Open your wallet right now. Most likely, you have a debit card, a credit card, a health insurance card, and access to the massive financial infrastructure that these three cards represent.

The ability to store, save, use, and borrow money anywhere in almost limitless fashion, without worry about amount, theft, or even making change. Add in the freedom from a direct worry about health costs, and these three cards represent a level of financial freedom unknown to anyone in the developing world... today.

Mobile Money Revolution

Yet by tomorrow, there will be more people who have similar access to financial services, via electronic transactions on mobile phones. In fact, over the next five years there will be a mobile money revolution at the bottom of the pyramid as international financial institutions like VISA, Mastercard, and the like move in forcefully to service the next billion customers.

They see M-PESA transferring 20% of Kenya's GDP and the money that can be made offering mobile financial services to the BoP. But its not just payments and credit, there are also opportunities in many other types of financial services.

Here are two examples with insurance, which is usually the providence of in-person sales worldwide:

• In Ghana, Tigo Family Care Insurance provides life insurance for prepaid subscribers and their family members in the event of a natural death.
• In Kenya, the Syngenta Foundation's Agriculture Index Insurance Initiative uses mobile phones and weather stations to offer farmers affordable crop insurance.

Now we could go on, but listing examples of mobile money was not the focus of the Technology Salon on how mobile financial services are transforming the economics of international development. What really captured our attention was the realization that mobile phones are merely a conduit to the larger experience of electronic transactions, which include mobile money, but also the full gamut of wealth that is created, stored, and exchanged digitally.

Please join us for the next Technology Salon

Better than Cash

First let us agree that electronic payments systems (bank accounts, Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), pre-paid cards, smart cards, mobile money) are a great benefit for everyone involved. Electronic payments systems:

• Increase access to basic financial services, including savings, lending, and e-payments.
• Reduce barriers to entry for fee-for-service business models
• Reduce the risk of money theft and increase personal control over financial resources
• Increase speed of payments both to and from consumers, businesses, and government
• Improve transparency, mitigate corruption, and reduce leakages in the disbursement of government funds.

A great example of all five of these benefits is the ability to pay for municipal water and electricity services via mobile money in multiple African markets. By making payments electronically, both consumers and government have more accurate records, consumers are able to save for and manage payments, and service providers can expand services with a higher expectation of payment, and more timely payment, therefore serving more customers, more efficiently.

In their Better than Cash program, USAID's new Mobile Solutions Office seeks to expand electronic payment system use by governments, for utilities but also government payments in everything from conditional payments (welfare, healthcare, etc) for citizens, to payroll payments for government workers, to pension payments for retirees.

The net effect of this shift to electronic payments will be much more efficient government programs. Yet the Mobile Solutions team isn't stopping with other governments, its goal is to transform the way USAID does it's programming as well. With language already in RFP's to encourage implementing partners to use electronic payments in their work, USAID will be pushing a move from cash payments to electronic payments for all its beneficiaries.

Barriers to Adoption

Before we get too far around the hype cycle, there are issues that will retard the growth of mobile financial services and the larger electronic payment systems. First, policy makers may have a grasp of what works to encourage electronic payments and use mobile financial services first-hand, but they don't often know how to steer their countries from the theoretical to the practical.

Next, at the business level monopoly mobile operators may be just as hard to convince to innovate as a highly competitive mobile phone marketplace with multiple players. Neither situation lends itself to interoperability, which is key for large-scale electronic payment systems and the mobile financial services they support.

Finally, not everyone has a mobile phone. Yes, shocking but true. So simpler systems like scratch cards and offline intermediaries will co-exist with electronic payment systems for years to come. Better that we recognize and welcome them than limit any payment system to one hardware delivery mechanism, no matter its revolutionary benefits.

Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA are all the rage in International development these days, but what do they really mean for the national development of countries we attempt to help?

Menekse Gencer of mPay Connect will lead us in a discussion of mobile financial services, the full gamut of finance that is now taking place on mobile phones: mobile payments, mobile microfinance, and mobile banking.

