India Adds 9 Million Mobile Users in July

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian mobile telecoms firms added 9.2 million users in July, taking subscribers in the world's fastest growing wireless market to nearly 300 million, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Monday.

Leading mobile firm Bharti Airtel signed up 2.7 million customers, enough for it to overtake state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd as India's largest telecom firm by total subscribers, including fixed-line subscribers.

Second-ranked mobile firm Reliance Communications added 1.75 million customers, and No. 3 Vodafone Essar, controlled by Britain's Vodafone Plc , added 1.76 million.

India is the world's fastest-growing market for wireless services and the second-largest market for such services after China, with growth fuelled by cheap handsets and call rates as low as 1 U.S. cent a minute.

The regulator's data showed Indian wireless phone users rose to 296.1 million in July, while fixed-line line subscriptions fell by around 160,000 to 38.8 million.

India Adds 9 Million Mobile Users in July - NYTimes.com

SMS as election tool

Cell phone political marketing campaign:

"R U curious to know Obama’s VP? The names of vice-presidential candidates are typically announced at news conferences or political conventions. But sometime before the opening gavel of the Democratic National Convention next Monday, Senator Barack Obama plans to break the mold by doing it with a text message.

"Last week, the Obama campaign said that anyone who sent a text message of “VP” to a dedicated phone number would be among the first to learn the identity of his running mate. The campaign has also run a television commercial that offers a campaign sticker to any person who sends the word “Barack” to the same number.

"The efforts spotlight Mr. Obama’s push to harvest millions of cellphone numbers of potential voters through text messaging, a technology that is increasingly moving into the mainstream. And it could have a significant effect in November, when the campaign plans to use the technology to get out the vote."

Enticing Text Messagers in a Get-Out-the-Vote Push - NYTimes.com

Call Cutta interactive theater

Talk with an Indian call center worker as part of a theater/performance art project. You visit the project by appointment where you get immersed in a faux call center environment. Call Cutta In A Box review, Call Cutta In A Box project page, Call Cutta blog.

"Call Cutta In A Box is a strange interactive theater installation where the audience, one at a time, converses with an employee of an Indian call center. Indeed, the production was created by art group Rimini Protokoll in collaboration with the Callcenter Descon Limited in Calcutta. The installation is currently on tour, traveling next to Gronigen, Copenhagen, and Paris."

Call Cutta interactive theater - Boing Boing

Phones’ Texting Feature Often Unused

Interesting, in S. Korea, texting and mobile emails are seldom used.

DRILLING DOWN; Phones’ Texting Feature Often Unused - NYTimes.com

Genevieve Bell talk (in bed)

I just discovered this video from 2006 today. I haven't watched it, but the title sounds intriguing. Sounds like that British talk show with the lady who interviews people in bed.

Mobile computing is literally going to bed with users, so at the cool BED club in New York, PodTech's Michael Johnson literally hopped into bed with Genevieve Bell, a senior researcher and anthropologist for Intel. She's the director of Intel's user experience group for Digital Home. Bell and a team of anthropologists traveled the world in a 36 country study of how technology is used on an everyday and personal level.

PCs in Bed & Beyond: Genevieve Bell, Intel's Top Anthropologist | PodTech.net

The Richest Man in India

Mukesh Ambani (older brother of Anil Ambani who controls Reliance telecomm) is an exemplar of the Indian middle class. This New York Times story describes him as a man with Indian tastes and values, in contrast with other elite business families in India.

Such changes accompanied the rise to power of a new class of Indians who want to live and work and raise their children in India, who are tethered to Indian values, food and popular culture and who are unapologetic about their indigenous tastes. The Ambanis are this class’s first family.

MANY other Indian business families have been rich for generations, and their scions don finely cut suits and flaunt fussy tastes. Ratan Tata cruises down Marine Drive on Sundays in fast cars and favors Hermès ties with matching handkerchiefs. Vijay Mallya is said to be trailed in his home by a butler holding a silver tray with a cigar and a Scotch. Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej are famous for soirées that attract Hollywood stars.

