Viral multimedia for development (part 2)

Note: See yesterday’s post for the beginning of this series.

Much of what I’m talking about here is targeting the end users themselves. But it makes a lot of sense to target the “middle men” such as Internet cafe owners and dump digital data on them that they can give away. The contents of CD-ROM left “accidentally” at an Internet cafe would be scattered to the wind overnight.

Free, sexy multimedia with a message seems to me a great way to promote development messages. Make a slideshow with HIV/AIDS messages that has an exciting soundtrack and people will watch it over and over. And they will share it with their friends.

For church development, the ability to give away e-books on mobile phones is extremely attractive especially if they are versions of esteemed books like the Bible and the hymnal. One of my colleagues is able to produce audio storybooks with full color graphics and sound effects mixed with the audio Scripture portion. A nine minute audio presentation of Genesis 1 and 2 when compressed as 3GPP video is only 4.4 MB. The slideshows are ready-made templates with sound effects. The voice track in a particular language is all that needs to be recorded.

Escutando música no celular

Escutando música no celular, originally uploaded by mozifoto.

Um jovem em Angonia, Tete escuta música no seu telemovel. Recebeu os mp3s atraves de Bluetooth do aparelho dum amigo.

Viral multimedia for development (part 1)

Everywhere I go in Mozambique these days, I see young people with earphones hanging out of their ears attached to their mobile phone. Where did they get the music that they’re listening to? Hardly anyone is hooked up to the Internet. There are no music stores. Another common sight is one guy staring at his cell phone while three or four friends look over his shoulder. The impact of mobile media extends beyond the owner of the handset.

There is a phantom step that is taking place that I don’t understand. My conjecture is that music sharing is mostly person to person. It is fairly easy to send an mp3 from one phone to another by Bluetooth or infrared. Another possibility is Internet cafes. A friend of mine needed to send me an email but there was a huge line at the Internet cafe. Apparently everyone was waiting to hook up to the Internet and download music.

If I wanted to spread my message virally, I think I would attach it to music or video. Of course, tracking results on such a campaign would be next to impossible without some sort of response mechanism. The Pocket Tunes mp3 player on my Palm T|X has an Unlock Bonus Feature under the Help menu. You have to visit an Internet address to get a bonus feature code. The result for Pocket Tunes is that they get a chance to promote paid features and also see how many people are using their product.

With MMS it is really easy to offer tempting feedback options. These might include photos, ringtones, or mp3 downloads. The promise of free anything is of course a powerful motivator to people. And once they’ve responded, how a content provider chooses to use their mobile number is up to them. This could include simply spamming them with whatever information you want to show them or you could be more ethical (and hopefully will be) and invite people to “subscribe” to an information channel which regularly delivers content to users.

A system like the Wattpad reader or cellphoto.net that has a mix of free and paid content is guaranteed to be popular.

---

Tomorrow I’ll talk about targeting the middle man for content distribution as well as an example of a multimedia slideshow for churches.

Mobile media is, uh, mobile

An article by HASH at White African called Think Different: Africa’s Technology Gap got me thinking about the ways that the digital divide is not as wide in Africa as we might assume. Mobile phones are a perfect platform for Africans to get on the Cyber-Highway.

Mobility

One way that mobile phones distinctly connect with African culture is their mobility. Africans are on the move. Well, I take that back. I have seen a guy sitting on a log in the morning and still found him sitting there in the evening, but there are a lot of Africans on the move. Relating to data by being tied to a desk all day is not the way things work around here.

Sociability

If my neighbor has a phone, I have a phone. Your phone number can be shared by everyone in your neighborhood. So mobile phones actually lead to strengthened social ties by creating a new form of indebtedness. Not to mention that you can keep in better contact with your family in far away places.

Datability

OK, I made that word up. But Africans do use mobile phones to access electronic data. SMS is a stripped down form of email. Liga-me! is akin to a pager. Your phone beeps and all it says is “Call me!” Most Africans I know can’t resist calling. What if someone is sick?!?

Here in Mozambique, mCel clients can access LAM flight schedules, get jokes, riddles and horoscopes and even find out about tides and Muslim prayer schedules. All of that by sending a code to 821010. That’s data on demand and it’s just a step away from Google searches. TV and Radio are increasingly using  SMS for interaction with their audiences. In Uganda you can request Bible verses. In South Africa you can submit classified ads.

Gadgets and ubiquity

ubiquitous: adj. existing everywhere: present everywhere at once or appearing to be.

I received an email today describing a nifty little gadget that plays recordings of the Bible. It runs on batteries or solar power. I used to get excited about such things. I am a gadget junky. But these days I think gadgets are a dead-end. If someone has created some marvelous windup gadget that brings the Gospel to millions my response is, “I doubt it!”

I no longer believe in gadgets. Instead I want to explore ways to tap into what people are already using. I remember twenty years ago riding on a bus through Mexico in the middle of the night. I saw very poor huts and from many of them emanated a blue glow. Television! Those poor people were more interested in owning a TV than a nice house. And they used their own resourcefulness to make it happen.

Visit any village in Mozambique, one of the supposedly “poorest countries in the world” and you can ask someone where the closest place with cell phone coverage is. They will know. It may be standing on a termite mound. It may be on “that mountain over there.” But they know.

Show me the ubiquitous gadget and I’ll show you the right media for that area. It might be cell phones. Or TV. Or radio. But I seriously doubt that proprietary gadgets with a crank on the side are going to be able to achieve the mass market penetration that you’re hoping for. Whether you’re hoping to save the lost, or conquer AIDS, or sell your product.

