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Barbara Lindsey

Steve's HR Technology - Journal - Welcome to the Company! Here is your iPhone - 0 views

steveboese.squarespace.com/...mpany-here-is-your-iphone.html

ACU mobiles iphone

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • The school distributed the iPhones with some specific, and fairly modest goals. Let students participate in class polls, have access to some information systems, etc.  These were important and valuable benefits.  But the students proceeded to leverage the technology to better connect with each other, to facilitate their own projects and group activities, and ultimately to derive more value than the administration had ever foreseen.
  • When technology is designed to promote adaptation, or is developed and consumed in ways that can support changes to configuration and flexible levels of personalization the opportunity for end users and employees to 'discover' new and better uses is significantly enhanced.
  • Abilene Christian certainly seems like an unlikely place to be at the forefront of an innovative, cutting edge technology-based project like this.  And it is.  But it shows that even from unlikely sources, ones without national reputations, and billion-dollar endowments, that fantastic innovations can arise.
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  • How about next year, when your first batch of new recuits come marching in the door, you hand them a brand new iPhone, and encourage them to use it to connect, learn, share, and experiment? I know what you are thinking, where is the budget for that going to come from? I would bet the extra productivity you will get from the program will more than fund the phones over the year. Ask Abilene Christian if the investment was worth it, they have gotten more mileage as the 'iPhone College' than they ever bargained for.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 Dec 09
     
    The school distributed the iPhones with some specific, and fairly modest goals. Let students participate in class polls, have access to some information systems, etc.  These were important and valuable benefits.  But the students proceeded to leverage the technology to better connect with each other, to facilitate their own projects and group activities, and ultimately to derive more value than the administration had ever foreseen.
Barbara Lindsey

Brains benefit from multilingualism - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...091029151807.htm

multilingualism benefit brains content-based

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 28 May 10
     
    "Learning a language strictly as a separate subject in the curriculum does not work as effectively for a broad range of young people as compared to embedding second language learning into other subjects. Thinking about numbers, for example, does figure naturally in a lot of school learning as well as in real life outside the school, which supports learning and knowing mathematics. The same may not always be true of foreign languages," Marsh argues."
Barbara Lindsey

Academic Evolution: Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid - 0 views

www.academicevolution.com/...intellectual-apartheid.html

publishing2.0 academy higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Academia must divest from Intellectual Apartheid
  • I mean academia’s policy that enforces an unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual divide. What intellectual divide? It is that gaping chasm between two opposing models of disseminating knowledge: toll access and open access.
  • lack of access to technology (dubbed the "digital divide") seriously handicaps half the world's population. That is a giant problem but one being gradually ameliorated by mobile telephony and economic forces.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.
  • I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.
  • Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.
  • “The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.
  • You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?
  • Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.
  • Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.
  • one of the great secrets of academic publishing
  • academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.
  • A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.
  • There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.
  • It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).
  • Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.
  • scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?
  • I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.
  • Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet
  • In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.
  • Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.
Barbara Lindsey

The FWK Licensing Model at iterating toward openness - 0 views

opencontent.org/494

OpenAccess copyright higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 27 Nov 08 - Cached
  • If we want to improve learning ~today~, we have to meet learners where they are ~today~. And today and for the foreseeable future the overwhelming majority of learners will be going to schools and universities where their teachers will adopt textbooks based on things like the name recognition of the author(s), the quality of the textbook, supporting instructional materials like test item banks and PPT notes, and the availability (and marketing!) of review copies.
  • having said that, there are some additional, very practical benefits of an open textbook for the faculty member who has to make the adoption decision. For example, when the license and the technology allow the faculty member to remove chapters from the book, change the order of chapters in the book, or even edit chapters in the book directly (e.g., adding locally relevant examples) BEFORE her/his students ever see the books online or in print, this gives the faculty member much greater control over the instructional experience. Most faculty members couldn’t care less about “open” for openness sake, but give them greater control over the instructional experience, and suddenly openness is translated into a concrete benefit - a difference beyond “openness for openness sake.”
  • The Plus in our CC By-NC-SA Plus will indeed be More Permissions - it will grant blanket permissions for anyone and everyone to make Commercial Use of FWK-published textbook materials in the context of the FWK Marketplace. The Marketplace will be an area of the FWK site where people can post and sell their own study guides, audio chapters, flash cards, videos, case studies, and other study materials related to FWK textbooks at whatever price they set (of course, they can alternately choose to openly license the things they put in the Marketplace, too). The Marketplace will be an “eBay for study materials,” and like eBay when somone sells material through the Marketplace, a small portion of the sale will come back to FWK and be shared with the textbook author whose work has been derived from or augmented by the new material.
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  • Every “strong copyleft” license is incompatible with every other,
  • Flat World Knowledge will be licensing it’s first books CC By-NC-SA Plus, with copyright held by the authors.
Barbara Lindsey

