There are close to 850 million mobile subscribers in India. Mobile penetration in India is increasing every day but that does not come as a surprise. In the past we have looked into successes like Just Dial geared towards the urban Indian and innovations like MKrishi geared towards India’s rural population. We have also covered the use of mobile as a way to disperse the news in ‘Gaon ki Awaz’ and other initiatives like Movirtu that provide mobile services to people without a mobile phone.

Mobile innovation is not new to India and the developing world, and it is taking a life of its own now.  Mobile technology is personal, ubiquitous and ever-present. It can host radio shows, be used for education, control equipment remotely, move money from one place to another and start revolutions. Redefinition of these capabilities have to led to mobile and telecom sector giants like Nokia, Samsung and Mahendra to organize mobile contests in the country to get the youth thinking about mobile innovation and design.

Bhasha 2011 is a collaborative project between Nokia Research Center and four design colleges in India and is aimed to help the young Indians get more exposure to their native languages. With increasing number of young urban Indians choosing English over their vernacular tongue, this initiative is addressing a problem that needs a solution. Getting students to design such solutions is a great way of getting them solve a problem that they are aware of and identify with. This is also a great segway for the young designers to design for technology early on.

There are a couple of interesting ideas seem to come out in the process. One of them being ‘Pitara’ by Bangalore based students from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. The application is a continuously growing repository of stories in vernacular languages with a bilingual dictionary functionality to decipher the stories. The idea is to learn languages through stories and contribute your own.

‘Kaccha Limbu’ by another group of students from Shristi, allows migrant students to learn languages of the state they are going to be moving to, to complete their studies. They are guided by three virtual assistants that guide, correct and quiz the students as they move towards learning the language.

‘Vijeta’ is a location based social network game. The player arrives in a new territory and visits different location and people to learn new words and find his way around.

Vijeta

50 teams belonging to top design schools like Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, National Institute to Design, Indian Institute of Technology and Symbiosis Institute of Design took part in this initiative.

Nokia had also organized the ‘Calling all Innovator Contest’ a couple of years back.   Couple of other interesting ideas that came out of that contest were the Nano Ganesh – an application that enables farmers to check availability of power to their irrigation systems. Similar to Nano Ganesh, Bangalore based Vinifet Technologies developed Kisan Raja a GSM based controller that allows farmers to control irrigation pumps using mobile phones or handsets. An IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System) in local languages helps in making selections for switching the motors on or off. Farmers also receive voice alerts for faulty power supplies, motors that do not start, lack of water in the well/bore, and attempts at device/motor theft. This project won the first runners up for the Samsung Innovation Quotient, which is a national talent hunt to recognize innovators from all parts of India.

Another concept that won the National Telecom Award for ‘Excellence in innovation with Rural Telecom Focus’ was Saral Rozgar. Saral Rozgar links job seekers and job providers through a common database that can be easily accessed through mobile phones. All the features for the application are voice activated in various languages which allows the workers in the informal sector of India access to the service. This the first time that industrial, part time and daily/weekly wage workers in the informal sector can access organized information about employment opportunities.

Another initiative by the veterans of Salesforce and Apple that caught my eye was mpowering. Mpowering works like foursquare where is low incoming communities are given mobile phones. If their children check into places like a ‘school’ by scanning a barcode, the family gets points which can later be exchanged for household goods, clothes and food. The organization partners with non profits in poor communities and tries to pull people out of poverty by using a rewards system. The idea is to get the poor to think about long term goals and not just short term necessities. The project is already doing good work in Orissa in partnership with Citta foundation.

As mobile penetration in India increases, more and more services are being developed for mobile distribution. The time is ripe for using mobile platforms to deliver a variety of services that include education, healthcare, agriculture, journalism, way-finding etc. Things that smart phone owners take for granted can create huge shifts in the lives of rural and BOP population in developing nations. The challenge is to develop these services for cheap feature phones and not just smart phones so that a larger user base can avail the services that these devices are capable of delivering and thereby facilitate large scale social change.