Using MMS to send an email in Mozambique

There are several ways to do email on your cell phone. Unfortunately, none of them seem to work.

In this post I want to describe my experiences with MMS.

If you have MMS set up on your phone you should be able to send an email to any address in the world. It works. Sorta. I succeeded in sending an MMS from my Vodacom and mCel phones to my Yahoo account. The Vodacom message arrived almost immediately. The mCel message took close to half an hour to arrive in my inbox. I replied to both messages with a short text message and sent them off. Nothing ever happened. It’s possible that the messages are stuck in some queue somewhere.

But think about this with me. You send a message. The person receives it and replies. Then you never get their response. How useful is that? Not very. Especially if neither of you are aware of the problem.

The Vodacom and mCel systems create email addresses for you based on your phone number:

Vodacom:  +25884[your number]@mms.vm.co.mz

mCel: 25882[your number]@mms.mcel.co.mz

This should work just fine but there seems to be a kink in the system.

Update 1: I spoke with mCel customer service and they asked me to send an email to my phone’s email address. I tried from another email account with the same results.

Update 2: I spoke with Vodacom customer service and was told that you can send MMS to email but not the other way around. They have a service called “vodamail” but it is only available for Vodacom users with a contract.

Here’s the information about MMS to email (in Portuguese): mCel and Vodacom.

It doesn’t say anything about receiving messages from the outside.

Informática Móvel

Informática Móvel, originally uploaded by mozifoto.

Ontem eu tinha um espaço no horário para falar com os meus estudantes de informática. Assim aproveitei-lo para falar sobre a informática móvel. Havia oito pessoas na aula. Todos tinham nível superior. E todos têm telemovel pessoal (Veja o foto no artigo anterior). Como pode ver no quadro, eu pretendia mais ou menos sensibilizar as pessoas com o vocabulário técnico. Também, eu queria fazer as pessoas entender de que o telemovel é o seu portal ao mundo de informática. Todos utilizam SMS para enviar mensagens aos seus familiares. Agora, isto é trocar dados digitais. Quando passam para também utilizar MMS já estão utilizar o telemovel como um pequeno computador. É possível enviar correios electrónicos. É possível visitar páginas do Internet e fazer pesquisas com Google.

Embora em teoria “é possível” fazer estas coisas, existem numerosas barreiras que dificultam a participação dum Fulano Moçambicano no mundo do Internet. Os telefones normalmente não são daquele tipo que recebem fotos e imagens. E muitos Moçambicanos andam com telefone mas não tem crédito nem para enviar um simples SMS, sem falar em passar alguns minutos a visitar páginas no Internet. Portanto a maioria só utilizem o telefone para chamadas e o famoso Liga-me! Mesmo assim, o povo moçambicano está fazer grandes passos avante na comunicação com quase 10% do povo com um celular na mão.

Telemoveis em Moçambique

Telemoveis em Moçambique, originally uploaded by mozifoto.

Pedi aos alunos do meu curso de Informática para tirar um foto dos seus telemoveis. Havia mais dois alunos com telemoveis que tinha-nos deixado em casa.

Vila Ulongue, Tete

Ndagha on radio vs. Internet in Malawi

Prolific Malawian blogger, Victor Kaonga has been featured at Global Voices Online as their Blogger of the Week. As a radio broadcaster he has a lot of interesting opinions on the difference between radio and Internet for Malawians.

I believe radio is a crucial link to familiarize rural Africans with online information. Just look at how BBC uses SMS to interact with their readers. The same thing is done prolifically by Mozambican radio and television. It’s a first step on a long journey to join the Internet revolution.

Stuck outside banging on the door

This morning I helped a Mozambican colleague get set up with Yahoo! Mail. He’s pretty hip on the mobile media side of his phone. He knows how to connect to the Internet and visit web pages. But setting him up with his own email account was fraught with obstacles:

1. You have to request an email account on a computer. Registering doesn’t work on a mobile phone.
2. Yahoo! pages are graphic-intensive so it requires a lot of patience to load up all those pages and then find out where you need to go.
3. Once we finally got him his email address and password, we tried to install Y! Go on his phone but were informed that it wasn’t compatible with his phone (A Nokia camera phone).
4. We connected through the web to http://br.m.yahoo.com and put in his name and password. Then it redirected our connection (an extra step and a lot of waiting). Then it said “Link not available. Try again later.” (Same thing happened through the main yahoo.com)

So, after all that work he’s got an email address but no way to check it or write messages. And I blew a morning helping someone who really wants to be connected to the Internet but can’t.

I also blew a lot of time on Saturday helping someone else set up their Gmail account. They’ve got the whole “connect to the Internet through your laptop using bluetooth and a GPRS connection.” It works OK, but dang it’s slow.

I know I sound like I’m whining, but these kinds of difficulties almost guarantee that the grand potential of the mobile web will not be realized. While even grandmothers in the developed world are hanging out at YouTube, lots of information-hungry people in the developing world are not invited to the feast simply because the onramp is an impossible hurdle.

What can we learn from this?

1. Knock down hurdles. Internet tools aimed at users in the developing world have to minimize the hurdles to getting started.
2. If they’re in, they’re hip. In a sort-of survival of the fittest, only the most motivated and cleverest people in Africa succeed in getting connected to the Internet. (Currently 1 in 1000 people in Mozambique)
3. Start where people are at. 1 in 10 Mozambicans are using a cell phone. And they’ve all mastered SMS (You have to in order to confirm top-up credit). Use SMS as an entry point and help people grow and expand.