Excellent to see
The Economist's latest Special Report on
Mobile Marvels ~ Telecoms in Emerging Markets!
"The reason why mobile phones are so valuable to people in the poor
world is that they are providing access to telecommunications for the very first time, rather than just being portable adjuncts to existing fixed-line phones, as in the rich world. “For you it was incremental—here it’s revolutionary,” says Isaac Nsereko of MTN, Africa’s biggest operator. According to a recent study, adding an extra ten mobile phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts growth in GDP per person by 0.8 percentage points. In 2000 the developing countries accounted for around one-quarter of the world’s 700m or so mobile phones. By the beginning of 2009 their share had grown to three-quarters of a total which by then had risen to over 4 billion."
Alumcos from our
MIT Development Ventures class have been building on this massive mobiles shift since 2001. These include
Assured Labor,
Click Diagnostics,
Dinube,
Dimagi,
CellBazaar,
WAY Systems, and more!
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