Additional Links

Learn local lingo using a mobile application

Green Phone and Nano Ganesh

Annual India report for Mobile innovation 2011

Fastcompany article on Mpowering

Mobile apps in rural India

Nokia’s idea project

Local language learning goes mobile

My parents live in a farm house in a town called Ambala in Haryana, India. When I visit them, I go on early morning walks with them, walking through the surrounding farms, villages, temples and gurudwaras. Along the way we run across farmers starting off their day, walking to their farms in dejection. During my visits, I often feel I have gone back in time and from the looks of it, it seems that the farming practices in India haven’t changed in years. The green revolution and the aggressive variety of crops that were grown in these farms in the last century have made the land incapable of growing  indigenous crops. As farmer suicides increase on a yearly basis, farming practices in India need addressing. Farmer issues have been raised in mass media and was most recently seen in a form of a black comedy movie called Peepli Live. I also watched another film called Harvest of Grief that dealt with the same issue at the Sikh Film festival last year. Indian farmers have limited access to information regarding farming advice. Questions like ‘Which pesticide will protect my crops’ often go unanswered and trial and error methods often costs the farmer money, crops and time.

Answering such questions and linking farmers to expert advice was the reason and inspiration behind mKRISHI, a platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The platform is two fold. It allows farmers to submit questions to agricultural experts using mobile phones and the experts get environment-specific details when the farmer enters his location on mKRISHI. The farmers are given mobile phones with special software to submit queries. This works for both low end and high end phones. The farmers can submit photographs with phones that have a cameras (as can be seen in the video above). The mKRISHI service costs a farmer between $1 to $2 per month. The experts, on the other hand, are sent updated agricultural metrics for a farmer’s land by sensor networks and a weather station in the village. This is made possible when the agricultural sensors connect to geo location services like GPS and Google Earth to deliver local weather, soil conditions, common pests and food grain prices. All of this information can be accessed by the expert through a web console where-in the expert can weigh in all the options and send back advice to the farmer by either text or voice message.

mKRISHI is working on creating a robust wireless sensor node so that every farmer can afford to install one node per one acre of land thus making crop disease forecasting more precise as data from the sensors powers the disease prediction model.  After a certain threshold is reached the farmers phone is triggered automatically so as to warn him to take measures to ensure a healthy crop cycle. TCS innovation labs is headed by Arun Pande and he is the force behind mKRISHI. In a Wall Street journal article, he says, ” In the absense of correct information and advice which is specific to him, the farmer relies on what other farmer do – or on his traditional wisdom.”

TCS launched mKRISHI in 2009 in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh where it now serves 500 farmers. There is a clear call to action to expand the service so that the service can positively help a lot more farmers and one such strategy is to partner with major IT companies. There is also talk of taking mKRISHI to other developing countries. For now it is concentrating it efforts in India and hoping that when a farmer needs help, there is always a helping hand out there to pull him out of doubt, questions or anything else that might be plaguing him. Thus making sure that farming is no longer a suicidal business in India and that, with the right tools it can be profitable and not just dependent on intuition and mother nature.

The WSJ Article

Fastcompany Article

Interview with Dr Arun Pande on Global Partner Network

I grew up in India during the 80′s and the 90′s when cinema goers had switched to the comforts of their houses and VCR’s to watch movies. The coming of new technology wasn’t the only reason people stopped going to theaters. Quality of movies, acting, music and funding from the Mumbai underworld were all equally responsible for the slow demise of the industry. After a couple of decades of bad cinema, Bollywood had a revival with movies like ‘Hum Aapke Hai Kaun‘ and ‘Dil Wale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge‘, both of which were huge budget, love stories and family tearjerkers. Bollywood managed to get its audience back into the theaters to see these extravaganzas which had top actors of the time, great music and were shot abroad in gorgeous locales or in palatial houses. The movies appealed to families, to the younger generation and embodied the traditional east meets west drama that comes with growing up in any indian household. What changed here was that the film makers and production houses for once decided to understand their audience, the people they were making their films for.

