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.