Communications as Currency April 14, 2007
Posted by Tim Schneider in Uncategorized.trackback
I heard this last week, and have spent the last week or so trying to find some confirmation/outbound links. Not finding any, I’m just going to post it like a thought experiment.
I was at a meeting last Wednesday and someone there was telling me about a company in Haiti that he claimed is “revolutionizing” telecom. This company is in Haiti, and they sell pre-paid phones that allow users to exchange minutes between phones by holding them close together and beaming them from one to another. According to this guy, cell phone minutes are now used as a common form of currency to buy things on the street.
There were other stories, about traveling in motorcades and the guns carried by his bodyguards, but I was captivated by this idea, the very act of communicating commodified. This loaf of bread, this dress is worth this many minutes of “connection.” I’d love to do that ethnography.
the issue is called mobile banking … m-banking for short … has roots in africa … also prepaid calls and voip led into m-banking … phillipines has a sweet deal in this venue … nttl.ob will eventually play out big … http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_N/threadview?m=tm&bn=36020&tid=26&mid=26&tof=1&frt=2 … But mobile banking, or m-banking for short, is about more than just added convenience; it’s about giving millions of poor people in developing countries access to financial services for the first time. And that could change the world.