Mr. Ambani comports himself quite differently. Among family members, he prefers speaking Gujarati to English, friends say. He may ask colleagues to stop at the temple with him during business trips to partake in a ritual Hindu prayer. He loathes Western suits, preferring a white short-sleeved shirt, black trousers and black shoes that resemble sneakers cross-bred with office wingtips.

His idea of entertainment is not ballet but Bollywood; he watches as many as three films a week at home in a private theater. “You need some amount of escapism in life,” he says. “Those two or three hours give you relief.”

He has a legendary appetite, but mostly for the food of the bustling Mumbai streets. He has been known to walk out of fancy restaurants in search of dosas, south Indian crepes sold by the roadside. And he carries those preferences with him when he travels.

Meet Mukesh Ambani - India’s Richest Man - Biography - NYTimes.com

Handbook of Mobile Communications Studies

At last! Handbook of Mobile Communications Studies has been published!

From Putting people first: "The book contains more than 30 contributions, including chapters written by Jan Chipchase (Nokia Research), Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India), Howard Rheingold, and Carolyn Wei (Google)."

Wow, worthy of a mention. aw shucks.

Saudi girls and technology-facilitated romance

An article about technology and romantic rituals in Saudi Arabia.

"A cellphone picture of Alia's fiancé — a 25-year-old military man named Badr — was passed around, and the girls began pestering Alia for the details of her showfa. A showfa — literally, a 'viewing' — usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged. A girl's suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya. In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, her showfa will be the only time in a girl's life that she is seen this way by a man outside her family."
....
"Later that evening, over fava bean stew, salad, and meat-filled pastries, Alia revealed that she was to be allowed to speak to her fiancé on the phone. Their first phone conversation was scheduled for the following day, she said, and she was so worried about what to say to Badr that she was compiling a list of questions..... 'Ask him what kind of cellphone he has, and what kind of car,' suggested another. 'That way you'll be able to find out how he spends his money, whether he's free with it or whether he's stingy.'"
....
"According to about 30 Saudi girls and women between ages 15 and 25, all interviewed during December, January and February, it is becoming more and more socially acceptable for young engaged women to speak to their fiancés on the phone, though more conservative families still forbid all contact between engaged couples."
....
"And certainly, practices like 'numbering' — where a group of young men in a car chase another car they believe to contain young women, and try to give the women their phone number via Bluetooth, or by holding a written number up to the window — have become a very visible part of Saudi urban life."

"A woman can't switch her phone's Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special 'electronic belts,' which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer's cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex."
....
"'If your family found out you were talking to a man online, that's not quite as bad as talking to him on the phone,' Ms. Tukhaifi explained. 'With the phone, everyone can agree that is forbidden, because Islam forbids a stranger to hear your voice. Online he only sees your writing, so that's slightly more open to interpretation. 'One test is that if you're ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it's wrong,' Ms. Tukhaifi continued. 'For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys — I didn't e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to 'friend' them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.'"

Love on Girls’ Side of the Saudi Divide - New York Times via miss elisa

Telephone service as military tool for Hizballah

"Although Hizballah is known for its massive Iran-funded social welfare system that provides everything from soup to education, construction materials and matchmaking services for Lebanon's Shi'ite underclass, cell-phone service is not part of the package — except for those who join its guerrilla army. One of the world's most technically advanced and resourceful guerrilla organizations, Hizballah had some time ago installed its own, in-house dedicated fiber-optic telephone network, connecting its headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut to its offices, military posts and cadres as far south as the Israeli border. During the summer 2006 war, Israel had jammed cellphone signals throughout south Lebanon and monitored the Lebanese telephone system, but Hizballah's internal communications channels had survived thanks to its private fiber-optic system. Since the war, however, Hizballah has expanded the network to cover its new military frontline north of the United Nations–patrolled southern border district, and into the Bekaa Valley to the east. Part of the system incorporates a WiMAX network allowing long-distance wireless access for the Internet and cell phones."

