Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

In interviews and conversations, lots of people have told me about younger kids (ages 7-14) carrying around cell phones just to look cool.  In what I’ve seen, kids are using the phones as still and video cameras, as well as a video and music player.  I’ve seen songs transferred via bluetooth and groups of people crowded around a cell phone screen watching a music video.  Below is Shewan with his friends looking at his red Razr phone, which he brought to one of the summer camps held at schools in western Belize my group is running.  His aunt, who lives in the States, sent it to him as a present.

I saw the guy below in the blue tshirt walking in the center of San Ignacio, and though the picture does it no justice, he had tucked the earbuds of his iPod behind his ears though he wasn’t listening to music.  (**Edit 28 August 2008 - I saw this same things several more times during the rest of my time in Belize.)

Nathan Eagle’s paper “Behavioral Inference Across Cultures: Using Telephones as a Cultural Lens“, to appear in IEEE Intelligent systems, August 2008,  continues to explain his thoughts into the way data-mining mobile phone usage can be used to discover cultural trends.  He specifically mentions studying the impacts of moving from rural to urban environments, identifying types of students at MIT, and investigating the social hierarchy or friend structure of individuals.

He does mention that such data is often collected without the consent of consumers, but that with proper effort on the part of the researcher, individual privacy can be maintained, allowing researchers to cull through data exposing cultural trends.

I’m in Belize City now and was walking around my neighborhood when this new house being constructed caught my eye.  After talking to the guys working on the house, I found out it’s a new office for Strukture Architects.

We’re doing paper mache this week at my group’s fourth and final camp for primary school children.  I’m excited to see the design choices that the kids make.  Specifically I’m interested in seeing how they deal with a multi-day project.  The camps have been designed to work on self-esteem, self-expression, and self-awareness through arts and sports.

Also, I carried out six interviews while I was in Cayo, and I’d like to do a few more in Belize City during this week and next.  I’m working on pulling out important bits of the conversations and transcribing them.

Mosoko or mobile “soko” (for local market in Swahili) is a text message and voice based “online” market place, “Craiglist for the next billion.”  The system is a launchpad for research into providing a way to interface with the internet through mobile phones.

The New York Times had an article about the emerging environment of mobile phone innovation in Nairobi a few days ago: “Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto?“.  I’ve read elsewhere that the article came out of the journalist attending BarCamp Nairobi, which I mentioned in a previous post.

It also mentions Google’s Nairobi office.  Google must certainly be interested in Kenya, and Africa, as an enormous future market for services, or they wouldn’t be investing in infrastructure and research there.

Google and the other software developers in Nairobi are primarily focused on expanding what it is to interact with the internet.  In emerging markets where mobile phones will vastly outnumber traditional computers for the foreseeable future, the mobile phone has the real possibility of being the most often used way to interface with the web on Earth.

The Question Box is a telephone intercom system that people can use to call an operator who can look things up for the user on the internet.  It’s a free service available in India, and ultimately people will be able to call in to the system from their mobile phones.

This is great as it expands the idea of what connection to the internet is.  To access the system and the internet, you only need to know how to use a mobile phone or, even more simply, how to push a button.  To use the Question Box would require a certain amount of trust of the person on the other end of the line.  Question Box is supported built by Open Mind, a non-prof, so I wonder how the system is financially supported.

via Appfrica

Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D)

SIM App via Nathan Eagle
Tools for doing this:
SIM Toolkit
Symbian SIM Application Toolkit
I want to do more research on this.  Looks like apps might be built with C++.  Eagle asks some good questions on his post that were never fully answered.

Nathan Eagle’s mobility
“mobility is a collaborative project which brings together some of the leading academics, technicians, educators and practitioners in the IT and mobile fields with the common goal of developing an exciting and empowering range of tools and resources to unlock  the power of mobile applications development for users in the developing world”