There has been a slump in the revenues of Bollywood again, 15 years after the so called revival of the industry. The Indian film industry has suffered a loss of 20% of its revenue over the last three years. A lot of this has to do with bad formulaic films that the ever evolving Indian film audience no longer cares for, the other being Bollywood’s battle with film piracy. The Indian film industry loses 4 billion dollars a year to counterfeiters. As Indian film makers grapple with plunging sales and piracy, they are being forced to innovate to sell their movies better. The maker of a recent movie called ‘Zindagi na milegi dobara’ (Life won’t happen again) directed by Zoya Akhtar and produced by Farhan Akhtar is promoting the film via mobile and online platforms. Bollywood is still known for promoting its films through traditional hand painted posters and television promotions. Venturing into the mobile technology for marketing is surely a big step forward and a fairly clever one as well.

Quoted from an article from AFP – According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there were 752.2 million mobile phone subscribers as of December 31, 2010 — a massive 43.2 percent increase on the same period the previous year.Meanwhile, 18.69 million people had Internet subscriptions, a rise of 22.6 percent year-on-year. Of those, 10.99 million had broadband, up 40 percent from 7.82 million a year earlier.The IT research company Gartner Inc. last year predicted that 82 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population would have a mobile phone by 2014, mainly due to a focus on the rural market and lower handset prices.

The film studio distributing the film, Excel Entertainment is partnering with India’s leading mobile phone company called Aircel to push a 2-3 minute trailer for free to 55 million subscribers. While in the west this might be looked upon as spam, pushing promotions onto phones without the users permission is not uncommon in India. While film companies have tried similar routes before,  the distribution has been limited to ringtones and text messages. The coming of newer 3G technology with internet access will allow more content to be distributed and watched. This also opens doors for content on social awareness and news bytes to be distributed to the users.

More and more Hindi film trailers are being posted on You Tube to gain a wider audience. Mobile and social media platforms allow a direct connection with the users that the film companies are targeting. Independent cinema is far along its way, as far as leveraging technology to spreading the word is concerned, because traditional modes of marketing cost money and are less effective. For traditional film industries like Bollywood where the producers still hope that star appeal would carry a film, things are just about to change. The fun interactive website of the film allows the users to get a sense of the characters in the story and the facebook page allows the users to interact with film even before its been released. The story seems like a bit of a rip off from a Hollywood original called the Hangover but it still looks like a lot of fun. I for one will be watching this one in the theaters while I wait out some of the other Bollywood flicks to get on Netflix. Technology may just save the largest film industry in the world from going bust.

Watch the trailer for the film here. Did I mention Hrithik Roshan stars in the film?

Sources
Fastcompany article
Bollywood piracy fighters
Bollywood marketing goes mobile

A big percentage of indian village population is illiterate. Traditional mode  of transmitting news like newspapers are not effective for that demographic. Television as a medium to disseminate news are not effective in villages either because of unreliable electricity as well as the cost behind purchasing a TV unit. Transistor radios have been a cheap and accessible way of news dissemination for a long time now. However with mobile technology making its way into the heartlands of rural india, a project like Gaon Ki Awaaz was waiting to happen. Gaon Ki Awaaz is India’s first mobile news service. The service targets rural india.

The reports are transmitted in the local dialect which is Avhadi. The subscribers need to answer their phones in order to hear pre-recorded news messages. The news is related to local events happening around the village or villages close by, making the information relevant to the subscriber. Subject matter for the broadcasts can include other useful information like farming tips, healthcamps and government announcements etc. A news bulletin like this would hold the villagers attention and inform them about the happenings in and around their village.

The news is broadcast twice a day, at noon and 5pm. The village reporters record the bulletins which makes it way to the local editor and is then converted by the founder of the service into .wav files. These files are then sent to Netxcell, a company in Hyderabad for broadcast. The file is then sent out to the numbers of the subscribed villagers in the database.

The program is available to the villages at a nominal subscription cost of Rs 30 for three months. The other costs being MMS equipped phones for the two reporters and the local editor that cost about $100 each and the monthly broadcast fee. The number of users is over 250 subscribers and has spread over 20 villages. The project was launched by Sunil Saxena who is also the dean of International Media Institute of India and Satyendra Pratap, a journalist from Rampur.

