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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.

While this isn’t as bad as the y2K problem, and we don’t observe Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the State of Hawaii, Canada and the the rest of the United States will start DST early and end it late. Clocks, computers and other devices will need to be patched or replaced to handle this man-made change in the natural order of things.
March 11 is the official start of DST for 2007, as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That’s the second Sunday of March. DST will last until the first Sunday of November (November 4, 2007).
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013102318.html?nav=hcmodule

According to the Washington Post, US and international companies are only now planning for the change. Microsoft Windows, MacOS and other operating systems include functions to handle DST, but these are keyed to the traditional start and end dates (the first Sunday of April and last Sunday of October).

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rtrent/archive/2007/01/19/one-dst-patch-angle-you-may-not-have-thought-of.aspx 

Microsoft states that they will have patches ready by early March. Cutting it a bit close, huh? According to Rod Trent, Microsoft’s DST rebasing patch will cause existing Outlook and Exchange appointments to be off by one hour.

Microsoft has a page of DST-related information at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx

That page includes this little gem: Mexico will NOT observe the new US DST guidelines, but Canada WILL. Canada agreed to follow the US changes last year, but Mexico didn’t.
Among the business-related topics mentioned by the Post are ATMs. Banks time-date stamp every transaction, and on many ATMs, the electronic clock is built into the machine. So ATM transactions that involve Mexico in some way will be affected by the new guidelines.
Airlines have to coordinate schedules across multiple time zones and jurisdictions.
Most of the world is only now figuring out that the US and Canada are changing their implementation of DST, which most of the world refers to as summer time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

USA: Critics charge that voting machines, included the new electronic models, are flawed and uncertified. Few people outside these companies who make the newer machines understand how the votes are counted. In 2000, New Mexico didn’t count 678 votes because a few counties failed to program their electronic machines.

Tech: Data Mining Goes 3D: Sounds like a stakeholder identification system to me. “In ‘Sandia’s intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images,’ the New Mexico Business Weekly reports that Sandia’s Information Visualization Lab is able to search structured documents, such as scientific journals, or unstructured ones, such as the Web or an intranet. Since the lab has been established five months ago, this software has already been used to determine the potential of several partnerships with SNL. Other firms, such as Lockheed Martin, also are starting to use the lab.”

Music: Yahoo! News - Rampant Piracy Threatens to Silence Latin Music Industry: It’s like I’ve told people for years. If enough people pirate music and movies without buying the real versions, we’ll start seeing less entertainment for sale. Simple economics. “Piracy is so rife in Mexico that the vast majority of the band’s album sales are illegal CDs peddled on the street. So although most anyone over the age of 13 knows the words to “Que Viva El Rock and Roll,” El Tri and its label, a division of Warner Music Group, rarely see a peso from those recordings.”