South Asia Mobile Content Awards: Accelerating Mobile ICT4D in the Region
by Madanmohan Rao; New Delhi, July 23 2010
Editor, The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook
http://twitter.com/MadanRao
In keeping with the growing mobile boom in Asia, the Digital Empowerment Foundation (www.DEFindia.net) along with the IT ministries of India and Sri Lanka recently hosted the first ever South Asian Mobile Content awards (http://mBillionth.in) in New Delhi.
Mobile phones across the world are surpassing penetration of other media. Worldwide penetration of mobile phones is estimated at 5 billion, as compared to cars (800 million), TV (1.5 billion), credit cards (1.4 billion), PCs (850 million), and Internet (1.1 billion). There are 400 million m-commerce users worldwide. In 2009 there were 850 million m-payment transactions. In India, mobile phones (650 million) have overtaken TV (470 million), newspapers (172 million), radio (168 million) and Internet (60 million). Mobile phone density in South Asian countries like Sri Lanka has surpassed that of India as well.
In June this year, over a dozen jurors met in Colombo and spent three days going through 165 nominations from across South Asia. Participating countries included Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I was honoured and delighted to be one of the jurors, and the MC for the awards ceremony (I even brought along a vuvuzela to cheer the winners)!
Awards were given to mobile applications and services in 10 categories: m-governance, m-inclusion, m-news and journalism, m-education, m-entertainment, m-tourism, m-business, m-health, m-environment and m-heritage. The awards were announced at a day-long seminar and evening ceremony in New Delhi on July 23, drawing over 400 attendees (http://www.techsparks.com/mobile/?p=158).
Winners in the mobile inclusion category (for extending mobile access to marginalised communities) included Dialog Tradenet (from Sri Lanka: http://www.tradenet.dialog.lk), Dakia(from India: http://one97world.com/), Voice of Youth (Nepal: http://www.ccfocusone.com), and Panini Keypad (India: www.paninikeypad.com).
The winners in the mobile news and journalism category included global heavyweights like Reuters (Market Light agri service: http://thomsonreuters.com/), as well as local startups like Gaon Ki Awaaz (from India: mobile voice news service for villagers http://gaonkiawaaz.wordpress.com/) and See ’n’ Report (from Pakistan: http://seenreport.com/).
3G broadband wireless Internet services have already been launched in Sri Lanka (ahead of the rest of South Asia), and Sri Lankan companies 3G Play (http://wavenet.lk/) and Colombo Ride 2.0 (http://games.lk) won two awards in the mobile entertainment category).
The m-health winners were solutions providers for improving workflow in hospitals as well as tele-healthcare providers leveraging cameraphones (eg. Jaroka Tele-healthcare from Pakistan www.jaroka.seecs.edu.pk and Students Health Information Tracking System for Andhra Pradesh http://swhits.cgg.gov.in ).
Suraj Chaudhry, VP at rural mobile telephony solutions provider VNL, said the mBillionth awards are the most unbiased professional awards he had come across.
People in South Asia are hungry for good content. Mobiles can fill in this gap, observed Peter Bruck, Chairman of World Summit Awards Mobile (www.wsa-mobile.org).
Mobiles have flattened the earth, said Sivakumar Ramamurthy, managing director for Intel (South Asia), referring to the title of the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, which focuses on how ICTs like the Internet are enabling players from around the globe to compete on the same field. Ramamurthy also noted that the number of mobile and wireless application developers in India is over 300,000.
Aruna Sundarajan, former IT Secretary of Kerala, remarked that 10 years ago there were a number of initiatives in the PC+Internet era called IT for the masses but now we are bang on with mobile.
Shahjalal University in Bangladesh uses workflow applications along with SMS and registration Ids to make it easier for students to apply for admissions. The Voice Of Youth initiative uses mobile calls and SMS along with radio to target youth in Nepal and help them express their concerns and frustrations. The Willager project by the NGO Ability in India uses mobiles to reach out to disabled users and help them learn sign language.