The service is trying to bring in some revenue by using advertising which will be played in the beginning of the transmission. The plan is to start local advertising from agricultural companies and services that could actually benefit the user in the long run. According to the Gaon Ki Awaaz blog, the local village barber, tailor, internet cafe operator, coaching center owner and the village astrologer have advertised their services. In the true spirit of present day technologies the future plan is to make this service interactive by allowing the subscribers to not only receive news but also submit news updates. These updates would be then vetted by local editors and then added in to the reports. The idea is to enable the villagers to create an ecosystem of citizen reporting and generate reports relevant to them.

Recently Gaon Ki Awaaz was awarded the Manthan 2010 award in the e-news and media category. The project also won the mBillionth South Asia award in m-News and Journalism category last year. The future plans for the service include creating a self sustaining model and scaling this social venture by raising more capital to gear up for rapid growth to reach millions of villagers.

Also check out how ‘Gaon Ki Awaz’ is produced – Video

The past decade has seen a lot of work being done in the arena of development of mobile applications in the developing nations. A lot of them include mobile banking, inventories for agricultural products, education, healthcare etc. There has been extensive mobile phone penetration in places like India, parts of Africa, China, and a lot of South American nations.  A lot of developers and stakeholders in the mobile industry are creating applications for the base of the pyramid users, taking for granted the affordability of mobile handsets and SIM’s by the BOP users. Statistics show that very few BOP users can afford mobile technology. Since mobile and wireless communication makes it so easy for people to communicate and bank even in places that are secluded and far flung, It doesn’t come as a surprise that an innovative startup has thought of a solution to make mobile communication available to BOP users. The initiative is called Movirtu.

As described on the Movirtu website – Movirtu provides innovative mobile technology and business models to wireless telecommunication service providers servicing rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia to help them realize shared access to basic mobile phone services at a much lower cost than has been achieved before. Although we are a for-profit enterprise, the company has an underlying social mission: To expand the use of mobile communication by the rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia living on less than $2 a day to improve their sustainable livelihoods and help alleviate poverty.

User flow for movirtu

Movirtu is developing a series of patent pending products that would enable shared access to basic mobile services for people earning less that $2 a day. For one such application called MXShare, Movirtu partnered with frog design to create a virtual mobile phone system to enable people who can’t afford to buy handsets to call, receive calls and text message using other peoples phones or pay phones. This mode of communication was being followed in the past using SIM cards. The call maker would borrow the phone and simply replace the SIM in order to see his/her contact list and make the call. This involved taking the phone apart and caused both the lender and borrower some amount of discomfort. The SIM’s were also easy to lose and only the person who was carrying it was able to use it, not the whole family.

MXShare is based on similar behavior type of borrowing other peoples phones to make calls. In the case of MXShare, all the information is stored virtually in a telecom cloud and can be accessed by the user by logging into his/her account using a code or a password. This doesn’t require any SIM cards. Frog design was responsible for doing user research and experience design for the product. Extensive research was conducted in Kibera in Kenya where people were interviewed to gather observations to know how people lived and used technology. The technology was well received and everyone was very excited about it. The challenge was coming up with the right nomenclature where the designers decided to go with the established universal language.

‘Cloud Phone’  as it is being called now is being compared to cloud based webmail or google voice. Accessing the cloud costs the subscribers 10 to 20 cents a call. Compared to a $25 dollar handset and a $12 SIM card, the Movirtu solution is affordable for users earning $2 a day or less.

Recently Movirtu raised $5.5 million dollars for expansion in a Series A round of financing. The funding will allow Movirtu to expand to newer markets and help its goal of reaching 4 million users by 2013.

Nigel Waller, the Founder and CEO of Movirtu who is also the POPTECH Social Innovation Fellow explains the step by step functioning of MXShare  -

Movirtu Fact Sheet

JustDial maintains a large and updated database of all local businesses and services not only for metro cities but also for all small towns in India.

Just Dial’s service came into existence in early 1990s when VSS Mani, founder and CEO, identified a user need . In a news channel interview he mentioned, “Things never used to get done. People would wait forever because they didn’t have a piece of information to act upon.”

Local businesses in India did not invest much in advertising. Their strategic location in a market place and word-of-mouth usually worked as ways of attracting customers. As for the customers, they relied on local printed directories, newspapers and word-of-mouth to look for a business or service. However, these listings were not updated enough. JustDial successfully bridged this gap and has been able to build a sustainable business model. Local businesses pay to JustDial to be on their listings.

