Friday, October 22, 2004
Getting the next billion people on line
Clearly, when humans get better telecommunications they get access to more customers, more suppliers, better information and -- perhaps most importantly -- new ideas.
Question: How does the next billion humans get on line? To discuss this question (the answer will be in the doing) Dan Berninger organized "The Next Billion roundtable" at Harvard University last Monday. (Nice job, Dan!) It was sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Pulver.com, and it was well blogged by David Weinberger (here, here, here and here), by Judith Meskill here, and by several others.
My own take-aways are:
1) Tom Evslin has the right idea -- a stand-alone connectivity box, the analog of a village phone. I am consistently impressed with Tom's grounded insights and his entrepreneurial humanitarianism.
2) I was delighted to meet Ory Okolloh, a Berkman student, a Kenyan, an articulate questioner with an infectious smile and a worthwhile blog. Ory's excellent perspective on Next Billion day is here. I was also pleased to meet Richard Whitt, author of "A Horizontal Leap Forward" which puts forth model legislation for the next telecom act, notable because the proposed law is structured much like Internet architecture.
3) I was gratified that the two people who I think know the most about connecting the under-developed world were there. Monique Maddy had the best idea for a village phone that I've ever heard of -- when the population is illiterate, you must have voice, and when teledensities are so low that the probability of having a face to face conversation is approximately zero -- and she actually implemented such phones until conflicting goals of her two types of investors (VCs and NGOs) came to a head. And Iqbal Quadir, who founded Grameen Phone, which implemented the village phone idea in Bangladesh and, in a year when B2B and B2C were flying around coined the term B3B for the bottom three billion, the planet's poorest humans. I felt privileged to be in the room with these two.
4) The person with the biggest chance of helping bring most of the next billion on line said almost nothing. Jeffery Paine President of UTStarCom, which sells mostly in China, sat quietly and left early. I was disappointed. Nobody else was there who represented China. The next billion online will almost certainly be 50% (or more) Chinese -- why'd we miss this opportunity?
Question: How does the next billion humans get on line? To discuss this question (the answer will be in the doing) Dan Berninger organized "The Next Billion roundtable" at Harvard University last Monday. (Nice job, Dan!) It was sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Pulver.com, and it was well blogged by David Weinberger (here, here, here and here), by Judith Meskill here, and by several others.
My own take-aways are:
1) Tom Evslin has the right idea -- a stand-alone connectivity box, the analog of a village phone. I am consistently impressed with Tom's grounded insights and his entrepreneurial humanitarianism.
2) I was delighted to meet Ory Okolloh, a Berkman student, a Kenyan, an articulate questioner with an infectious smile and a worthwhile blog. Ory's excellent perspective on Next Billion day is here. I was also pleased to meet Richard Whitt, author of "A Horizontal Leap Forward" which puts forth model legislation for the next telecom act, notable because the proposed law is structured much like Internet architecture.
3) I was gratified that the two people who I think know the most about connecting the under-developed world were there. Monique Maddy had the best idea for a village phone that I've ever heard of -- when the population is illiterate, you must have voice, and when teledensities are so low that the probability of having a face to face conversation is approximately zero -- and she actually implemented such phones until conflicting goals of her two types of investors (VCs and NGOs) came to a head. And Iqbal Quadir, who founded Grameen Phone, which implemented the village phone idea in Bangladesh and, in a year when B2B and B2C were flying around coined the term B3B for the bottom three billion, the planet's poorest humans. I felt privileged to be in the room with these two.
4) The person with the biggest chance of helping bring most of the next billion on line said almost nothing. Jeffery Paine President of UTStarCom, which sells mostly in China, sat quietly and left early. I was disappointed. Nobody else was there who represented China. The next billion online will almost certainly be 50% (or more) Chinese -- why'd we miss this opportunity?
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