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In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Sara Corbett has a long article about the mobile phone’s growing importance in global and local economics. The article is also a great example of how qualitative research and ethnography can be used by larger corporations. When I teach research methods courses and supervise professional papers, I often recommend that graduate students investigate these methods.

The article follows a Nokia researcher named Jan Chipchase as he collects field notes and photographs from around the world. His research data is sent back to Nokia’s designers, so they can determine how to add features that will stimulate mobile phone adoption in lesser developed countries.

Can you see me now?

Some of these features have nothing to do with software or hardware. In rainy regions, a mobile phone might require a hook to keep it off the wet floor. Inexpensive phones must be durable.

Corbett also discusses something I’ve seen more frequently over the years: mobile phone users who arrange their meeting place by phone in real time. Instead of meeting at a set hour in a specific spot, an appointment becomes a game of tag, as the two people give each other landmarks until they actually see each other.

Mobile microfinance

There’s a long discussion of how mobile phones might be used to help microfinance schemes become scalable. Microfinance involves loans of relatively small amounts of money, usually arranged by face-to-face meetings. Mobile phone applications such as text-messaging could be used to make the loan and repayment processes easier and faster. Swift repayment is a key success factor for these plans, and Vodaphone has been implementing mobile banking systems that would work well with microfinance ventures.

Once concern that I have is the cost of these microloans. Eight days earlier, this New York Times article discussed the backlash against Mexico’s leading microfinance firm, Compartamos. Economist Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel peace Prize for proposing the microloan concept, wants non-profit groups to arrange microloans.

Compartamos is a for-profit company that is launching an IPO, based upon the massive interest revenues the company has generated. The IPO keeps microloan customers from participating in the group’s success. This Business Week article from December 2007 has some more information about the IPO.

Mobile telecom firms are likely to use microloans as a way to subsidize inexpensive mobile handsets for their customers, which as only an indirect benefit to the microfinance community.

Phones or food?

Today’s New York Times published a long article about global hunger. There are some heartbreaking stories in this article, including the growing market in Haiti for flavored dirt. One quote from the article really caught my attention:

President René Préval of Haiti appeared to taunt the populace as the chorus of complaints about la vie chère — the expensive life — grew. He said if Haitians could afford cellphones, which many do carry, they should be able to feed their families.

Are the world’s poor being asked to choose between mobile phones and food? It seem farfetched, but the surging cost of basic staples in some countries has forced the question.