She will showcase ways in which mobile financial services are (and will be) radically changing emerging economies, shifting the economic landscape in ways we are just now starting to see but as yet cannot fully understand. Here is one example of that shift:

• mPay Connect research shows M-PESA saves 3 hours per day for every Kenyan subscriber in reduced shoe leather costs - the cost of walking money from place to place. If we multiply 3 hours per day, by 13.2 million subscribers, by 365 days, that's 14.4 BILLION hours saved per year. Add in the average wage per hour in Kenya, and the time savings start to make you gasp in savings shock.

Priya Jaisinghani of the Mobile Solutions Office at USAID wants to bring savings like that to both the host country governments that USAID works with and to the USAID system itself. She'll continue with Menekse's theme and bring the discussion home:

• How can USAID and its implementing partners also leverage mobile financial services to increase the efficiency of foreign assistance? Two simple suggestion to start: contractors using mPayments to pay host country national staff and national pensions paying through mobiles.

Of course there are many more, and more ways in which mobile financial services are radically changing the world in which we work. Join your fellow Technology Salon professionals in a deep dive on the impact all of this will have at the next Salon:

Mobile Financial Services in USAID Programming
December Technology Salon
8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
RTI International
701 13th Street NW, Suite 750
Washington, DC (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.

According to Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the 73% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia who do not have a mobile phone represent $13 billion per year in incremental revenue for mobile telephony operators. Women are the face of growth for the mobile industry in the developing world - 66% of all new mobile subscribers will be women - and there is a huge untapped potential for business interests and for social impact.

But will mobile money be the killer app to drive mobile phone adoption by women?

This is the question we put to Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting and Menekse Gencer, founder of mPay Connect in our recent Technology Salon in San Francisco. (Sign up to be invited to future Salons). With their input, we came to several interesting conclusions around mobile money and women empowerment:

Mobile Money is Many Things

Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA, get tossed around without any real understanding of the differences in systems and outcomes. To help our understanding of these concepts, mPay Connect made great presentations on mobile money, and we're going to steal one, key slide:

Mobile money is really mobile financial services, and like traditional financial services, has several parts - mobile payments where money is moved from one account to another, mobile microfinance where money is loaned and expected to be repaid, and mobile banking where money is kept as a safe repository of wealth.

As you can read in The Mobile Money Movement, mobile money has many benefits, from greater money security to more transparent transactions, but there are two key benefits that we focused on in the Salon.

1. Lowering transaction costs: mPay Connect research shows M-PESA saves 3 hours per day for every Kenyan subscriber in reduced shoe leather costs - the cost of walking money from place to place. If we multiply 3 hours per day, by 13.2 million subscribers, by 365 days, that's 14.4 BILLION hours saved per year. Add in the average wage per hour in Kenya, and the time savings start to make you gasp in savings shock.
2. Increasing business legitimacy: Each business that uses mobile money builds a history of financial activity that they can use for loans, factoring, and even inventory control. It also allows governments to license businesses as such and better estimate and collect taxes. In fact, mobile financial services usually are not creating financial services - many of these systems existed informally through local networks - mobile money is formalizing them and bringing them into the measurable economy.

While there isn't any objective research yet on mobile money directly impacting GDP, you can start to sense the change it brings to an economy.

Mobile Money Involves Many Actors

While we often think of M-PESA as the poster child of mobile money, there are other mobile money systems. Even in East Africa there are payment systems by Bharti Airtel, Orange, and MTN. G-Cash in the Philippines is even older and larger than M-PESA, and other players besides mobile line operators smell the mobile money to be made.

In India, banks and mobile telcos are joining forces, while in Bangladesh, BRAC and Grameen Phone have joined to create B-cash, which is promising to be network neutral - that is allow any payment using any mobile operator's system. Overall, there is real convergence - in both payment systems and in the industries that want to participate in them. Recently in Nigeria, 16 companies were given a provisional license to do mobile payments and banking: only 6 are linked to banks and only 1 to a mobile operator (MTN).

Today's model, where mobile phone companies dominate, is just a snapshot in time.

Mobile Money Isn't Targeted at Women... Yet

Even with all that excitement, we don't see handsets, subscriber plans, or even special services targeted at women in Africa like we do in Asia. Mobile operators in Africa say they are growing too fast to target women - they can barely keep up with their existing new customer influx, regardless of gender. While there is truth to that, there are also cultural issues.

