Year of Mobile

For last six months of 2010, working in the online advertising world, I couldn’t get through a meeting without talking about mobile phones. What is our mobile strategy? How do we get started with mobile? How big is mobile? How is mobile different than search? Do you have clients that have retail apps? The questions came from clients trying to keep up with consumers who were more and more likely to be using their mobile phones to browse the web. I sat through two or three presentations from publishers that predicted, based on the current adoption rates of smart phones, that searches done on mobile phones would surpass searches done on computers within two years. The presentations and articles passed around all predicted “2011: The Year of Mobile” and our clients’ questions and sentiments seemed to agree.

Now I’m in Kenya working for a non-profit that sells foot powered irrigation pumps to rural, subsistence farmers. In this world, seemingly far removed from mobile advertising strategy and mobile apps, I’ve found that I still can’t get through many meetings without talking about mobile. The prediction of 2011 being the year of mobile might be correct even here, albeit in a much different way than it was explained in the presentations catered to US advertising.

This Economist article (thanks, Simon) gives a number of examples of how mobile phones are becoming a lot more than just devices to make calls. M-Pesa, which is described in the article, is plastered all over Nairobi on billboards and painted cement walls. In a country where over 60% of the population doesn’t have a bank account, the text based banking has opened up new opportunities for those that traditionally fell outside of the formal banking sector. My organization is currently running a program where farmers can put a pump on layaway, making payments through M-Pesa when they have money available, which will open up our market to farmers that find it hard to come up with the initial investment. There are ideas to start a mobile social network of farmers that will allow them to text a question to the larger group and get answers quickly sent back, making it possible to share information that hasn’t easily been available in the past. What’s the market price for my crop? How do I rotate my crops for better yield? What’s the best irrigation hose?

Last weekend I went on a trip outside of Nairobi with 10 other Americans working and living in Nairobi. 4 of them are directly working on mobile software, creating programs that will help organizations and businesses manage the data that is being gathered through M-Pesa, for example, and building out new services such as text based surveys. For my project, we’re talking to a company that allows you to develop surveys that are done via text message. If the owner of a new pump texts “survey” we can send him/her a series of questions that will help us gather key demographic information, know where our pumps are being used, and ultimately measure our pumps’ impact on farmer income. For the farmers’ time and willingness, we could offer a guarantee of the pump or reward them with cell phone air time. And we could do all of this from the comfort of a Nairobi office, sipping on Kenyan tea while data pours in from cell phones in over 25 different countries.

I noticed this article on Simon’s reading list this week. The title, “Why the Web is Useless in Developing Countries,” is over the top and I found the article’s argument a little weak. A simple phone call to President Mubarek, who just watched his government topple amid protests largely motivated through social media, would probably work in convincing even the biggest cynic that the internet’s power is great. But, after working in Africa for just over a month and witnessing firsthand the exciting development of new mobile uses and tools, I’d have to agree that mobile phones offer a much larger and more immediate opportunity to change and improve the lives of those living in developing countries. Especially in 2011 – the year of mobile.