A Cell Phone Civil War in Lebanon - TIME via UNDP Observatory

Hey! I was obliquely cited on CNN.com!

Arranged marriage gets high-tech twist - CNN.com: "The rise of cell phones has made long-distance courtships easier. A small 2006 study from a University of Washington researcher found that young Indians living in Bangalore used cell phones to get to know partners introduced to them by their parents."

yeah, that's my research!

A bad romance gets worse over mobile phone

The non-Latin letters that are in some languages have much significance. In this case, a substitution of a closed Turkish i with Latin i in an SMS was deadly. Who would have thought that a misspelled text message could cause such harm?

"The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan's sent a message and Emine's cellphone didn't have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter "ı" or closed i. While "i" is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn't exist in most of the terminals in that country.

"The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)"

From an email list at work: Localization Problems: A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)

Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK) - New York Times: "Savannah said she sends a text message to her father at least two or three times a day. “I can’t ask him questions because he is too slow,” she said. “He uses simple words.”"

Interesting article about the social world that teens and young people craft for themselves through personal technology, especially mobile texting.

What do you think?

Cell phone transforms into deadly robot

Autobot or Decepticon?

Technology is invisible to youth

Youth don't like technology, but I bet that they like the social connections it affords.

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept, and just 16 percent use terms like "social networking", said two combined surveys covering 8- to 24-year-olds published on Tuesday by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.

"Young people don't see "tech" as a separate entity - it's an organic part of their lives," said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV's VBS International Insight unit.

"Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives -- it's invisible."

The surveys involved 18,000 young people in 16 countries including the UK, U.S., China, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

via Usability News, July 28, 2007

wanted

Twitter

Twitter is the new "moblogging" tool. It lets you send text messages to groups of friends and to an online page. The purpose is to report on "what you are doing." I am fascinated by the use of mobile phones as a pseudo-blog platform. In this case, it's really just a matter of souped-up text messaging. See the Time article about Why Everyone's Talking about Twitter.

Good things

A couple things came to my attention today in the mobile-society list.

First, M/C Journal just released a themed issue on mobility. Some articles caught my eye, and I look forward to reading them including Raiti's Mobile Intimacy: Theories on the Economics of Emotion with Examples from Asia, Solis' Texting Love: An Exploration of Text Messaging as a Medium for Romance in the Philippines, and Humphreys and Barker's Modernity and the Mobile Phone: Exploring Tensions about Dating and Sex in Indonesia. Several of the other articles also have catchy titles, but these are the ones that jumped out at me.

Second, an article was highlighted about the Top 10 Emerging Mobile Markets. India exhibited a lot of raw growth last year.

Mobile phones and romance

Ah, Valentine's Day. My favorite holiday research-wise because stories about romance pop up everywhere.

1) Valentine's Day wins Indian hearts

India's largest chain of card shops, Archie's, is producing more than 300 different types of Valentine's Day cards this year.

Some of them come with detachable love hearts which can then be used as mobile telephone accessories. There is also money to be made from people who do not have a sweetheart but want one. Internet dating sites have grown in popularity in India.

One of the most successful, Fropper.com has two million members and says February is the most popular month in which to join.

2) India: political, religious hardliner groups protest Valentine's Day (thanks to Jonathan for these two links)

3) and here's a potentially interesting story, except it's published in The Conservative Voice, which suggests there might be a political agenda. But it has a mobile phone angle, so I can't resist: Extremist Muslims Vs. Valentines, Except Rebels

Kuwait: "Tactics are evolving. In this oil-rich state, young Arabs buy two cell phones, and as they see the beloved driving by, they throw one of the mobiles in her car; then the telephonic romance can begin."

