The Ever-Evolving Power of Mobile

Hold a mobile phone and you hold a piece of the biggest technological and learning platform in history—and incidentally, it’s a platform that’s revolutionizing life in general around the world. This was the message of “Mobile Technology: A Change Agent in the United States and Across the Globe,” a three-hour marathon of speaker panels that convened at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, on Thursday, December 13, to discuss mobile-phone technology’s evolution and the global implications thereof.

“You name a sector, and mobile is not just enabling it. It’s transforming it,” said Shawn Covell, vice-president of government affairs for Qualcomm. Covell was one of 12 guest experts who spoke over the course of three separate panels that took place during this three-hour event.

Mobile Money
Some 2.5 billion low-income people lack access to conventional banking, but “mobile banking”— services through which a phone user can receive or transfer money without having a bank account—is becoming a viable alternative, according to Laurence Chandy, a Brookings Institution fellow, who co-hosted the first session, “The Intersection of Economic Development and Mobile Technology,” with Covell and with Sonal Shah, Case Foundation senior fellow.

left to right: speakers Shawn Covell, vice-president of government affairs, Qualcomm; Sonal Shah, senior fellow, Case Foundation; Laurence Chandy, fellow, Brookings Institution; and Darrell West, vice-president of governance studies and director of the Center for Technology Innovation, Brookings Institution

These services, Chandy explained, make it easier for users to save money during times of abundance and to borrow from friends and family during times of scarcity. People on the verge of poverty can thus more easily stay out of poverty.

Chandy pointed out that mobile banking enjoys a huge uptake in Kenya, and that there are now, in all, 114 mobile offerings around the world, with another 104 new ones in the pipeline.

It might also enable governments to more effectively track where the neediest individuals are. Better still, aid groups could allocate money directly to the people.

“The traditional mode has been to try and guess who the poor are and guess what they might want,” Chandy said. “Mobile money has the potential to raise the bar by putting the money right in their pockets.”

Connecting People to Vital Health Information
The world’s doctors work disproportionately in cities, leaving rural areas shorthanded. Rural health workers do their best to tend to low-level health needs, but rural residents who need a doctor might have to travel to the city (if they can).

Enter mobile devices, with which rural health workers can transmit information to city doctors, according to Covell, so that the doctors can diagnose and prescribe treatments without leaving the office. Covell cited China as one country where such remote-access diagnoses are having positive effects.

Shah laid out more examples of mobile technology boosting health. One app in South Africa gives patients with HIV/AIDS reminders when to take their medications and what to eat. Additionally, Johnson & Johnson co-launched an app that guides expectant mothers on what to do day-by-day for their developing babies.

“I think in development, we try to solve the technology problem first, and then find it wasn’t really a technological problem; it was an information problem,” she said.

All this growing mobile capacity will need support, though. Covell noted that the world community will have to release much more spectrum.

“The need for data is only going to increase as time goes on, and spectrum is the highway through which data travel,” she said.

Politics, Facebook, and the Power of Friends
The 2008 U.S. elections demonstrated the power of short-messaging service (i.e., text messages), but in 2012, the world saw how smartphones and mobile apps can shape elections, stated Chris Spence, chief technology officer for the National Democratic Institute, in panel number two, “Mobile Technology & Its Impacts on Politics, Elections & Participatory Democracy in the U.S. and Around the World.” Spence noted that the campaigns extensively used smartphones to mobilize voters and volunteers, get voters registered, and solicit donations.

left to right: speakers Juliana Gruenwald, freelance technology journalist; Katie Harbath, associate manager for policy, Facebook; Rebecca Rosen, associate editor for technology, the Atlantic; and Chris Spence, chief technology officer, National Democratic Institute

Katie Harbath, an associate manager for policy at Facebook, spoke about the Obama campaign’s effective use of Facebook apps to reach out to 18-29-year-old voters and encourage them to reach out to their friends. Harbath explained that whereas an email pitch is good if it gets a 5% response rate, this Facebook strategy garnered a response rate of 20%.

Mobile-phone outreach hit a crescendo on Election Day. Facebook apps sent recipients messages urging them to vote, to stay in lines, and to tell their friends to do the same.

“You saw, throughout Election Day, that you were constantly being asked to do stuff and to share messages with your friends,” she said, adding that she expects this mobile app-driven, friends-of-friends approach to get even further traction in future elections.

Relieving More Poverty in Less Time
The final panel, “The Universal Impact of Mobile Technology,” featured Toshi Nakamura, CEO of Kopernik, a startup company that distributes life-changing technologies, such as water purifiers and solar-powered lights, to impoverished countries. Leaders from a community select a technology that they would like to have, and Kopernik crowdsources the funding to get the item installed in the community.

left to right: speakers Howard Buskirk, associate managing editor, Communications Daily; Tom Carroll, president, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future; Toshi Nakamura, cofounder and CEO, Kopernik; and Eric Tyler, analyst, New America Foundation

In its first few years, Kopernik would send grad students to the communities to survey how their residents lived and, once the technologies were installed, how the residents liked them. Then the company started providing communities mobile phones for talking to Kopernik directly. This procures more information, more quickly.

“In a mobile platform, you get responses immediately, so you know what the users of technology know right now, whereas if we send people to interview them, it takes a few months to get to know what they are thinking,” Nakamura said.

Conclusion
It’s fitting that Spence contrasted the U.S. elections of 2012 and 2008. Many of the apps and services that received discussion during Brookings’ three-hour event did not even exist in 2008. It’s astonishing to think of the difference a mere four years makes in communications technology.

So where might the technology proceed in the coming decades? We can only try to imagine. The only sure thing is that they will continue to be powerful agents of global change.