JustDial predates the internet era in India; it laid its foundation in the telecom boom in the mid 90s. The more popularly used interface for looking up businesses is the phone service available by dialing 69999999 nationwide than looking it up justdial.com on the Internet . The other end of the call is a JustDial representative who responds to the queries. They respond with the list of the top matches of the business in the required location and also send the listing in an sms. The low call rates and ever-increasing mobile users support this user behavior.

What is significant is that their claim to have “an excellent user experience” holds true. No matter how efficient an automated search engine may be, no other experience can match that of a conversation with a live, friendly human voice.

[This article contains information available in public domain.]

Babajob.com is a Bangalore-based start-up that uses the web and mobile technology to connect employers and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) informal sector workers (i.e. maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) with the goal of creating a scalable, replicable and profitable solution to combat poverty. Babajob aims to do this by creating greater market efficiency in the informal sector through voice and web features such as SMS, USSD, automated voice systems, and operator manned call centers, enabling employers and job seekers to find each other. The simple premises, upon which it built itself and continues to grow on, are –

• Everyone deserves to get a better job, no matter what their income or skill level, and
• Technology can enhance our ability to both hire more efficiently, and better communicate with those we care about.

While at Microsoft Research India in 2005, CEO Sean Blagsvedt co-ran the Advanced Development and Prototyping Team and worked very closely with the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, whose aim was to study and invent new ways that technology could be used to positively impact the social and economic development of the world’s poorest 4 billion people. Sean’s first thought was “Great – all they need is the village version of LinkedIn.com!” In reality however, in order to make such a system work, one has to overcome the problem that most low-income workers of the world may not be literate, nor own a mobile phone and rarely own or have ready access to an Internet-connected PC. Most people in India find jobs through people they know – namely their extended social network – and most employers – particularly when hiring employees that work in the home – would like to hire a person who someone they trust can vouch for. Another important factor with the increase of travel time (owing to the increase in the number of vehicles on the roads) and often-unreliable public transport has resulted in people looking for jobs closer to home, in their neighborhoods. More often than not, it’s the simply not-knowing that causes people to miss out on better-suited opportunities. Babajob.com is an attempt to digitize this process and information to efficiently “get the word out” and importantly provide an incentive for the folks in between an employer and employee to connect people together.

By leveraging web and mobile technology, Babajob scales and engages a wider audience creating greater efficiency for employers and further deepens the social impact on job seekers. Employers can conveniently browse job seeker profiles based on salary, location, languages, employment background, skills and references. Babajob offers several fee-based services to help in the matching and hiring of seekers.

With services available for all major cities in the country, Babajob is currently testing out a new voice application that will help communicate the necessary information into various regional languages. With a likely tie up with a mobile handset maker – the goal is to transcend, once again, the language and literacy barrier, to broaden the scope of Babajob’s services.

Babajob serves as a fine example of complex system design for a country that is socially and linguistically diverse; and where literacy is a major point of consideration, while attempting to make information accessible.  With a constantly evolving set of parameters and a strong belief in the transformative power of software on society, Babajob is social entrepreneurship at its best. By tapping into informal social interactions and streams of information, and using a blended value business model that combines a revenue generating business with a social-value-generating component, it provides us with a glimpse of the paradigm shift that is brewing with regards to businesses in emerging economies.

Having spent a long weekend with Archana Prasad –Co Founder Jaaga, National Institute of Design alumnus and Bangalore based artist, in Pondicherry, where she was performing with her group The Manjunauts, (she is also a VJ) at the Freedom Jam; I had the chance to engage in a dialogue with her about Jaaga.

Jaaga’s name has been popping up at a very frequent rate, in the art+ design circle here in Bangalore. Over the last couple of months, it has become a hotspot for performances, exhibitions, workshops and social interventions. To break it down, Jaaga, which means space in Kannada, is an urban community art-architecture experiment, currently situated in Bangalore. It is a modular structure that employs a participatory design process where the community helps build and use it. It includes web enabled workspaces and large multi-level public spaces. The fact that this building is mobile and can be moved to different neighbourhoods, cities and countries; taking with it its culture of pushing the envelope of innovation and pro-activism at a neighbourhood level to greater heights, is an added bonus.

