Tag: mobile

Mobile water companies and irrelevance [Article]

Ben Evans is an internet analyst, & writes that mobile operators innovations are irrelevant.

..the key point is that something can look like it’s an adjacent area when actually all of your skills and leverage points are irrelevant. Mobile operators have almost none of the skills and leverage points needed to be relevant for anything other than connectivity.

He echoes others that have argued essentially the same. He publishes an excellent free weekly newsletter that covers the tech/ telco industry, if you are interested in this industry.

Priorities: Toilet? Or Cell Phone? [Article]

Kevin Kelly observed during a trip that the residents of farmsteads in remote China had no running water, electricity or toilets, yet everyone had a cell phone. He offers an explanation: “The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, if not billions of people in the rest of Asia, Africa and South America have chosen Option B. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. (I know they don’t have a toilet because I’ve stayed in many of their homes.) But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.” Noah Millman shares his take on the topic: 

mobile pains

Ok, so a million letters have been typed about telephone etiquette.

I have my $0.02 worth.

Literacy or social position doesn’t educate a person. The lady on the train today was a classic example. A senior manager in a well-known organization, she is well-traveled, & is in charge of a fairly large team of people & manages a multi-million dollar budget. How do I know? Well, she practically told the entire compartment during the course of her several conversations on her “smart-phone’! No wonder they call them smart-phones now, the users definitely aren’t!