Banking Initiatives

That doesn't mean that no one is creating innovative, useful software to run on cell phones. In South Africa and Nigeria, for example, a variety of mobile banking initiatives have taken off and been embraced by a population that isn't going to be getting "online", in the web sense, anytime soon but who want all the advantages of cashless transactions. And in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Zambia, with funding from The Vodafone Group Foundation and the UN Foundation, we've successfully completed a pilot of our EpiSurveyor mobile data collection software for public health.

Based on that pilot, which dramatically increased the public health data available in those countries, the World Health Organization has adopted EpiSurveyor as the standard for mobile data collection in Africa - and we're transitioning from unconnected PDAs to wirelessly-connected phones as I write this.

Importantly, the programming staff for that EpiSurveyor software is entirely located in developing countries: India, Kenya, and South Africa.

We've done this not only because it's more cost effective, but also to promote development capacity in those countries.

After all, who is more likely to come up with innovative software based on the centrality of the cell phone, a programmer in Silicon Valley surrounded by beautiful desktops and laptops, or a programmer in Nairobi who lives in a world in which almost all contact with the network is via cellphone?

But regardless of where the developer is located, I think it's time that we recognised that for the majority of the world's population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album, and many other things, just as soon as someone, somewhere, sits down and writes the software that allows these functions to be performed.