Live Blog: Digital Media Strategy Course Guest Speaker, Katrin Verclas

Katrin Verclas, the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, also joined our class today.  Going to live blog her speech as well, as long as my typing can keep up...hands are getting tired!

Note: Katrin speaks faster than Dan; again, doing my best to be as accurate as possible, but please take these as paraphrases rather than direct quotes.

Note again: Katrin also references a slide show, so I apologize if some of these have references that are unclear.  I can't keep up unless I just write everything...

6:34 - Watching an introductory video from the Economist...

6:36 - Because there is such ubiquity of mobile phones internationally, people are very excited.

6:37 - The mobile phone has outpaced the Guttenberg printing press and certainly the Internet.

6:38 - Even though I am excited about all of these developments, we have to come to a very realistic understanding of what mobile technology is good at and what it can do for social development and social change, and where it falls flat.

6:40 - A lot of people have phones, but they don't necessarily have airtime - or have very little airtime.

6:41 - Globally, in terms of media access, mobile phones outpace at this point pretty much every other medium.

6:45 - Even though they're still expensive in most of the world, I think we're going to see a move away from SMS strictly as a communications tool to richer forms of data services.  It's going to take awhile.

6:50 - Katrin highlights the efforts and mobile offerings of the Blue Ocean Institute, with their Guide to Ocean Friendly Seafood, which has a mobile interface.

6:54 - Katrin mentions TXTual Healing, "interesting experiments with mobile interactivity on the street."

6:58 - There is this huge social component [to mobile technology].  We're all so interested in delivering health services and activists communicating with one another, but for many people in the world its the one way that they can transcend their social isolation.

7:05 - We don't know how people are using mobile technology.

7:08 - The fact that everybody has a phone, does that make societies more open, more accountable, more fair?  Is all of the attention that has been focused on it in health making anybody healthy or live longer?  Who knows.

7:11 - Open systems in mobile need to be talked about.  We have the most ubiquitous communication device on the face of the earth, but they're all privately held.  Its not working like the internet; private commercial players control access to mobile technology.

7:12 - A message to the carriers: we love you and we hate you.  We are where we are today because of you.  But we need to have a better conversation about the role mobile phones play in human development.

7:15 - If you're trying to reach teenagers, texting is really a great way.  And a lot of Latinos don't necessarily have data or data phones, so SMS is an effective way to reach those constituencies if done well.
...
In so many ways, you have to really know your audience, and you have to know how they use a particular piece of technology, and what their MO is in regard to that technology.
...
On the mobile side, we have a fair amount of data on [who is using it].
...
Interestingly, for African Americans, voice is the best way of reaching them on mobile.
...
These are broad generalizations, admittedly.

7:20 - Question: for those people that aren't using computers as a rule, will people who are using phones for SMS be able to jump to using mobile phones computers without using personal computers in the interim?

Yes, to some extent.  I guess I would say, because I do a lot of work in developing countries, that there are literacy issues that are huge.  Even though many, many people have a phone, not everybody is comfortable texting.  It requires you to be literate.
...
It will be a different form of computing.  What we consider today computing is going to be different.  It is different on a mobile platform.  It will be different for the billion people that can't read or write.  It is a very different type of computing experience.  Even though you're seeing convergences there, and phones becoming more and more powerful, you're going to see a divide there from human capabilities.