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Posts Tagged ‘Mobile Phones’

India’s Rural Cell Movement: Can You Hear Me Now?

Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators to make money on a paltry $6 a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of $50 or more in the U.S.

The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number.

It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards

But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can’t afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don’t they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that’s already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. “We are the bottom of the bottom,” boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game.

The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology Pioneers, and just last month VNL won the Mobile World Congress’s Green Mobile Award. Time called it a “Tech Pioneer that Will Change your Life” and Fast Company named it one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.

I met with Mehrotra at the company’s headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time.

The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly.

But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a business operating several trucks traveling between this village and Delhi and before he’d have to ride on a bike between back-and-forth to coordinate them. Now he can sit at home and just call the drivers. He installed one of VNL’s small base stations on his roof, and he said it had increased his standing among his peers—he is frequently the one called on to settle disputes now. And now they can just call him. Similarly wives will call husbands out in the fields when its time to come in and eat, rather than trudging out to get them, allowing them to focus on kids and the housework.

Another woman (pictured below) I spoke with was a widow with six kids and 21 grandchildren. (So many, she actually had to ask someone else how many she had.) As grandkids clambered in and out of her lap, she explained that she gets pension checks from the government, but the delivery used to be spotty. Before her phone she had no recourse but to travel to Delhi to inquire about it. Not exactly something she relishes, having lived her whole life in this village and only been to the big city twice. Now she can call the office and gives them an earful. Not surprisingly, the checks have started to come more regularly.

Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded by mountains, and he said that he felt “imprisoned” and cut off, despite being just a few hours drive from Delhi. Now he has a renewed interest in politics and what’s happening in other villages and the country at large. This man had only had his phone for six months, but he expected it would change his life in ways he couldn’t articulate or imagine. “Since the day I got this, my life has already changed,” he said through an interpreter.

Indeed, Mehrotra says it’s already having a ripple affect on the politics of Rajisthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. “They have to be accountable,” Mehrotra says. “They can’t wriggle out.”

These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they’ve quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two.

Mehrotra is a big believer in the Ghandian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he’s done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he’s invested all of his own money in the project—and it’s taken far more than he expected.

This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I’m not sure it could be built any other way. I don’t think there’s the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn’t be done. Once he built it he’d take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn’t believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. “They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn’t,” Mehrotra says.

From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren’t so sure. In theory, VNL isn’t competing with them because they’re not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that’s too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. “They’ll say ‘Give it to me in the city too.’ ” Mehrotra says.

All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they’re not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.

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Opera Releases Beta Of Native Opera Mini 5 App For Windows Mobile Phones

Opera Software has been busy lately, releasing fresh finalized and beta products on a near-daily basis. This morning, the company announced that it has released a native version of Opera Mini 5 beta for handsets running Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Interestingly, the new WinMo version of Opera Mini does not require Java. That basically means any Windows Mobile phone can accommodate the app.

Despite not requiring Java, Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile includes the same feature set as the Java-based version. That means features like tabbed browsing, speed dial, bookmarks and the password manager are built right in (also see video below).

To download, simply point your current mobile browser to m.opera.com/next.

(Press release)

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CloudBlue’s growth calls attention to mounting e-waste problem

CloudBlue Technologies, a company that manages the disposal of e-waste — thrown away electronics ranging from laptops to medical equipment components — says it has just landed a second round of financing, as well as 25 new Fortune 500 clients in the last year, calling attention to a growing yet oft-neglected problem.

The company’s new recruits come from a range of sectors, including insurance, media, manufacturing, finance and healthcare. In today’s knowledge economy, no industry is immune from e-waste. Businesses lacking computers and mobile phones are unheard of, regardless of size. And all of these electronics need to periodically be replaced. In the past, their predecessors would have ended up in landfills despite major opportunities for recycling and reuse — not to mention the toxic or hazardous materials many of them contain.

But companies big and small are running out of excuses for this behavior. New government environmental regulations are requiring strict e-waste disposal measures and non-compliance comes at a hefty price. While this is bad news for enterprises set in their ways, its a huge boon for companies like CloudBlue, which helps them shift course and mitigate their risk.

Based in Georgia, the company tracks every phase of e-waste disposal, from pickup to transportation to recycling. With 16 facilities around the world, it is able to send its own trucks to collect waste in an energy efficient manner that is guaranteed to comply with all regulations and dodge big fines.

E-waste presents several unique challenges. Not only do electronics contain many small, intricate components that need to be dealt with individually, most of them — especially in the enterprise space — contain proprietary information or identification tags that need to be thoroughly and responsibly erased before they are disposed of. CloudBlue takes care of all of these processes, it says.

By and large, the U.S. is behind when it comes to e-waste management. Several states have passed bans on e-waste in general landfills, which is a start, but by no means a solution. Europe covered this a long time ago. That said, the European Union is taking a lot of heat right now because recyclers are doing a poor job of removing toxic materials and properly extracting and processing the pricier metals.

Another big issue: Some e-waste disposal companies are simply shipping what they collect to developing countries where they rot in distant landfills, endangering nearby populations and crippling their own environmental efforts. For example, watchdog organization the Basel Action Network has just called out CRT Recycling for exporting tossed computer monitors to Indonesia. While the Environmental Protection Agency has done its best to regulate against this practice, objectionable shipments still make it through. CloudBlue assures its clients that none of their waste leaves the U.S., but it can’t turn this tide all by itself.

While it wouldn’t disclose the amount of its recent venture round, the company says it came from Riverwood Capital. It previously raised $9.92 million, including $3.57 million in December 2009 that may have been rolled into this current round.

Companies: CloudBlue Technologies, Riverwood Capital

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TUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor? No.

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple

When a lot of people get their news electronically, skimming over headlines through news aggregators, RSS feeds, and retweets on Twitter, sometimes the majority of information people will get from an article comes from the headline.

When a headline leans towards the sensational side, or doesn’t accurately reflect the information that’s actually contained in the article, it’s easy for poorly-represented news to spread like wildfire. This article from the UK’s The Daily Telegraph, regarding Apple’s self-initiated audit of its overseas manufacturing facilities, is a perfect example, with its attention-grabbing headline: “Apple Admits Using Child Labour.” The sub-headline isn’t any better: “Apple has admitted that child labour was used at the factories that build its computers, iPods and mobile phones.”

Once a person reads those words, his or her knee-jerk reaction is most likely going to be one of disgust and horror. “How could you, Apple?” they might say. If this hypothetical reader owns a Mac or an iPhone, their eyes might glance over at it with anguished guilt; if they don’t own any products from Apple, it’s just one more reason not to buy them.

If you dig beyond the headline, however, to the meat of the Telegraph’s article, where the actual reporting finally begins? Then you get a completely different story as early as the first sentence: “At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.” That’s pretty far from the image conjured by the headline, of legions of school-aged children lined up in factories and slapping together MacBook Pros when they should be slapping together algebra homework. Instead, we find a relatively small number of teenaged factory workers — reprehensible, but not unusual at all for overseas factories. The end of this first sentence is even more important, because it puts the focus where it belongs: three factories which supply Apple. Two paragraphs later, we find another very important bit of news not reflected in the headline: “Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used.”

Other news sites performed better reporting on the matter, but at least one still had an easily misinterpreted headline. Read on to find out more.
Engadget’s headline for its story is a bit better — “Apple supplier audit reveals sub-minimum wage pay and records of underage labor” — but it’s still ripe for misinterpretation. The reporting at least is far better than the Telegraph; right away, Engadget notes that the reports of child labor come straight from Apple’s own 2010 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, and they also note that out of 102 audited manufacturers, most of them said Apple was the only manufacturer that performed compliance checks this rigorous. That means Sony, Lenovo, Dell, HP, and all the other manufacturers out there may well have even worse working conditions at their suppliers’ factories than those reflected in Apple’s audit, but until or unless they perform similar checks, we have no way of knowing.

Another bit of perspective on this comes courtesy of MacRumors: “Apple in 2009 found a total of 17 instances of what it considers ‘core violations’ of its code of conduct, representing about 2% of core issues assessed by its auditors.” Far from perfect, yes, but equally as far from the sweatshop conditions conjured up by the Telegraph’s headline; in fact, if you actually read Apple’s own audit, you find that 97% of its facilities were in compliance with regulations against underage labor.

Finally, the wording from Apple’s audit itself, with emphasis added at key points:

“Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16. Across the three facilities, our auditors found records of 11 workers who had been hired prior to reaching the legal age, although the workers were no longer underage or no longer in active employment at the time of our audit.
In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year prior to our audit, as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment. Apple required each facility to develop and institute appropriate management systems-such as more thorough ID checks and verification procedures-to prevent future employment of underage workers.”

Issues like underage labor, poor working environments, and substandard pay are all very real consequences of doing business with overseas suppliers. Most manufacturers are content with turning a blind eye to the whole thing, so long as the shareholders stay happy and stock prices stay high. By running comprehensive audits of its suppliers, Apple runs the risk of finding out just how poorly its suppliers treat its workers, and by publishing those results, it runs the risk of news outlets like the Telegraph blowing them out of proportion. Despite what some newspapers or news sites would have you believe, Macs and iPhones are not crafted by children, and that’s partly due to Apple’s performance of these audits in the first place.

TUAWTUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor? No. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now Silverlight Does Augmented Reality Too

Last year, the ARToolkit, a fundamental building block for creating augmented reality applications, was ported to Flash in the form of the FLARToolkit. This was a watershed moment for AR, as it became exponentially easier for Flash developers to create their own augmented reality experiences. Before then, AR had been a high-tech concept that experienced developers and companies had been experimenting with; by becoming more accessible to Flash developers, AR took off in popularity last year.

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Now, in 2010, the ARToolkit has once again been ported, this time to Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. German .Net developer Rene Schulte recently released the SLARToolkit which will allow augmented reality applications to run in Silverlight.

“SLARToolkit is a flexible Augmented Reality library for Silverlight with the aim to make real time Augmented Reality applications with Silverlight as easy and fast as possible,” says Schulte. “It can be used with Silverlight’s Webcam API or with any other CaptureSource or a WriteableBitmap.”

The SLARToolkit supports detection of multiple markers, both from simple black and white, and custom markers, and is based on the Matrix3DEx Silverlight library. The port to Silverlight is another important step for augmented reality, and could lead to the further expansion of AR both on the desktop and on mobile devices running Windows Mobile.

Earlier this month we saw Adobe Flash and AIR gain support on the Android Mobile OS, and Flash on the iPhone has been a recurring rumor since the device was first released. AR may not be the biggest mobile market, or a killer feature for mobile phones, but with the expansion of the ARToolkit to Silverlight, and the Flash support on Android, it has taken a big step toward wider exposure to more users.

SLARToolkit – Silverlight Augmented Reality 3D projection sample from Rene Schulte on Vimeo.

Discuss

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Let’s Talk: Ztail Scores Deal With A Top Mobile Phone Retailer

One of the more frustrating things about shopping for electronics is the fact that many devices don’t hold their value for very long — you can’t typically buy a cell phone and expect to sell it for $200 a year later. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now Palo Alto-based startup Ztail is teaming with online mobile phone retailer LetsTalk to do exactly that for mobile phones: buy a phone through LetsTalk, and Ztail will tell you on the spot exactly how much money they’ll give you 18 months down the line if you want to sell it back.

Here’s how it works. LetsTalk now features a ‘ValueLock’ banner for the vast majority of its phones, including popular devices like the Motorola Droid (ValueLock is essentially a branded version of Ztail’s service). Each phone has a ValueLock Price, which is the amount Ztail will pay if you decide to send in your phone up to 18 months later (this price is the same no matter when you send in your phone, up to the 18 month cutoff). The catch is that in order to redeem your ValueLock deal, you have to purchase your next phone through LetsTalk too. The site appears to have competitive prices, so this shouldn’t be a huge deal.

