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.

Each decision to invest in a software development effort starts with the question, can we find something off the shelf? and what is the level of effort that makes sense given the expected benefit within the next 9-12 months? By bounding the effort in terms of effort and cost, we ensure that requirements for that particular technology system stays within reason. This inevitably creates a conversation with the rest of the management about the trade-offs and thus leads to a process for setting priorities. This is not unique, really, I credit the folks of 37signals in their publication “Getting Real” with a good articulation of how to ensure strong alignment of information technology systems with the current phase of development. Its really a variation of “doing what matters”.

And, we try to learn by our mistakes. In the early stages of the project we went a little “over the top” with the requirement for scalability. We decided to engineer our solution to be highly scalable by using the emerging technology of cloud computing (Amazon’s EC2), which also allowed us to be charged on a “pay as you go” model. This made a lot of sense at the time, but we failed to realize the complexity involved in doing this, which led to some unanticipated costs. So, after paying for this for several months, we realized this was overkill for our current level of development and while keeping the configuration on ice, we effectively killed that account. I’m confident this wasn’t wasted effort, as it illustrated how to make better near term decisions, and gives us a foot in the cloud computing door, should we need that.

Doing more with less is actually a terrific discipline, at least in retrospect.