Mobile Tech Ashoka Lemelson Gathering June 24-26

We asked Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya about his thoughts on mobile technology and its relevance to economic development. Here are his answers.

1. Some of the biggest obstacles to mobile phone access and adoption of mobile innovations are (among others) illiteracy and language issues, service affordability, the need to charge cell phone batteries and access to mobile networks in rural areas.  What are other challenges present in your area and what are the 1 or 2 challenges that you think must be addressed most quickly and why?

• Common Operating System and application standards – These are required particularly in low cost mobile handsets, adoption of these standards based on open source could help in furthering of services access on mobile platforms far and wide. Google’s Android initiative in this direction is appreciable. Open standard is the way to go, proprietary standards cannot help grow the mobile market.
• Mobile Value Added Services  (VAS) is the future market – lowering entry cost barrier for owning a mobile device and Mobile Network Operators (MNO) connection can actually make accessibility higher and get more people connected. Usable mobile VAS could supplement incomes for both MNOs and service providers.

2. When it comes to mobile tech there are infinite opportunities to help people raise incomes, connect to one another, store, save, and transfer money, learn important information, etc.  There are also many areas in the mobile phone ecosystem in which innovation can create even more of these positive outcomes.  Some of these areas are mobile hardware construction, the construction of batteries and battery charging, mobile application development, and mobile-based network and systems development for transferring and storing money, information, data, etc.  In the mobile phone ecosystem, where do you see the most potential to achieve positive outcomes in the next 5 years versus in the next 10 years?  How and why?

• Decentralization of service support for mobile hardware devices, including suitable changes in hardware standard to enable capacity enhancement possible using a base hardware at local level.
• Entry barrier for mobile services should be reduced by MNO, to enable mass expansion
• Common Networking standards across internet, would enable greater access a cross multiple platforms
• Mobile VAS is the way forward, MNO and Mobile Device manufacturer should enable level playing field for service providers to offer application enabling greater services access to clients. Low cost and volumes should be targeted instead of tying down clients in prohibitive contractual agreements.
• Common Access Protocol should be adopted for financial and other such information based services transactions. Necessary regulatory changes in various country Banking norms and trade bodies should be advocated.

3. Going back to question 1, think of a hypothetical invention or a new technique to solve one of the challenges that you think is most pressing in the field of mobile tech.  It doesn’t have to be realistic, feasible, and it can rely on other technological innovations that also don’t exist yet.  (For instance, if say the greatest challenge in mobile tech was that two people cannot use the same phone at the same time, maybe I would invent a phone that has the ability to hold multiple headsets or maybe I figure out how to create a DIY phone kit makes it so cheap to build one at home that no one has the problem of not being able to afford a second phone)   What is your hypothetical invention or innovation and what challenge does it address?

• Software Sim Card – The necessity of having new sim card while moving into new networks (while traveling to different countries or sometimes in the same country), to save on “Roaming an Network cost”, could be resolved by having a software sim card. These sim cards could be downloaded at any time using a Common Access Protocol and paid to similarly. This sim card would solve a major bottleneck for clients, allowing them to use both sim cards (or more at the same tine), thus remaining always connected.