MEC presented at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The theme of the panel was location aware applications for mobile devices. This was a great chance to think big thoughts about how trends in technology adoption have enabled our social enterprise, and in turn how applications like ours may impact markets in the future.
Although telecom economics make it unlikely that there will be mass-adoption of location based services like Miloki or Citysense in the markets that MEC serves, the fact remains that GPS enabled cellphones have now been commercialized and are available in most countries. Some enterprises (like ours) will leverage them, creating a potential for broad ripple effects throughout BOP populations. For example, with our system, one loan officer may use a GPS device to provide location data for a thousand small clean energy investments.
In addition to our application, newly available cell phone technologies are creating surprising social and economic opportunities for the BOP. A good example is MPESA in Kenya which now has 4 million account holders compared to a total of 5 million deposit accounts in the whole banking sector of the country. Other applications are helping people earn income with their cellphone, like CellBazaar, which is “Craig’s list” on your cell phone in Bangladesh, and Txt Eagle, which lets individuals do jobs such as translation over their cell phone.
The cell phone age (there are now over 3.2 billion cell phone subscriptions—nearly half the population of the planet) creates an opportunity to intelligently harvest the data that can make the BOP investment grade.
My interview from Web 2.0 is posted here.
