In 1992 when telecommunication engineers sent the first SMS in the UK, few would have predicted that less than twenty years later it would be used as both a mobilising and demobilising tool in Kenya during one of the most violent elections the region has seen for a while. Alice Munuya, KICTAnet , in her talk entitled ‘Civil Society Groups and National ICT Policies’ gave a fascinating insight into the use of SMS technology during late 2007/ early 2008 and how it could be manipulated for both violent and peaceful action.
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Jaxtr, a Silicon Valley startup that lets users bypass a carrier’s international phone charges via the Web, said on Wednesday it is offering free mobile phone text messages between 38 countries. Jaxtr members can use a simple Web form to send a text message to a mobile phone in any of the supported countries, which include the United States, Brazil and Britain as well as Kenya, Slovenia and Ukraine.
Jaxtr offers free texting between 38 countries | Technology | Internet | Reuters
Tad Hirsch, the creator of a mass text-messaging system Txtmob used to aid protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention is resisting releasing information on its users. The New York Times reports. “Last month the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at MIT who wrote the code that created TXTmob. Lawyers representing the city in lawsuits filed by hundreds of people arrested during the convention asked Mr. Hirsch to hand over voluminous records revealing the content of messages exchanged on his service and identifying people who sent and received messages. Mr. Hirsch says that some of the subpoenaed material no longer exists and that he believes he has the right to keep other information secret.
Having several mobile phones is not grounds for suspicion of terrorism. Since mobile phones are relatively cheap fashion items, literally millions of people have more than one of them ! Are all the charities and companies involved in re-cycling old mobile phone handsets now to be considered as terrorist suspects ?
The most popular mobile data segment of all, SMS, is set to continue its growth in 2008 with estimates that over 2 trillion messages will be sent worldwide.
A Chinese politician, Zhao Linzhong has called for SMS voting to be banned as it “breeds corruption”. He said that such activities are serious in nature and affect the morality of the people.
The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth.
From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.
The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa
The photo-documentary report entitled “ The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa,” exposes the ugly underbelly of what is thought to be an escalating global trade in toxic, obsolete, discarded computers and other e-scrap collected in North America and Europe and sent to developing countries by waste brokers and so-called recyclers. In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and ability to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment including computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local experts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports are “junk” and are not economically repairable or marketable. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the environmentalists call yet “another “cyber-age nightmare now landing on the shores of developing countries.”
Siemens Networks, a joint venture of Nokia and Siemens, are installing new cellular base stations at a furious pace, the facilities almost always get their power from diesel-powered generators. However, fuel can account for as much as two-thirds of base-station operating costs. Add to that the expense of trucking diesel over poor roads to far-flung locations and protecting the valuable fuel against theft. “Getting oil or diesel to these stations is tremendously difficult,” says Mats Granryd, president of Ericsson India.
As a result, green energy is suddenly becoming more than a feel-good project for the world’s mobile service providers. As mobile networks expand far beyond the reach of power grids, they need to find alternatives to diesel. After experimenting for years with base stations powered by wind, solar energy or biofuel, equipment suppliers are preparing to roll out alternative energy technology in significant numbers.
Green Mobile Phone Base Stations: Taking Root, Beginning to Sprout
Market driven technologies are largely failing to meet the needs of NGOs in the Global South. There is enormous potential for mobile telephony software to help activities such as providing cheap and low cost information services, conference calling, sending ‘bulk’ SMS messages and collecting data for surveys. Yet the tools and technologies that are currently available to do this work are very challenging to use – making them out of the reach of most NGOs.
Becky Faith 