Jaaga was born out of Archana’s insatiable desire for a dedicated space for the city’s artists who are rich in talent albeit not necessarily in funds, to showcase their work.  Together with fellow artists Suresh Kumar G and Shivaprasad S, they founded an artist collective called Samuha. With 23 artists of various disciplines like painting, sculpture, new media and performance arts, Samuha is running for 414 days, having started June 22, 2009. Each artist member owns 17 days at the space and can use it for exhibitions, seminars, workshops and interactions on art practices.

Samuha being in place, Archana’s quest for an artistic haven – a creative common place, was still on. A chance meeting between Archana and Freeman Murray, an American technologist in India, lead to the creation of Jaaga, Having successfully worked with pallet racks in the past through various projects in the US, he suggested constructing a modular sturdy structure using this warehouse shelving, usually used for heavy duty industrial purposes. Pallet racking is a material handling storage system designed to store materials on pallets. Although there are many varieties of pallet racks, all types allow for the storage of palletized materials in horizontal rows with multiple levels.

Jaaga is a massive structure made up of red and blue pallet racks put together and looks like a movie set. With the assistance of volunteers, Jaaga was built up in all of 15 hours. The flooring is made up of plywood and metal wires and the walls are made of billboards. Being fully mobile, it can be dismantled and reassembled within hours. Jaaga is currently redesigning itself into being more spacious and modular. The entire structure will be a dichotomy between a natural earthy airy area and cyber industrial space.  Jaaga’s USP is that it brings together art, technology and social change activists to share their practices with the world and with the neighbourhood. It also re-looks the concept and conception of space; and that real estate can be moved, folded and floating.  Archana wanted the whole structure to look like a Lego building. When they got the space, a 300 sq. ft plot, they had to clean it up, as there was a lot of garbage and weeds that had grown around it. Volunteers came in and helped remove the garbage and weeded the place out.

The first event at Jaaga was the Robert Bosch Art Grant ceremony. Since its inception, Jaaga has hosted various events, including a performance by the Attakkalari Center for Movement Arts, which had eight dancers performing in eight modular spaces. As a space, it is available free of cost and artists or anyone interested are invited to submit proposals with ideas on how they would like to use the space. The vision of Jaaga is that it becomes a future University that harnesses the power of modern technology to herald a new breed of creative thinkers and doers; also to be a virtual repository of avant-garde thinking stemming in India and rooted in the world.

To quote Archana – “We live the reality of a world whose path, starting from mass production – industrialisation, has created the tensions that the West worries about. We already live it. Being an artist in that landscape can only be interesting. As artists we are super sensitive to these cracks and tears in the fabric of society. Our works are reactions, imaginations, renditions, and explorations of the chaos that surround us. How can anything honest that comes out of such stark, harsh, cruel yet beautiful reality be anything short of exciting. India is a hotbed of superbness now.”

For more information visit – http://jaaga.wikidot.com/

VNL | Meet the next billion mobile users from VNL on Vimeo.

Vihaan Networks Ltd., an Indian telecommunications company known as VNL, won the Bronze award for a solar-powered base station to bring cellphone access to remote rural villages. The inexpensive base station can be quickly assembled and set up by unskilled villagers, and can run entirely on the built-in solar panels and batteries. The technology, which now is being called the ‘WorldGSM’ has a philosophy of providing mobile services that are low in cost, maintenance, can be self deployed and are solar powered.

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“We must take justice – fast justice – to people,” vowed Mr Singh. “When a verdict takes 10 or 20 years, it destroys their faith in the legal system.”

According to the government, Indian courts are bedeviled with a staggering backlog of 15.6 million cases. It is not uncommon for minor cases to drag on for decades. The new “court-on-wheels” program aims to fill this critical gap in the delivery of justice and could one day be expanded across the country. Sandeep Singh, the first judge to preside over the court, has handled about 60 cases each day since the mobile court opened for business. Most have involved theft, village fights and disputes over dowries or the slaughter of cows.

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