The Mobile Minute: Crowdsourcing the Turkish Elections, Mubarak Fined by Egyptian Courts, and The Importance of Mobile Broadband

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Jun 02, 2011

[Updated with audio recording: If you'd like to hear this Mobile Minute in audio form, check out this podcast recorded by Ashiyan Rahmani-Shirazi @ashiyan]

Mobile Minute - 2nd June 2011 by ashiyan

Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on Egypt's ruling against former president Mubarak for cutting Internet and mobile services, the rise of online phone calls, the operating system with the most data downloads, an effort to crowdsource citizen reports from the upcoming Turkish elections, and a look at mobile web content and access in East Africa.

  • Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been fined $34 million by an Egyptian court for cutting access to Internet and mobile phone networks during protests earlier this year. Other Egyptian officials (former interior minister Habib al-Adly and former prime minister Ahmed Nazif) were fined as well, for a total of $90 million in fines among the three former leaders.
  • A new report from the Pew Research Center reveals that online phone calls are becoming much more common. The center reports that 5% of Internet users go online to make a phone call each day, and 24% of adult American Internet users have used the Internet to make a phone call.
  • Curious about which operating system users download the most data? Wonder no more – Android owners use roughly 582 MB of data each month, compared to Apple users who came next with 492 MB of data. The information, compiled by Nielsen, also found that although Android users use more data, iPhone owners downloaded more apps.
  • Turkey's elections are coming up on June 12th, and students at the Istanbul Bilgi University have launched a crowd-sourcing website in order to report on the election. Called CrowdMap, the site maps reports from SMS, email, Twitter, and other Internet sources to provide instant updates about the election outside of the mainstream media.
  • Vodafone's "Making Broadband Accessible for All" policy paper looks at broadband in developing markets, and why focusing efforts on developing mobile Internet access rather than fiber broadband may be a better choice in the long run. The paper looks at affordability and availability as the main factors that influence users' abilities to access the Internet. (via White African)

[Mobile Minute Disclaimer: The Mobile Minute is a quick round-up of interesting stories that have come across our RSS and Twitter feeds to keep you informed of the rapid pace of innovation. Read them and enjoy them, but know that we have not deeply investigated these news items. For more in-depth information about the ever-growing field of mobile tech for social change, check out our blog postswhite papers and researchhow-tos, and case studies.]

Image courtesy Flickr user QiFei

Very interesting articles.

Very interesting articles. Thanks for sharing.

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