In many patriarchal societies, men control the use and ownership of mobile phones. Mobile technology can be seen as a threat to traditional power dynamics and social norms. There are some hints of change - it is a security line for girls to go away to school as they can be checked on at any time. Especially around health, it's usage as a communications tool can be deemed critical for family well being..

Building on the examples in Examining the Intersections Between mHealth and Mobile Money, mPayments can be interesting way to free women for city life - imagine dowries paid in airtime vs. livestock or payroll and government benefits direct to handsets vs. husband's hands. Conditional cash now paid at hospital visits could be used as incentives for other positive behavior change, like family planning and career advancement.

Now make your own positive behavior change for career advancement - sign up to be invited to future Technology Salons - so you can participate in discussions like this first-hand.

Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting, put forth a startling proposition in a previous Technology Salon. She described a new ICT4D paradigm: Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development.

She believes that combining the traditional role of women in the family and the power of services delivered through the mobile phone (mServices) has the potential for exponential impact. It is the perfect, and the obvious combination; empowering women through the benefits of mobile phone ownership is the easiest and most straightforward measure we can adopt to advance social and economic growth in developing countries.

Mobile phone payment in India

The most popular and well-known mService is mPayments. Safaricom's M-Pesa is expected to have reached a throughput equal to an astounding 20% of Kenya's GDP in 2010. In their research, Vital Wave Consulting found Kenyan women to be more aware of the value that mServices could provide them, because of their exposure to M-Pesa.

But are there real development opportunities in mPayments and the greater concept of mobile money? Can financial transactions on mobile phones by half the population really lift an entire society?

To help us deep dive on the power mobile money will be Menekse Gencer. Menekse is an expert in mobile financial services and the founder of mPay Connect, a consulting service for clients seeking to launch mobile financial services for the unbanked in developed and developing markets. Her work has taken her to Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In her newest publications for The World Economic Forum and Innovations Magazine, Menekse identified why mobile money will have a significant impact on the GDP of emerging markets and how mobile money bolsters the outcomes of other industries like healthcare.

Together, Brooke and Menekse will lead us in a discussion around mobile money, its opportunity to advance development, and its specific impact on gender in the next Technology Salon in San Francisco.

Is Mobile Money the Killer mService for Women?
February SF Technology Salon
Tuesday, February 8, 10-11:30am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but be sure to RSVP ASAP, as we only have room for 15 people, then there will be a waitlist.

On the occasion of the 2010 mHealth Summit, please join the United Nations Foundation, the Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, and the mHealth Alliance for a luncheon discussion of the forthcoming report:

• Health Information as Health Care: The Role of Mobile in Unlocking Health Data
  
  This report examines the ecosystem of patient-related health information, tracing data pathways throughout the continuum of care, and from patients in villages to international health organizations and the most important steps in between.
  
  It aims to serve as a map for identifying barriers, choke points and other inefficiencies in current system that may impede progress toward effective health systems transformation, and maternal health goals, and provides recommendations for leveraging modern ICTs to address health data flow challenges.

Please join us to discuss the impact and role health information flows, and information and communications technologies (ICTs), particularly wireless, have on global health. We will open with a brief overview of key findings from our forthcoming report, and then move into a discussion of the key gaps in data flows in health systems.

Health Information as Health Care: The Role of Mobile in Unlocking Health Data
mHealth Summit luncheon discussion
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place NW
Washington, DC 20036 (map)

R.S.V.P. to UN Foundation is required and seating is limited. A link to the draft report and room information will be provided upon confirmation of R.S.V.P. Highlights from this discussion will be captured in the final draft of the report, which will be published later this year.

Note that you must register to attend the Summit to join us for this event. If you do not plan to attend the Summit in full, please contact Trinh Dang for more information.

As part of this month's Educational Technology Debate on mEducation initiatives, the Technology Salon will be looking at ways to apply mobile phones in education, and scale them across organizations with an mEducation Alliance.

Yet, what would a mEducation Alliance look like? Who would be partners and what would they hope to achieve? Join Anthony Bloome of USAID to explore how an mEducation Alliance might spur appropriate uses of mobiles phones to strengthen formal and informal education delivery in the developing world.

