La explosión de Internet en África. Según el Banco Mundial, entre 2000 y 2012, el numero de abonados a la telefonía móvil en África ha pasado de 137 millones a casi 350 millones Hace un par de meses comentábamos en «Móviles, casas y coches» que… A finales de los noventa y hasta 2003 las operadoras de telefonía hicieron suyo un mantra de las escuelas de negocio: «los países mediterráneos prefieren el móvil a Internet». Había una base de verdad: la penetración de Internet, explosiva en los países anglosajones, Centroeuropa y Escandinavia, se ralentizaba en España, Italia, Portugal e incluso Francia, donde, sin embargo, el teléfono móvil era ya el rey.
A partir de ahí los tópicos nacionalistas sobre los «países católicos» se generalizaban y se sacaban consecuencias erróneas para América Latina y Africa. A cuenta de eso seguimos teniendo titulares sobre la siempre esperada, nunca concretada, explosión de Internet en Africa… aunque al final se esté produciendo a través del móvil.
Gogo Afrika Crowdfunding. NESsT | Learn To Fly. Forget the American Dream, Collaborative Consumption is a Better Path for Developing Countries Why the American Dream Doesn't Work in Developing Countries | GOOD. The United States was founded on the idea of idea of individual liberty, individual ownership, and individual needs. Unfortunately, this is a costly way for a country to develop, especially if every citizen aspires to express his freedom and individuality by owning a car or a house or a hammer. Nearly 250 years into the evolution of our ethos of individuality, some Americans are starting to recognize that the primacy of individual ownership is not always economically sustainable.
A movement has begun that places value on providing access to products and services, rather than ownership. Do we all really need to own a car? Or can we share a ZipCar that can be rented by the hour and used as needed? The move toward access, rather than ownership is documented and promoted in three recently released books, The Age of Access, The Mesh, and What's Mine Is Yours. The concept of communal living and shared resources has long been a feature of Eastern society. Image: (CC) by Flickr user tibchris. Africa: The era of collaborative consumption has arrived. A new wave is sweeping across developed countries and can make a big impact in Africa.
For those who thought group buying was the last big goldmine in ecommerce, collaborative consumption has triggered a new and sustainable rush. In a world struggling to recover from a rough economic patch and more importantly with waste and global warming; collaborative consumption has come to the rescue. According to the (almost) ever trusted knowledge bank we know as Wikipedia: The term collaborative consumption is used to describe an economic model based on sharing, swapping, bartering , trading or renting access to products as opposed to ownership.
This model presents consumers with an opportunity to expand their ability to partake in previously limited areas of consumption, while owners of goods, skills or property can derive more value from them. An example of this win-win scenario would be Rentstuff, a website that lets anyone rent various types of goods out for a fee. Cycle Chalao! Bike Sharing Comes to India. Cycle Chalao! /CC BY 1.0Raj Janagam was growing frustrated with the lack of transportation methods in India for commuting short distances. He said 10 million people in Mumbai alone use local trains and public buses for long-distance transport, but there was no practical way for him to get from the railway station to his college. It seemed the perfect place to set up a bike share program. But since none existed, he was going to have to do it. It took a year and a half of research, but he and some friends launched Cycle Chalao, a bike share program that piloted in Mumbai in 2010.
He had come up with a model that would charge users about $3 to $4 per month, but the city asked Cycle Chalao if they could make it a free service for citizens, and the city government would provide the funding to make that happen, a step that became final this summer. Cycle Chalao! The bike share won't be completely free, however. But the work of Cycle Chalao doesn't stop there. FreMo India's 1st Bicycle Sharing Programme. The Bike-sharing Blog: India’s Bike-sharing Tipping Point. Guest post by Bradley Schroeder Bike-sharing in India is on the verge of exploding in terms of the number of cities looking towards implementation. Both for-profit and governmental bodies are reviewing models that could work.
I was privileged to be invited to India in November 2011 by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy to work on bike-sharing –- both at the national level, as part of a team creating a policy document for national funding, as well as at the municipal level with various cities. What I experienced was reminiscent of the China I experienced when working there in 2008. The concerns for safety and the image of cycling being only for the poor are probably the largest concerns for India right now. While various attempts at bike-sharing have been made, most lack the basic concept and confuse it with bicycle rental. But the wheels are turning. India is at the tipping point. What's going on with bike-sharing in your part of the world? Timbuktu Chronicles. WhiteAfrican | Where Africa and Technology Collide! Social media users in emerging countries want more than just flashy visuals ← Social media platforms must avoid a One-Size-Fits-All approach when breaking into emerging user-bases.
Thanks to HikingArtist.com for the image. Brazil and India don’t share much common ground. But, along with the United States, they are the top three markets for Facebook in the world. While more than 156 million Americans have already adopted Mark Zuckerberg’s creation, only recently did almost 100 million Brazilians and Indians migrate from their favourite social media platforms to Facebook.
The lack of understanding of the shifts in emerging markets destroyed the Google-owned social network, Orkut. One important trend for Brazilians and Indians, despite their lack of common ground, is that most of what works online for the South Americans also works for the Asians.