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World Bank Presentation: Emerging Markets Research

Since the slides from last week's World Bank presentation were culled from a variety of sources collated below. Cheers for Mike Trucano et al. at InfoDev/CGAP for hosting - it was good to put faces to names.

Readers with more than a passing interest in mobile phone use in emerging markets may wish to read up on InfoDev publications such as Micro-Payment Systems and Their Application to Mobile Networks and the Village Phone Replication Manual, both of which have informed our own research.

On with the links... the first few slides that describes some of the work of the Nokia Design Insight & Innovation Tokyo studio can be found in the A Path, Adapted presentation [PowerPoint, 4MB] from last week's User Experience Conference in DC.

The most accessible material from the illiteracy research is [PowerPoint, 6MB]. Take your pick from an essay or, if you're more in a sit-back vibe, a video explaining much the same thing hosted by the LIFT Conference team here.

The I-need-to-pee-but-is-this-a-gents-toilet-? example to highlight the risks and consequences of an illiterate person exploring a mobile phone interface was first introduced here. And yes it most certainly was a gents.

The richness and sophistication of the mobile phone repair cultures is best read up in the following presentation [PowerPoint, 4MB] and related short essay.

The speed at which pocketable objects such as mobile phones make their way around the world was introduced at TED 2007 presentation [PowerPoint, PDF 4MB], one consequence of which is a rapidly growing platform that has potential for innovation. It also supports the notion of the mobile phone as leapfrog enabler.

The shared phone use research including the mobile phone as ATM abstraction can be read up in this essay or downloaded as [PowerPoint, PDF 7MB]. The talk mentioned sending money as air time Sente and the Pooling of resources to stay connected.

I'm sure you're all relieved to know that the security underwear photo from Lhasa can be found here in reference to the likely distribution of objects around the body, and equally that you can view examples of back street sex shops in Chengdu and Xiamen, mentioned in relation to issues of trust and rational/irrational consumer behaviour.

Thanks go out to the extended team whose hard work made all this research possible.

Writing from Tokyo | August 21, 2007 | Permalink