Panel on “Break­ing Bound­aries: Mobile Web Access in Emerg­ing Economies,” with:

• G Kofi Annan — Annansi LLC
• Charles McCathieNevile — Opera Software
• Matt Womer — World Wide Web Consortium
• David Rogers — OMTP Ltd

In many regions, the mobile phone is the pri­mary tool for Web access. As mobile Web con­nec­tions increase in devel­op­ing nations the impact will be sig­nif­i­cant. This panel exam­ines the dif­fer­ences between mobile Web access in devel­op­ing and devel­oped regions and how the mobile Web can affect social development.

Why is the mobile web inter­est­ing in the devel­op­ing world? More peo­ple have access to a mobile phone than to clean, run­ning water. More peo­ple have a mobile phone than a com­puter. About 80% of the world has some sort of mobile cov­er­age, so it’s obvi­ous to say that mobile should be a point of online access. Peo­ple in the devel­op­ing don’t use mobile phones just for mobil­ity. They are using it to access the inter­net with browsers like Opera Mini.

The unique­ness of the emerg­ing economies is that mobile prod­ucts must be adapted to how these economies are grow­ing, so you need to ana­lyze usage pat­terns, get feed­back, and iter­ate often. Closed sys­tems will not work because the bar­rier is too high; you need to be using open source soft­ware. Open source is also good because it avoids dupli­ca­tion of efforts.

In devel­op­ing mar­kets, the top appli­ca­tions are Face­book, MySpace. Peo­ple are using this for enter­tain­ment and for con­nect­ing socially. There are many local sites that are big in their respec­tive coun­tries as well. Some exam­ples of leading-edge appli­ca­tions in emerg­ing economies include mobile bank­ing, health care apps, and agriculture.

There’s a ten­dency to think that what we have in the West is what devel­op­ing coun­tries should aspire to. But if text is work­ing, then that’s what should be used. There are a lot more options with text at this point and that’s what should be explored. What mat­ters are the design chal­lenges of “being local”, as you attempt to cater to locals and trav­ellers. For exam­ple, the mobile capac­ity inside Aus­tralia matches demand (actu­ally, you only really get about 2/3 of what is adver­tised). Because of the con­ges­tion of inter­na­tional lines, you only get about 10% when you travel out­side of Australia.

Emerg­ing mar­kets are often in phys­i­cally hos­tile envi­ron­ments. There is a unique oppor­tu­nity now to pro­vide a plat­form for the gov­ern­ment or human­i­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tion to cre­ate a net­work that would con­stantly mon­i­tor the envi­ron­ment and give an early warn­ing of impend­ing nat­ural disasters.

In devel­op­ing mar­kets, there is demand for either the most expen­sive smart­phones, or the cheapes phones. There is not much demand in the mid­dle: you can either afford the most expen­sive gear … or you can’t.