Building a mEducation Alliance for Development
October DC Technology Salon
Friday, October 1, 8:30-10am
UN Foundation Conference Room
1800 Mass Avenue, NW, Suite 400
Washington, D.C. 20036 (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So the first fifteen (15) to RSVP for DC mEducation Salon will be confirmed attendance and then there will be a waitlist.

While everyone is amazed at the quick proliferation of mobile phones in the developing world, here's a startling statistic which should check our unbridled enthusiasm for m-everything: 73% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia do not have a mobile phone.

Across all developing countries, adult women are 21% less likely to have a phone than men. In absolute terms, that's a 300 million-woman gender gap. Yet that gap is not evenly distributed. For instance, rural women who work outside the home are more likely to pay for phone use themselves and spend more on mobile phones as a percentage of income than their urban counterparts.

Why do women own and pay for mobile phones? Because they see tangible benefits: across all women, 90% feel safer and more connected thanks to their mobile phones and almost 50% used a mobile phone to search for employment or increase their income.

And mobile line operators should take note. The annual incremental revenue opportunity in closing the gender gap would be $13 billion per year, and even at current rates, 66% of all new mobile subscribers will be women. Simply put, women are the face of growth for the mobile industry in the developing world.

Such are the findings of the Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women.

But Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave, took this concept a step further. She gave us a new development formula to challenge our conventional thinking:

Women + Mobile Phones = Economic Development

We all know that equipping women in low-income countries with productivity tools earns tremendous returns for development - it's not just good for them, it's good for their families, villages, societies, countries.

We know that women spend up to 90% of their income on their families and are responsible for up to 80% of food production in many low and middle-income countries. These women run families and businesses.

And we also know that mobile phones are uniquely positioned as tools for growth in our era. Research has shown that mobile phones are associated with faster economic and business growth.

Combining the two - the role of women and the power of a mobile phone - has the potential for exponential impact. It's the perfect, and the obvious combination; empowering women through the benefits of mobile phone ownership is the easiest and most straightforward measure we can adopt to advance social and economic growth in developing countries.

Speaker notes of Brooke Partridge, Vital Wave Consulting

The Role of mServices

After dropping that bombshell on the Technology Salon, Brooke went on to explain that closing the mobile phone gender gap will not be easy. Of course cost and access are issues, but she found that perceived need is the largest barrier to female adoption.

Women, it turns out, just see a phone as a communication device for talking with those that they already know. And if everyone they know is near to them - in their family or community, they don't feel the need for a device to reach them. Either they can easily walk to them or can borrow someone else's phone to call them when needed.

So how to drive adoption, close the gender gap, and increase economic development? mServices. In the Salon, we brainstormed on what those mServices could be, and came up with these four:

1. mPayments: With M-Pesa reaching throughput equal to an astounding 11% of Kenya's GDP in 2009, its the killer mServices application. In her research, Brooke found Kenyan women to be more aware of the value that mServices could provide them, because of their exposure to M-Pesa.
2. mEmployment: Remembering that 50% of women looked for jobs or increased income through mobile phone usage, we quickly agreed that mobile job boards or an mCraigslist would be popular if targeted at women.
3. mHealth: Women are usually the home health provider, so offering them healthcare services (advice to diagnosis to treatment) over mobile phones should be an obvious mService
4. mAgriculture: Women are responsible for up to 80% of locally-consumed food production, so they should be the target farmers in mobile agriculture services.

mServices have barriers to deployment. The services need to be very low cost, and yet high volume to be sustainable over millions of often rural and poor users. And to scale them beyond interesting pilots, there needs to be ongoing early-stage support - both capacity building and financial - that's often missing in the gap between public donor program and private venture capital.

And of course, as we've found in previous Salons, sustainaiblity and scale are relative and contentious. Scale can be a community, a province, a country, or a continent depending on who is measuring sustainability. In the world of mobile phone operators, its almost always in the millions - either subscribers or revenue.

Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development

Brooke concluded the Salon by remind us that while the mobile phone gender gap may look like $13 Billion dollar for-profit problem, mServices deserve attention from women's groups and development organizations.

Scaling mServices is the key to closing the mobile phone gender gap, mobile phone ownership will empower women across the developing world with new access to information, services, and goods, and therefore mobile phones usage by women is directly linked with, and will result in, overall economic development.