Anurag Shrivastava from the Ministry of IT in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India said they have launched a call centre for citizen queries, with mobile access (www.telesamadhan.mp.gov.in). K. Sabarish from the Kerala State IT Mission explained their Dr SMS initiative which provides location information via mobile for nearby doctors (http://drsms.kerala.gov.in).
The state of Karnataka has one of the most advanced mobile systems for tracking buses, booking tickets and sending updated schedule information to passengers via SMS, said Gaurav Gupta, managing director at KSRTC. The Madhya Pradesh Forestry Department relays satellite information about fires directly to frontline officers and villagers via mobiles.
In other examples present in the audience, Ravi Ghate, director of SMSone Media, described their award-winning SMS news service in Maharashtra (www.SMSone.in). I was delighted to meet a number of Mobile Monday enthusiasts present in the audience (www.MobileMonday.net) who wanted to set up networking chapters in their cities too may a hundred chapters bloom in South Asia!
Laxmikanth Deshmukh, IAS Collector from Kolhapur district in Maharashtra, said successful m-Gov initiatives need to be scaled up across each state and the whole country. Less coaching is needed for mobile phone and application usage for farmers and villagers as compared to computers, observed Deshmukh. His department is providing notification of vehicle movements and food shipments to village shopkeepers and government officials via SMS, which helps cut down on black marketing since otherwise shipments can be diverted and food security thereby threatened.
Money transfer for our citizens via post offices used to take days. It now takes only minutes, thanks to mobile phones, said Sunil Kanti Bose, Telecom Secretary for Bangladesh. Railway ticketing via mobile has also been started in Bangladesh, and the government plans to transform the country into Digital Bangladesh by 2021.
Ananya Raihan, director of D.Net in Bangladesh, called for improved relationships between carriers and content developers. Ibrahim Ahmad, editor at the CyberMedia group, urged that along with the speed of development, the quality of mobile services is also very important and should be assured. Deepak Maheshwari of Microsoft urged the ICT4D community to avoid duplication of experiments and build a database which can be shared.
Given the semi-literacy or illiteracy in many parts of India, voice-enabled services like voiceERP are being used by sugarcane farmers, said Umesh Sachdev, CEO of Uniphore. We are using voice-based authentication via mobiles for women users in rural Madhya Pradesh to mark attendance in their places of work, said Sachdev. Rural VAS is the next wave of growth.
Chirag Jain, CEO of SMS Gupshup, predicted that many more innovations will come as mobiles move into many-to-many communication models. While much attention focuses on high-end and low-end devices, the mid-end devices market will make a big impact, according to Sukanta Dey, development head at Tata TeleServices.
Kunal Bajaj, partner at Analysys Mason, cautioned that discovery of mobile services remains a challenge for end users. Discoverability of m-VAS is a key component of accessibility, he stressed.
There is a need for more mobile middleware to enable a range of connections, financial transactions and content interoperability, urged R Chandrashekhar, IT Secretary of India. Companies like OnMobile in India are stepping into this space, and helping startups find venture capital backing and new market opportunities around the world (as in the case of Bangalore-based mobile classifieds startup VerSe, which secured Vodafone South Africa as a customer).
The next killer applications for mobiles may come not from a corporate giant but a garage developer, predicted Reshan Dewapura, COO of Sri Lankas ICT Agency. ICTs will be a key driver of economies in our region, he added.
South Asian cooperation has been inadequate; fortunately this mobile awards and congress event is fostering more partnerships, observed Amir Ullah Khan, research director at the Bangalore Management Academy.
The need of the hour is socionomics – economic activity with social inclusion, summed up Vishwanath Reddy, fonder of IMImobile.
No device has gripped the human mind as much as the mobile phone, observed N. Ravi Shankar, Joint Secretary at DIT and CEO of the National Internet Exchange of India.
