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May 31, 2010

SO Links: Week 21

Took last week off. Here are a few items from this past week's research:

Filed under  //   Android   Bangladesh   Brazil   computing   Dell   OLPC   Russia   science   smartphones   technology   Women  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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May 15, 2010

SO Links: Week 19

As a resource, starting this week, we are posting selected links gathered during our research each week. 

Filed under  //   banking   Brazil   complexity   consumers   India   mobile   money   netbooks   resilience  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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November 13, 2009

A Straight-to-BRIC Strategy

Dell's strategy with it's new smartphone, the Android-powered Mini3, is somewhat of a leapfrogging of usual US handset manufacturer procedure. The company announced this week it's first two major rollouts for the phone, also a first for Dell in this category, are in China, through China Mobile and Brazil, with Claro. 

China Mobile, as you may know, is the world's largest mobile operator with over 500 million customers, the upper end of which continue to desire well-made handsets from international brands. