This special report from The Economist, presents innovative ways of implementing mobile services. See below some short sentences presenting initiatives around the world, as presented in The Economist article "Beyond Voice".
1. Farmer's Friend (Uganda - by MTN, Google e AppLab) - make available agricultural-information via text message, such as weather forecast in the area, pesticide use, how to plant banana, and others.
2. Google Trader (Uganda - apoiado por MTN, Google e AppLab) - a text-based system that matches buyers and sellers of agricultural produce and commodities.
3. Village Phone Project (Uganda, AppLab) - Offering agricultural and health information is more difficult than offering a phone service, because such information must be localised and must take cultural differences into account, as explained by David Edelstein from Grameen Foundation. The idea of the project Village Phone is to look for local partners and in order to experiment the idea of “community knowledge workers”.
4. Reuters Market Lite (India) - Reuters Market Lite, a text-based service which provides local weather and price information four or five times a day.
5. mKrishi (India, Tata Consultancy Services) - allowing farmers to send queries and receive personalised advice.
6. Nokia Life Tools (India) - In addition to education and entertainment, it provides agricultural information, such as prices, weather data and farming tips, that can be called up from special menus on some Nokia handsets.
7. Nong Xin Tong (China Mobile) - In conjunction with the agriculture ministry, as part of its push into rural areas, the service provides news, weather information and details of farming-related government policies.
8. Site 12582.com (China) - Site that sends farmers information about planting techniques, pest management and market prices.
9. TradeNet (Ghana) - Launched in Ghana in 2005, now links buyers and sellers of agricultural products in nine African countries.
10. CellBazaar (Bangladesh) - provides a text-based classified-ads service in Bangladesh.
11. mPedigree (Nigeria and Ghana) - Using the special number at the medicine package is possible to verify through a text message service if the drugs are genuine. Other service is to send daily text messages to patients to help them remember to take their drugs for example, tuberculosis or HIV.
12. Banking Services
For banking services, the success of the initiative depends on the market.
According to the article, The M-PESA initiative at Kenya, was sucessfull, and one of the reasons was because during the post-election violence in the country in early 2008, M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some people regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes.
Additionally according to the article mobile operators have far more powerful brands and much greater reach than banks.
According to the article, mobile-money schemes generally limit balances and transfers (typically to around $100), and when customers sign up, they have to produce some form of identification. Additionally, that makes the process more formal than for buying a SIM, but less rigorous than for opening a bank account.
Another initiative is the mobile money service launched by MTN in Uganda.
According to the article, another advantage is to make available Banking for the unbanked, because by 2012, CGAP predicts, some 1.7 billion people will have a mobile phone but no bank account, and 20% of them will be using mobile money.
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