Over 300 million women are being left out of the benefits of mobile phone ownership as it becomes the most ubiquitous technology in the developing world, which has major implications given women's role in social and economic development.

Furthermore, the potential value of cell phone ownership increases as mobile services (mServices) including health, finance, and commerce become available - half of the women who do have mobile phones have either increased their income or looked for employment using them.

Yet how can value be shown in mobile phone gender parity? Where are the challenges to scaling mService implementations? And what's the typology of different mService applications themselves and their relation to women's use of mobiles?

For the July Technology Salon, Vital Wave Consulting's CEO, Brooke Partridge, will share her company's insights and the results of a major new report on the mobile phone gender gap - Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women.

This ground-breaking analysis of emerging economies quantifies the opportunity for achieving gender parity in mobile phone ownership and characterizes the relationship that women have with mobile technology.

With detailed case studies, value chain models, and added opportunity identification from Vital Wave's own analysis, we'll explore the importance and the challenges of scaling mServices implementations across countries and genders.

Closing the Mobile Phone Gender Gap
July DC Technology Salon
Thursday, July 15, 8:30-10am
UN Foundation Conference Room
1800 Mass Avenue, NW, Suite 400
Washington, D.C. 20036 (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So the first fifteen (15) to RSVP will be confirmed attendance and then there will be a waitlist.

Special Salon Exclusive!

For those that arrive early, we'll have a sneak peek at the new HUB: Health UnBound community from the mHealth Alliance. David Gutelius will provide a preview and explain how HUB will become an online network connecting the global health, health systems strengthening and technology communities, to improve health outcomes by reducing fragmentation and redundancy

Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, which started as a way for Nokia engineers to test mobile phone network operations, has grown into a killer app - for everyone. At the SMS4Dev Technology Salon in San Francisco, we looked at three ways to apply SMS to pressing development projects.

SMS:Gov

First we discussed the issue of local government communications with their constituencies. The problem being that usually they don't communicate with constituencies outside of infrequent in-person meetings.

By employing software like FrontlineSMS in a SMS:Gov usage model, local governments could offer two compelling services: 311 and MyObama.

• 311: By offering a single, simple text message menu tree using keywords, local governments can categorize constituent needs and wants into categories for prompt response, like the 311 systems in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco.
• MyObama:Local politicians can use the same process to become knowledgeable on the electorate's concerns, and individualize their message to respond to those concerns, like MyObama did to great success in 2008

Rob Munro discussing his SMS efforts

Categorizing SMS via Artificial Intelligence

But what if the categories for keywords are not known in advance, or a community doesn't understand the concept of a keyword? Rob Munro faced this challenge in Malawi when implementing FrontlineSMS with rural Community Health Workers (CHWs) who mainly use the Chichewa language.

The doctors at a central clinic spend one hour each day managing incoming CHW text messages, but with a patient population of 250,000 this averages to just 5 seconds per patient per year, and so any automation for triage incoming text messages from CHWs can lead to huge productivity increases.

Rob developed self-learning artificial intelligence algorithms that parsed free form SMS text messages in three different ways:

1. Normalizing spelling variants of keywords by learning linguistically predictable alternations
2. Segmenting words into their component morphemes to identify key substructures (like "patient" as the key form of "patients")
3. Using the normalized/segmented data to classify each message to determine its urgency - patient-related vs. administrative texts

With the algorithm learning from just 600 text messages it was was able to achieve about 95% accuracy, which should hold across any language using an alphabetic writing system and improve as the volume of text messages increases.

Applying SMS to Private Industry

Stepping away from SMS itself, Zach Berke spoke about two ways in which his company, Exygy, is developing text messages to support private industry expansion into the developing world.

• Payment plans: Solar power can be expensive, but how do you have a payment plan for an installed system? Require owners to text in codes they buy from local retailers to unlock another set amount of usage.
• Pharmaceutical validity: Counterfeit pills are a huge issue for consumers, but a simple code printed on a package can be texted to a central verification system to confirm drug authenticy.

Now both of these systems have their challenges. For the solar system, how do you pre-set codes into the hardware, or keep someone from soldering around the payment device. For pharmaceuticals, its printing variable yet secret codes on a specific end-user level package, with each code unique yet short enough to text without error.