Turning links into a library with Diigo - 0 views

knowthenetwork.com/...inks-into-a-library-with-diigo

diigo

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 05 Jan 10
     
    Great overview of the many benefits to using Diigo to collect, organize and share your bookmarks.
Barbara Lindsey

Edge: NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE By Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.edge.org/...shirky09_index.html

shirky future newspapers

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad.
  • When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.
  • With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
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  • many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg's invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther's use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
  • The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"
  • Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
  • During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word.
  • When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
  • If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.
  • The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.
  • Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.
  • Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.
  • In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
  • Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
  • Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.
  • The point here is that newspapers must accomplish online what they have long been able to achieve for generations of readers in print: they must forge an emotional bond with their readers by becoming an essential part of their daily lives.
  • Third, and perhaps most important (because without this the first two are impossible), newspapers must recognize (as some already have) that technology and journalism are inexorably intertwined.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 09
     
    "Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario."
Barbara Lindsey

News: 'The World Is Open' - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...bonk

opensource opencontent free education higher ed

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Tom Reeves from the University of Georgia, argues that we should not be content when online courses are just as good as face-to-face ones; instead, they should be better. They should excite people into this age of learning. Online courses should offer interactive elements such as animations and contextually rich simulations, extended video and audio resources, engaging discussion forums with peers and experts, and multiple learning format options. They should not simply be pages of digital content to click through. We do not need to be offering degrees in electronic page turning.
  • And if a free online course that lacks interactive elements is my only choice, then that is indeed my choice. It may lack a caring instructor, but I may still need to learn that content for a job promotion or skill retooling. There may not be embedded discussion forums with peers and experts, but that does not stop me from discussing the content with whomever I want to. The rich video or audio resources may be inaccessible to me since I am hearing or visually impaired, but I can use specialized software tools to assist in my learning with the learning contents that are, in fact, accessible to me. We need to stop thinking about what is not possible and replace such thinking with ideas and optimism of what is now possible! And sure, along the way we should admit to the myriad limitations of open education and make genuine attempts to address each of them and open up education even more. If we only offer questions and not think of solutions, we are not benefiting the open learning world nor will we benefit from it.
  • OER and OCW can do just that — they can showcase the best of the best from each school, college, university, and corporate and non-profit training center. When one’s work is on display to the world community, instructors are often forced to rethink their teaching and perhaps come up with even more innovative ways to deliver their content.
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  • So, to answer your question, the reason you notice the strange mix of reactions to wikis is due to the quite varied ways in which wikis can be employed in educational settings. At the far end of the risk continuum they might be used in place of expert knowledge. More safely, they can simply accumulate knowledge and information resources for a class. As my colleagues and I found in our first semester teaching with wikis, when interesting online resources are found, students will often say, “put it in the wiki” so it can be forever shared. And that is not a bad way to start to use them. Instructors can dip their toes into the wonderful world of wikis and remain in shallow waters testing them out before they get in too deep. Later, they might try Wikibooks or perhaps creating and editing Wikipedia pages.
  • We will see a lengthening of higher education during the coming decades of about 1 year for each 10. By the end of this century, it will be quite common to attend college until one is 30. Today only a small percent do. Open education will provide continued access to learning resources before, during, or after graduation. In turn, there will be less self-doubt about whether one can succeed. The increased knowledge needs of every citizen of this planet should calm the fears of those who predict fewer educators or institutions of higher learning will be needed. Just the opposite!
  • The type of instructors needed in higher education will dramatically vary from today. Many will remain in traditional instructor roles. Some will be course and program developers. Others will be online facilitators. Still others will be learning guides who help students make sense of their options. What is more interesting to me is the coming rise of the super e-mentor or e-coach. Such individuals will have a discipline expertise (e.g., theater, journalism, public health, finance, etc.) as well as human development or counseling skills. Third, they will understand the learning opportunities of the Web. They will know how to guide students in their online learning quests. Some will be needed daily, some monthly, and others perhaps just annually or biannually. They will be our learning gurus, in this, what I label, “the learning century.”Global and international education will be the buzz words of the coming decade. They already are. Student peers will increasingly be those from other institutions and regions of the world. One’s cohort groups will include many people that you will never physically meet. This will make affiliations with just one institution more difficult. More people will claim to be alums and be loyal to your institution but not to the same depth or degree as before.
  • Students will have more opportunities to create their own degree tracks and programs. There are no longer limits in terms of the time, place, and sequence of courses. The degrees offered will only be limited by one’s imagination. With the range of courses today, self-service learning will be the norm. It already is widely accepted in corporate training circles.
Barbara Lindsey

