Blog

MobileActive's staff is doing much traveling these days! Meet me at the Skoll Forum in Oxford, England if you happen to be there where I am part of a workshop on cross-cultural (mobile) communication and am pitching a project to an innovation panel of smart social venture folks. How fun is that!

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Streaming video from your mobile almost feels like magic. A video taken on your mobile phone appears, in real time, on the web and even allows users to interact with the mobile phone user through real-time chat functions. "It's immediate, it's there, and it's one click away," Flixwagon CEO Eran Hess told the BBC in a recent video interview. "It's very easy to do."

MobileActive tested two streaming video applications, Qik and Flixwagon, to see how they measured up for use by nonprofits and advocacy organizations that want to document and feature video content in real time. Lastly, we discuss how streaming video can be used for social impact.

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When Matthew Kam first went to India, he noticed the lack of English literacy of children that had studied English for three or four years. Most couldn't read, didn't know simple words, and sometimes couldn't spell their own names. "We realized that those students who had taken English for three years couldn't read every letter in the alphabet," Matt said. "Teachers who were teaching English couldn't speak English themselves." However, the English literacy of these same children improved dramatically when presented with a unique learning tool: a mobile phone.

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Pictures and video out of Lhasa and Xiahe are slowly emerging, yet again initially mainly taken with camera phones and transmitted clandestinely across the border to transmit to a global audience.

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We are happy to announce MobileActive08, a three-day conference on mobile technology for social impact to take place October 13-15 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Organized with our amazing colleagues at Sangonet in South Africa, the theme of the 2008 event is "Unlocking the Potential of Mobile Technology for Social Impact." MobileActive08 will convene 250 civil society, development and technology practitioners interested in the use and application of mobile technology in civil society. This will be the largest international civil society event to date focusing on this topic.

Participants include non-profit practitioners using mobile phones in innovative and creative ways or considering mobile applications in support of their activities, mobile technologists, researchers studying the use of mobile phones, government officials, donors and representatives from the telecommunications industry.

We are especially pleased to welcome IDRC as a major supporter of the event. IDRC has been conducting research in how mobile telephony is advancing development and civil society goals, and is emerging as the major knowledge center of research on mobiles in health and development.

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This video about women's rights is one of three mobile phone videos made by Egyptian artist Ahmad Sherif, designed to be spread virally on mobile phones.

The text, translated into English, says

Muslim? Great. Christian? Perfect. Jewish? Shalom. Veil? Why not. Niqab? Be my guest. No Niqab? Your choice. Atheist? Whatever. You're ready to die for God? It's your life. You would die for Adel Imam? Who wouldn't...

 

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Two upcoming conferences will address issues relating to mobile phones in development.

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian organization focused on helping organizations in developing countries use technology, will be hosting a conference on mobile phones used to improve access to health services in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The conference will be held on March 17 and 18 in Florianópolis, Brazil. More information is available on the IDRC website.

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A video circulated on Egyptian mobile phones begins with a picture of a couple holding hands. Images follow of condoms, birth control pills, and even the mouths of a man and woman kissing. "Love: so what?" reads the text. "Love before marriage isn't a shame. Egypt, start loving."

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Over at Netsquared we're running a Mashup Challenge. In a nutshell, we're asking folks to contribute their ideas and then working, heads down crazy, to get them resources -- brains and $ -- to help move those ideas forward. And we want more mobile mashups represented.

There are three parts to the Challenge:

1. Applications: Individuals working to create change will share with the NetSquared Community what change they are trying to make, as well as the information/data sources they believe can be married to help create that change. Applications will be available online February 1 and accepted until March 14, 2008.

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Imagine if every member of the legislature could see a message from your constituents, just by looking out of the window. A text-to-screen campaign allows for exactly this: A large screen, placed right outside the State House, for example, that brings your constituents’ text messages to legislators' eyes.

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