Yet it can be done. Unicef used RapidSMS to track the distribution of 63 million mosquito bed nets across Nigeria with test messages on ordinary mobile phones using no-charge SMS shortcodes.

Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be implemented in the field, The Cloudy SMS4D Salon really drove home mobile phones as a multifunctional tool whose true impact is tied more to the usage than the technology itself.

While we gathered to discuss SMS4D, we really talked about heath reporting and outreach, education, and community building through knowledge management and sharing. It just so happened that these health projects were using SMS codes to report longitudinal child health statistics.

Data gathering in health, and even knowing when to gather data, is a huge burden, often relying on community health workers doing the healthcare version of the Training and Visit system of the agricultural extension world. Waiting around for a planned infrastructure is hopeless, but working with the more incremental nature of mobile can improve reporting rates and reduce errors -- "utter chaos works everywhere" being the best quote of this Technology Salon.

ChildCount+

Childcount builds on existing SMS reporting to enable community health workers to rapidly register children, note any symptoms or diseases they might have, improve patient tracking (and thereby reducing duplication), and schedule immunizations and outreach. The SMS "encoding" builds off of a simple and familiar paper form, which is handy for training (but less useful than a mango tree, as we'll see).

The runner-up quote from this Salon dealt with discussion around the potential risk of intentionally fabricated data -- "humans are awful at falsifying data" -- digitizing and quick, auditable reporting exposes both errors and lies.

Happy Pill

Winning the award for innovative ideas in mHealth was the HappyPill project -- instead of boring old SMS, HappyPills uses "flashing" - where you call a number and hang up immediately to "ping" someone. Usually, flashing is just a free way to ask someone to call you back, or you can sometimes work out extensive codes -- one missed call is just saying hi, two is call me back, three means an emergency, etc..

HappyPills takes this basic, essentially binary interaction and applies it to help improve adherence rates for prescription regimens. A medical center can send out flashes to their patients, and the patients are reminded to take their pills and would then flash back to signal that they took their medicine. It's naturally not foolproof, but hugely more cost effective (almost cost-free) in comparison with sending a community health worker out to the patient on a motorcycle to witness their pill-taking.

Jokko Initiative

It turns out that people are not just willing, but economically motivated and excited to use (and pay for) basic SMS-based services to improve their numeracy and literacy skills, improving their ability to communicate cheaply over their phones as well as better navigate market prices. In these low-technology communities, Tostan's Jokko Initiative is creating a curriculum to enable this via SMS.

Mango tree mobile phone menu navigation

They have also come up with an amazingly simple methodology to introduce people to menu systems using a mango tree metaphor which gracefully transitions from the concrete (planning a climbing route on a real tree to get to a specific mango) to the semi-concrete (the same, on a diagram of a tree), to the abstract (the tree diagram becomes the menu diagram, the mango a specific function).

Anyone who thinks that is too basic has never shown their grandparents a new shiny piece of technology, or had their entire worldview of user interface challenged by someone physically pointing a mouse at a screen).

Patatat

Patatat is an early-stage solution, which puts SMS into the role of a community town hall, newsletter, or email list. It removes not only the normal geographic barriers that a listserv gets around, but also infrastructure barriers, so (for example) farmers across a region or the world can share knowledge around their crops without relying on the grid and hardwired phones/Internet to do so.

This also centralizes costs to one "host" and minimizes it to the community, so a farmer could send one SMS (free to receive, costs to send), and the host would re-broadcast it to the entire "community." With Twitter already showing that it can (technically) report earthquakes faster than the earthquake itself spreads, this rebroadcasting tool also has clear applications in emergency announcements, citizen journalism and a myriad of other fields.

Technology or Development?

So, was this technology salon about technology, or was it about development projects? Sure, all of the projects discussed at the salon happened to use server and cloud-based SMS technologies. They also use paper, physical transportation, and people. That the technology is now moving from the focus of a project to being a (cool, exciting, powerful, still new-and-shiny) tool in the toolbox is truly heartwarming.

It means mobile phone ICT solutions are maturing into a cross-sector role and not into another silo, but a "pillar of excellence".