The Answer Sheet - How to give classrooms a mission - 0 views

voices.washingtonpost.com/...o-give-classrooms-a-missi.html

larryferlazzo classroom mission organizer community

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 23 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In my previous career, I was a community organizer for nineteen years. Before we did anything, we would ask ourselves these two questions: • Does our action help develop leadership among local residents? • Are we honoring the father of modern-day community organizing Saul Alinsky’s "Iron Rule"? Alinsky famously said, “Never do for someone what they can do for themselves. Never.”
  • in the long term, staying true to our mission often resulted in the emergence of self-realized community groups that had confident leaders and committed members. These groups were more successful in gaining affordable housing, creating jobs that paid a living wage and benefits, and building safe neighborhoods than other organizations that never developed their own sense of identity and purpose.
  • In the first part of each school year in most of my classes, I lead a discussion with students asking whether they want our class to be a “community of learners” or a “classroom of students.” On our overhead, I enter the choices in side-by-side columns and give examples of the difference between the two.
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  • In a classroom of students, a teacher does most of the talking. In a community of learners, students work in small groups and are co-teachers. In a classroom, people laugh when others make mistakes, but in a community, people are supported when they take risks. In a classroom, the teacher always has to be the one to keep people focused. In a community, students take responsibility for keeping themselves focused.
  • By starting with this cultural orientation or way of thinking, students develop their own approaches or techniques for how the class will operate. What emerges is a lens for looking at numerous issues throughout the school year. It’s my job to honor my own rules of community organizing, to promote leadership development and self-sufficiency by respecting their judgments and desires.
Barbara Lindsey

Digital Divide.org - 0 views

www.digitaldivide.org/...digitaldivide.html

digital access digital divide

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Mar 09 - Cached
  • It took digital-divide researchers a whole decade to figure out that the real issue is not so much about access to digital technology but about the benefits derived from access.
  • 80/20 factor” (in which eighty percent of profit is made by serving the most affluent 20%) causes technology designers to work hard at creating "solutions" specifically for the affluent. The poor are ignored because market forces assume that designing solutions for them will not be profitable*. The result is that even where the poor are provided access to digital technology, it is low-quality and merely “localized” versions of products and services intended for the rich.
  • 1) Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for reducing poverty.
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  • Closing the Digital Divide is a precondition for resolving terrorism.
  • The emerging market countries of Asia are now major drivers of the digital economy
Barbara Lindsey

The TechCrunch Quick Guide To GrandCentral - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...ch-quick-guide-to-grandcentral

grandcentral phone cell

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Mar 09 - Cached
  • If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.
  • A big hurdle to using GC is the fact that no one knows it’s your new phone number, and they keep calling your old number. To get the maximum benefit from the service you need to route as many calls through it as possible. The only way to do that is to let your contacts know that your new GC number is the best way to reach you. Before you send out a mass email and reprint a thousand business cards, though, make sure you plan on sticking with the service.
  • You can customize greetings by specific callers or groups, so business callers can get one message, and friends can get another.
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  • Then you set up rules for phone calls. Have business contacts always ring your cell phone. Have family ring all of your phones. Friends go to your home number. Or whatever. You can also set certain people to go right to voicemail if you never want to talk to them directly.
  • You can also temporarily set all of your calls to go immediately to voicemail or to forward to another phone (this is great if you are out of town).
  • Hitting “4″ during a call turns recording on or off.
  • Voicemails are sent to your inbox - they can be reviewed by calling in or via your computer (see “mobile” below as well). All voicemails can be forwarded to others, or you can request an embed code to place it on a website.
  • GrandCentral has said that they will soon be releasing a feature that automatically transcribes voicemails into text and will deliver them to you via email or SMS.
  • WebCall: embed a call button on your website and let people call you (the caller will not see your phone number) Gizmo: GC will use your Gizmo ID as a forwarding phone number - get calls on your computer (great when traveling abroad)
Barbara Lindsey

AdelaideNow... School uses mobile phones as learning tool - 0 views

www.news.com.au/...0,22606,24538923-2682,00.html

mobile_phones language_learning

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 08 - Cached
  • St Johns Grammar is encouraging mobiles as part of an Australian-first trial to promote the benefits of mobile technology in increasing fluency in foreign languages.
  • The Year 10 students, studying Indonesian, are given a mobile each which they use to call up an automated service that guides them through a menu. They choose from conversations about booking a hotel to a menu and are prompted to go through the details in Indonesian. Their answers are uploaded on to a website and get marked on their use of the language.
  • unique trial by the the Government's Le@rning Federation's Mobile Applications for Language Learning project.
Pump Wat

Best Quality Clean Water Pumps - 1 views

In the previous months, I was looking for quality water pumps for my house that will ensure safe drinking water for my family. I have asked several friends where I could possibly look for the best ...

pumps

started by Pump Wat on 26 Sep 11 no follow-up yet
Barbara Lindsey

Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ia_in_africa_part_2_mobile.php

mobile_phones africa social_networking mobile

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Sep 09 - Cached
  • social media technology conference PICNIC2008
  • conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent.
  • Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world.
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  • most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world.
  • Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.
  • Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.
  • The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."
  • At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
  • The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.
  • Micro-payments and Mobile Banking
  • Mobile News Reporting
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