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It's refreshing to see a number of initiatives targeting the bottom of the pyramid market segment to address the unconnected (users who do not own phones) and the unbanked (users who do not have access to banking services).   The first example to note is the recent collaboration of Google and the Grameen Foundation who are developing applications to address specific needs in a rural African user’s life. For example, the applications being developed for farmers enable them to... [More]

In early August, David Pogue in the New York Times began a campaign, Take Back the Beep, to have phone companies cut back or eliminate many of the instructions that are played when leaving or listening to your voicemail. Specifically he raises the point that consumers don’t want or need to hear all the instructions abut how to leave a message, listen to their messages, reply, etc.    He’s probably right. When voicemail was introduced decades ago, detailed instructions we... [More]

The world is an interesting place. We take picking up the phone and making a call, speaking to friends and family, or making a business call totally normal and part of our everyday routine. In fact we cannot imagine life any other way. For 70 percent of Africa, this is like a dream. Their reality is they have no money for a phone. Even if they had money, would there be a line or coverage or, how would they charge a phone battery, there is no power! Email, what is that? Text, never heard of it!... [More]

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced you to a businesswoman who was always on the go and needed to be connected to different devices throughout the day. In this post we will travel to anothe area of the world. Let's look at a user in an emerging market, examine the problems this user faces and discuss the solution that Movius has developed for this market. The second user is a world away. A young man is leaving his small village in Uganda Africa – where there i... [More]

One of the things I love about working in the telecom industry is that we work to enable one of the most basic building blocks of society—communication. I have had the privilege over my career in this industry to travel and talk to people from around the world about how such a fundamental aspect of human society varies in subtle ways around the globe and even by demographic within a geography. Though subtle at their roots, those differences eventually manifest themselves in fairly fundamental wa... [More]