TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

State of the Web: Bangladesh

I recently spent six weeks volunteering in the depths of rural Bangladesh. During that time, I lived in a town of 50,000 people (Rayenda) – of which about 30% had electricity (which went out for hours at a time, several times a day), few had running water, nobody had a landline, and the only car in the town was owned by a western NGO. I counted a total of 5 computers in the town, and not many more televisions or radios.

The only technological shining star in Bangladesh is the cellphone. While penetration is still relatively low, probably 15 – 20% of the people in rural Bangladesh had cellphones (a somewhat higher proportion in urban areas). Inexpensive Nokia phones are if not affordable, at least within reach for many of the poor via installment plans. Airtime and text messages are ridiculously cheap too: fractions of a cent. Its the archetypal leapfrog example: towns and people who’ve never had access to communications beyond word of mouth now have access to a cutting edge GSM cell network.

Shocking fact: cell coverage in Bangladesh is 100% - the laser-flat topography and ubiquitous towers mean that you can talk and text literally anywhere in the country, however ridiculously remote it may seem. Another interesting thing is that a cottage industry of charging stations has sprung up in villages with electricity or generators, allowing people from un-electrified areas to sit and enjoy tea or dinner while their phone is charged.

Through-out the country there is little knowledge of the web, and even less reason to acquire such knowledge. In rural areas, cellphones are the sum total of electronic interaction for the average person. Most people had not heard of the internet or email (or ATM’s, modern banking infrastructure, or any of the electronic services we take for granted), and the few who had had only sporadic and slow access. In urban areas awareness of the net/email/etc. was much higher, but access is limited. Because no Bangladeshi services (airlines, newspapers, banks, anything) have online components, there’s little reason to make the internet a part of day-to-day life either.

For as long as I can recall the western world has been maundering on about the mobile web and the shape it will take. While some countries (Korea, Japan) have started down the path of mobile payments and entertainment (dmb, etc.), I think that it is countries like Bangladesh who will truly point the way to the next generation of online, mobile targeted services. Consider:

There’s no legacy systems of sunk investment to slow the purchase or development and deployment of new systems.
There’s no interface expectations: well we who are used to the full internet find WAP browsers and clipped pages to be a frustrating exercise, its all net new and value added to the people of Bangladesh.
It makes financial sense for Bangla businesses to extend themselves via mobile and skip the bricks and mortar phase entirely (banks provide a good example here).
There’s plenty of resources (coders) available just over the border in India to bring services into existence.
The economics of micropayments for mobile services make sense in Bangladesh where (a) the population is large (150M) and concentrated in a geographically limited area that takes little infrastructure to service, and (b) the people are conceptually acquainted with micropayments from the tariffs that they encounter during their day-to-day lives.

Anyway – that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a new world of millions of web users coming that will have never known the “web” - no browsers, no email, no rss – just a 1 inch Nokia screen. Who’s positioned to profit from this surge? How can you or your business be a part of it?

Workblogging is not “more” work, just different

At work right now, one thing I’ve been working on is shifting my division to using blogs as an internal communication mechanism (vs. email, phone, etc.). I’ll write another post on the why later, but for right now I wanted to share a simple graphic that I’ve been using to refute a common “push back” on adding blogs to one’s communication toolbox. The objection is that blogs just provide “another thing” that employees need to be on top of - an addition to phone, email, voicemail, etc.

My refutation is that blogs don’t add to one’s workload (either writing them or reading) - they just change the venue in which that work takes place. The width of the column below represents 100% of your communications.

Prior to email it was 100% phone-based (ignoring face to face, physical mail, etc. for simplicity’s sake).
Sometime in the nineties, email will have spread through your workplace, shifting the venue of some portion of your communications away from the phone. That portion has likely grown over time, and for many people, the transition is not yet complete.
Now blogs will be carving out a slice of your communications too.
Note: the width of the column doesn’t change - just how its divided up.

This is, of course, a gross simplification (the width of the column has changed over time, for example), but I think it communicates the basic point regardless: that adding blogs to an internal communication mix does not have to be looked at as an onerous addition to one’s existing workload - instead its a complimentary communication channel.