From what I can tell, Ztail is offering up some good prices for the used phones. The ValueLock price for a Droid is set at $196, which is nearly $150 more than you pay for the phone up front with a 2-year Verizon contract (and remember, you’re going to get that after using the phone for 18 months). After sending in your device, Ztail sends you your money either through check or PayPal. And CEO Bill Hudak says that trade-in phones don’t have to be in mint condition either — it just can’t have obvious flaws like water damage, cracks, and missing buttons. And, in the event that Ztail goes under some time after you buy your phones, LetsTalk will still back these pricing guarantees.

So how does Ztail make money from this? First, they receive a commission for every user that buys a phone and then decides to sign up for the ValueLock service, which only requires an Email address and takes a few seconds to do. Hudak says that during a trial run 30% of customers who were eligible for ValueLock signed up for it (they’re prompted to both by an Email from LetsTalk and a card sent alongside each device). Ztail also gets a substantially larger second commission down the line if the customer sends in their device through ValueLock and purchases their next phone through LetsTalk.

This is big news for Ztail — LetsTalk is one of the web’s largest phone retailers, with over $100 million a year in revenue and hundreds of thousands of activated phones sold each year. Ztail has been working on this pseudo-insurance model for nearly a year, and it also has more large partnerships in the works (it’s also worth pointing out that LetsTalk powers the mobile device store on WalMart.com, so it’s possible that their partnership may extend there) . Prior to launching this business model, Ztail had previously focused on streamlining eBay listings and also launched a ‘Kelley Blue Book For Everything” in 2008.

If you’d like to try out the system for yourself, Ztail is going to offer a $230 ValueLock price on the new Motorola Devour to TechCrunch readers (use the code ‘TCDEVOUR’ when you sign up for the service). The normal ValueLock price for the phone is $168. You can read our review of the Devour here.

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Mobile browsing startup Skyfire says new hire signals business shift

Skyfire, which offers a browser for fast mobile navigation of media-rich web pages, just announced that it’s hiring Jason Guesman as its new senior vice president of sales and marketing.

We don’t cover a lot of hiring news, especially non-CEO hires, but a company spokesman tells me this is a significant move for Skyfire’s business model, because it marks a new focus on selling Skyfire to companies, not consumers. Until now, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has devoted its marketing efforts to convincing consumers to download and use the browser, but there’s growing interest from manufacturers and mobile carriers who want to install Skyfire on their devices. Among other things, the browser is a way to get Flash and Silverlight technology to play on mobile phones (Flash has famously been shut out of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as Skyfire chief executive Jeff Glueck discussed in a column for Venturebeat.).

Guesman will be responsible for growing sales to those companies. He’s also supposed to grow the business around Kolbysoft, the company that Skyfire acquired earlier this month. Kolbysoft builds browsers for Google’s Android operating system. Guesman’s past experience includes six years a senior vice president and general manager at Seven Networks.

Skyfire has raised a total of $22.8 million in venture funding.

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SugarSync Makes It Simple To Upload Files Via Email; Adds 500 GB Storage Plan

Sharpcast’s SugarSync,, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is making it easier for users to backup their data via email. The startup is launching an “Upload by Email” feature that lets users store email attachments in their SugarSync account with the ease of sending an email.

The new feature allows a SugarSync user to sync any email attachment to a dedicated folder in their SugarSync account by simply forwarding it to a special email address. Instantly, the file(s) is available on all synced devices and accounts. For example, if a user receives an email with many attachments, they can simply forward it to their SugarSync email address (comprised of random numbers and letters for spam protection). All attachments will transfer to their SugarSync account.For added security, SugarSync will scan all file attachments for viruses prior to syncing, and certain file types are not accepted (e.g., .exe, .cmd, .bat) to prevent malicious files from landing in an account.

At the moment, SugarSync is supporting 2 petabytes of data from users. SugarSync’s CEO Laura Yecies says that because of the popularity of the product, the company is adding a new power-user storage account that has 500 GB of storage, priced at $39.99 per month. Previously, the highest level of storage available was 250 GB.

SugarSync recently launched a small business friendly offering, which Yecies says is gaining considerable traction. You can read our past reviews of SugarSync here and here. The startup has ramped up its mobile offerings, with supports for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile powered phones.

SugarSync faces competition from Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft, Dropbox, Box.net, ZumoDrive and Mozy.

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