Global Culture

SMS stands for Short Message Service and is available on most mobile devices, allowing the user to send and receive short text messages. It has been around for 15 years and it may engage a much more significant percentage of the world population as Internet users.

In my previous post déjà vu I had concluded that the future of the web will be shaped by the growth of influential population sectors demanding services that suit their needs. While today’s web activities for most users are driven in great measure by their ability to commit a good number of hours per week to work/play on content-rich sites, we must assume that once the next wave of users starts to adopt it, their needs will be tied to their daily challenges and likely less availability of “fun” time.

A great demonstration of such adoption is given by Warana Unwired, a project developed by Microsoft Research India in the state of Maharashtra, with the objective of serving 70,000 farmers across 75 villages:

The original goals of the project were to give internet access to farmers, to allow farmers to check market prices so that they can sell the produce to the market that was offering them the best price, it was to setup a remote agricultural advisory system. For various reasons, these didn’t work out.

The cooperative then turned around and started using these kiosks for remote bookkeeping.
The farmers used the kiosks to check their sugarcane output each farmers produce, track their fertilizer outputs, issuing harvesting permits and to get their pay stubs. There is a kiosk operator serves as the intermediary to give access to these farmers.

We found that all the application scenarios they had could be converted using the SMS enabled phones. The system is now available 24 hours, and we have farmers using the data on a few occasions at odd times like 3.30 in the morning. The solution is truly mobile and the farmers are using it in places like the tea shops, front of the farmer fields and in the kiosks. In most cases they use the kiosk operator (who is now the phone operator) as the intermediary to send the SMS messages. There is a potential saving of over a million rupees($22,000, which is a big deal in these contexts) if the cooperative completely switched from the PCs to the mobile phones, this is primarily due to the savings from the maintenance costs of the PCs.

While there are no details about how this application works, I imagine the farmer must know a small set of “requests” or “commands” that once submitted as SMS to a particular number return the much needed piece of information, such as the current market price of sugar.

According to the independent United Kingdom-based research company Portio Research, the number of worldwide mobile subscribers will surpass 2.5 billion this year and reach almost 4 billion by 2011. It is no coincidence that those areas with the most explosive growth in adoption of mobile technologies are those that can’t afford to get other computing alternatives. With over 1 trillion SMS messages worldwide it is obvious that a lot of people have mastered this simple interface and could embrace it as a gateway to serve the content they need, and nothing else.

It is said information is power. Now imagine half the world population with this kind of power.