Cellphones are changing the world

the cellphone revolution has hit the third world. For years, our farmers and help have had simple cellphones to use to text and talk to family, but now they are getting smart phones to connect to the internet, to post selfies and cat videos.

and soon: 5 G is coming..

I remember when "green" and cheap computers were being given as a charity to poor villages in Africa, but that idea has pretty well been replaced by cheap cellphones which are opening rural Africa and Asia to texting their family and friends, reading the news, putting selfies on facebook, and are now being used for banking and e commerce.

Jack Ma's Alibaba has been a revolution for rural China: Alibaba. Find what you want, pay via cellphone and it comes to your door.

think Ebay/Amazon meets the Sears catalogue.

and he is now spreading e commerce into Africa. As Ma wrote in the NYTimes:

Africa is poised for radical change. The world is experiencing a digital revolution, which I believe has the potential to be not only the most transformative but also the most inclusive technological revolution we have ever seen.

Today, anyone with a smartphone can get a loan and start a business. Mobile technology and the internet have put access to countless products and services in the palm of every person’s hand.

The digital revolution has the potential to drive tremendous — and inclusive — economic prosperity for Africa. But we need digital entrepreneurs to create the companies that can make all this possible.

This is one of the ignored stories of the decade: Africa emerging.

The US media usually only sees Africa as a basket case: We read only of wars (send in Special forces to train the local military to stop the jihadis) and famines (send money for NGO's to feed the starving, but keep out GM crops and push socialism that discourages industry and investment in the infrastructure because hey, we want them to live a green lifestyle, aka stay in poverty).

But China sees it as an economic opportunity: not just as a source of rare earth metals and agricultural products, and not just as a place to dump shoddy goods that underprice local markets, but now Jack Ma and cellphones could revolutionize the rural economies as was done in China.

It might not solve the problem of famines from drought and the army worm eating all the maize but e commerce might get around the basic problem in Africa: corruption. By offering an alternative way to get rich.

Because corruption, more than "pollution" or "global warming" or any other trendy idea, is the real problem that keeps people poor.

for example: here in the Philippines, what comes in the way of e commerce and buying things on line for later delivery is that people just don't trust it.  But credit cards being used in the mall, and now they are starting to accept e-money via cellphones to pay for stuff, so it's only a matter of time.

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Speaking of China: protests in Hongkong: a thousand points of light.




No, not candles: but people are lifting up their cellphones.


update: Discussing Hong Kong:


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and one more cellphone related item:

StrategyPage discusses cellphone use in North Korea.

70 percent of the population now own one, and can surf the local restricted internet (or if you are near to China, get on the world wide web).

and since electricity is iffy in some areas, many use solar panels to charge them.