Jude Mathurine from Rhodes University has an interesting presentation on the impact of mobile phone based use of social networks in Africa. I’ve not yet come across a comparable study of new media’s use and impact in Sri Lanka, but the points on slides 3 and 7, noting that the Internet is still an elite […]
Tag Archives: Mobiles
HTC Sense and mobile phone user interfaces
My first mobile phone in 2002 was a Nokia 3310. It was a hardy beast and hands down, the most reliable mobile phone I have ever owned. I don’t remember playing the in-built games that much, but its screen was easy to read and the phone was dead simple to use. I recently bought two […]
Nokia Siemens in Iran: Shame or all’s fair game for telcos?
Deep packet inspection is bad under any regime, no matter how benevolent. When a regime such as Iran today gets access to technology with the potential of DPI, you have a justifiable uproar on far more serious and urgent implications than delayed music downloads. Global media over the past week pointed to Nokia and Siemens […]
Mobile phone movie competition on women in Sri Lanka
The last time someone came up with a novel idea on the use of mobile phone in Sri Lanka, it was the Inspector General of Police, who said that women could use them to video themselves getting raped. A new blog and initiative by Women and Media Collective does something less adventurous yet far more […]
Posts on Iran, new media and citizen journalism
I’ve been inundated with links on how new media is helping us understand what’s going on in Iran after its recently held Presidential elections. In order to understand the broader context of who uses new media in Iran, why and how, the Berkman Centre’s Mapping Iran’s Online Public is essential reading. A few articles on new […]
Layar: Augmented reality through mobiles in Amsterdam
Layar is one of the most visually impressive and powerful applications I have seen to date using a mobile. As noted on Download Squad, “Layar uses the camera and location-based services of your mobile device — Android devices only, so far — and overlays information on the camera image. This is flying-car level tech, the […]
The great leveller: Mobile phones in India flag potential for m-gov elsewhere too
The NY Times has a great story on mobiles in India. From 1997 to 2000 I experienced as a student how the introduction of cybercafes in Delhi – at the time far more expensive then their Sri Lankan counterparts per hour – changed the way I communicated with family back home and Indians communicated with […]
Focus on the mobile user, and all else will follow…
Worldwide phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with over 4 billion mobile subscribers at last count. (In comparison, the PC industry is forecasted to see its sharpest unit decline in history.) Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices. And for the […]
Location based information in real time: Help or hindrance?
Looking at this Google Map created by Omar Chatriwala, a web journalist at Al Jazeera, and the plethora of location aware devices plus options to put up geo-referenced information and news on the web in real time, I wondered whether this was helpful or not in times of crisis? Ushahidi’s leading the field in addressing […]
Google Latitude: Real time location awareness through mobiles
At the time I last wrote about the potential of location aware web / mobile mashups and services, Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defence disallowed the sale of GPS enabled mobile phones. That seems to have changed in the past month. Airtel and Dialog both sport the Blackberry Bold, which has in built GPS, and Dialog’s […]