I don't know how to verify this tidbit, but it's such a good story.

4) and forbidden love via mobile! Romance nipped on train
This is an excellent story about two kids who become connected because of the mobile phone. The boy was randomly dialing numbers and reached her. They nurtured their romance by mobile, and then by landline, before they tried to meet in person, and were thwarted.

Laltu came to know his beloved by chance. He was dialling numbers at random from his new cellphone when she said hello. Long conversations and endless SMSes followed. The bills were long, too, and the phones were confiscated. But that only made the young lovers use landlines, instead.

In time for Valentine's Day...

The University of Washington made a press release about my research.

Mobile phones facilitate romance in modern India

And it is featured on the University of Washington home page, the second story following the one about negative employees who are like bad apples in the corporate barrel.

Pleasures of the Text

An article in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago about the curious phenomenon that is text messaging. The Pleasures of the Text (link via Jan)

One pithy observation in the article:

This may be the universal attraction of text-messaging, in fact: it's a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance. The great majority of text messages are of the "Hey, how are you, whassup?" variety, and they're sent sometimes when messenger and recipient are within speaking distance of each other - across classrooms, say, or from one row of a stadium to another. They're little electronic waves and nods that, just like real waves and nods, aren't meant to do much more than establish a connection - or disconnection, as the case may be - without getting into specifics.

CNN story on mobiles in the developing world

CNN published a story about mobile phone success stories in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. It's a nice contextualization of what mobile phone use is like in digitally emergent places. Cell phones play vital role in developing world

Texting while driving

There is renewed debate about using mobile phones while driving: should it be illegal to text while driving? Not that I have tried, but I can't imagine how anyone would feel comfortable doing that while driving. It's like reading while driving but much more involved. Theorizing about it, I would imagine something about the immediacy of a conversation (textual or otherwise) that makes it difficult to ignore SMS even when it's not a good time to be typing.

In Washington, the proposed bills about regulating cell phone use are:
"Senate Bill 5037: A person operating a moving motor vehicle while holding a wireless communications device to his or her ear is guilty of a traffic infraction.

House Bill 1214: A person operating a moving motor vehicle while reading, manually writing or sending a message on an electronic wireless device is guilty of a traffic infraction."

Finnish novel writting in txt msg

"txt msg" is the language of mobile youth. Now Hannu Luntiala, a Finnish author, has written an entire novel (332 pages) in txt msg, called The Last Messages. Finns, known for their reticence and reserved natures, apparently find 160 characters more than sufficient to express themselves. The prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, reportedly broke up with his girlfriend via text. Klassy. Re: Book written in txt msg

Mobile ASL project

Some interesting work is going on at the University of Washington supporting sign language on mobile phones. The talk I went to by Richard Ladner and Anna Cavender included demos and a show-and-tell of a video phone. The work presented discussed doing a user study to identity design requirements, an eye-tracking study to determine what physical aspects of the signer that deaf people were attuned to, and a technical effort to compress video and make it sufficient high-resolution for mobile bandwidth. The MobileASL project is described here.

Happy New Year via mobile phone in South Africa

Mobile calls, SMS, and MMS were used to ring in the New Year in South Africa and other parts of the world. Did you make or receive some kind of holiday greeting through your mobile phone? And did you exchange greetings with someone you would consider very close, somewhat close, or an acquaintance?

SOUTH Africans have become a nation of electronic greeters, with more than 1,5-billion cellphone text messages sent over the recent holiday season.

MTN alone handled 1,17-billion SMS messages over Christmas and New Year, almost double the number it carried last year. But fast fingers and thumbs have not completely replaced the more personal touch of a phone call, with MTN reporting a 46% rise in voice calls from last year to an astonishing 1,87-billion calls during Christmas and New Year.

....

Other countries also reported amazing growth in seasonal greetings by SMS. Danes and Norwegians broke their previous records with the Danes sending 16-million over the new year period, up 31% from a year ago. Norwegian networks carried 37,5-million text messages on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, says Sapa.

