State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

From New Scientist Special Report. The idea is summed nicely by this statement from the report: In the developing regions you have hostile conditions for a PC so phones have a lot of potential to become the computing platform for people.

Two proof-of-concept cases studies from India illustrate how. The first one is about converting banking paper forms to digital version using mobile phone. The second one is about educational video games that run on smartphones.

Is there a similar case study which you can share?

Micro-lending groups are typically run by women in rural areas who arrange small loans for each other or act as mediators between banks and the local community. They have proved to be a successful strategy in sparking business endeavours and combating poverty. But one problem is that these groups often keep poor accounts, which can make it difficult for banks or other lenders to invest in them with confidence.

“When banks are interested in lending to these people, if they’re lucky the groups will have a stack of paper records,” says Tapan Parikh, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who works with micro-finance groups in India.

Typically, these records would include forms stating the agreed amount, duration of the loan and repayment receipts. Parikh learned that group members prefer the paper forms because many can’t read and so fill them out by memorising which numbers go in which boxes. As a result, he stuck with paper but turned to camera-phones to make the accounting process more secure and transparent.

He created a new version of the paper forms, which look like the old ones except that a barcode has been added next to each box or section where you need to fill in numbers. Instead of filling out these new forms, you take a picture of each barcode with a cellphone. Software on the phone recognises the barcode and a message appears on the screen, prompting you to enter the figures that would have gone in the section that corresponds to that barcode. There is also a spoken version of the message to make things clearer for those who can’t read. In this way, the borrower or lender scrolls through the whole form, taking snapshots of the barcodes and entering data via the phone’s keypad. The result is an electronic version of the form, which is initially stored on the phone and later uploaded to a central server when the phone is near a mast.

Learn English by phone

It isn’t just the photo and video features of smartphones that are useful to people in the developing world. The advanced graphics and high-speed chips they come with are being harnessed to build educational video games.John Canny’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the language skills of some English teachers in Mysore, India, were lacking and that children were often kept away from school to help with chores. Yet 19 of 47 students had parents with cellphones.

To tackle the problem, they have created educational video games that run on cellphones. In one, based on the South Indian children’s game Tree Tree, trees displaying different letters from the English alphabet are scattered around the screen. The player hears a letter pronounced and must move an on-screen figure under the tree whose letter was spoken while avoiding being caught by a “baddie”. Another builds a knowledge of animal vocabulary: based on the game Frogger, where a player has to cross a road without being hit by traffic, children playing Canny’s game must choose to move one of a number of animals across the road depending on an instruction spoken in English. The game can be adapted to teach the words for vegetables or colours as well.

The team is testing the games this summer to see whether they improve students’ English. The next step is to allow students to collaborate on games via Bluetooth connections. Later the group plans to incorporate speech recognition, so students can get feedback on their pronunciation based on whether the phone software recognised what they said.