Things were less successful in Bulgaria, where mobile networks temporarily collapsed because of high traffic shortly after midnight on January 1.

While global figures have not yet been calculated, the number of SMS greetings sent over the new year is tipped to top 200-billion. Airwide Solutions, a mobile messaging player, predicted a massive increase in the emerging markets of eastern Europe, north Africa and Asia.

Airwide expected the UK to top 200-million New Year messages, and predicted that Poland and China would match that. The US, where SMS is less successful because local phone calls are free, is expected to report 125-million New Year messages. However, Filipinos, who send 400-million SMS messages on a normal day, should be the leaders.

South Africa: Billions of Beeps Usher in New Year via UNDP ICT for Development Observatory

Mobile companies looking for love in India

Several companies are trying to win the affections of Hutch in India. I like how the deals are couched in romantic terms in the headline! The article says Hutch is attractive because it's in an emerging market.

Telecommunications companies are looking to fast-growing emerging markets as their operations in traditional markets have stagnated. Less than 10 percent of the 1.1 billion people in India have a mobile phone, according to a Gartner Group study, compared with more than 70 percent in the United States, but new users are growing at record rates. According to the Telecom Regulators Authority of India, India had 6.79 million new mobile subscribers in November.

In contrast, some surveys say that in some areas in Europe and Asia, including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Sweden, there is already more than one mobile phone subscription for each person.

Suitors Woo Mobile Phone Company in India

Sassy T-Shirts

Whilst doing a bit of online window shopping, I stumbled upon phone-themed novelty shirts from CafePress.

Economist round up

Some recent articles about the mobile phone sector in the developing world. The India article talks about how mobiles are mainstreaming poor people into the economy. For now, the Indian mobile sector is focusing on cheap basic services rather than the latest and greatest in sexy 3G services. The Africa article talks about how regional providers are jockeying to be tops in their markets.

Talk is cheap, India leads the world in mobile-phone subscriber growth, Dec 7th 2006, From The Economist print edition

WITH 6.6m new subscribers a month, India is in the grip of an unprecedented mobile-phone boom. Figures released in September showed that India had overtaken China in new subscribers per month for the first time. India still lags behind China in total subscribers, with a mere 136m (up from 75m a year ago), compared with China's 449m. But India's government is confident that this gap can be quickly closed, and that it will meet its target of 500m phone subscribers by 2010.

The boom has become the source of much national pride. It is arguably a more widely celebrated example of the “New India” than the high-tech offshoring industry centred on Bangalore, because poorer Indians are participating in it too. Industry bosses are quick to point out that the spread of mobile phones is bringing labourers, farmers and fishermen into the economic mainstream. 'An unemployed person with a phone suddenly feels part of the nation,' says one top executive.

Out of Africa, A new kind of telecoms operator is evolving in Africa and the Middle East, Dec 7th 2006, From The Economist print edition

THAT mobile phones are transforming economic and social life in Africa is now widely understood. Less well known are the companies that are leading the charge. Following a flurry of deals over the past 18 months, five African and Middle Eastern operators are now vying for supremacy. These regional powerhouses have worked out how to earn princely sums in the world's poorest places. So far they have mostly been too busy signing up new subscribers to compete vigorously with each other. But that is now starting to change, and the industry is preparing for a round of consolidation as the operators start to attack each other's markets.

The five big operators are MTN of South Africa, MTC of Kuwait, Egypt's Orascom, Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Vodacom, an Anglo-South African firm. John Tiefel, a partner at McKinsey, predicts that consolidation will result in three or four large operators spanning Africa and the Middle East, with a sprinkling of national firms. “All the operators have a very similar vision: to become meaningful players in all these markets,” says Phuthuma Nhleko, the boss of MTN Group in South Africa, which has operations in 21 countries across the region.

Links via Irini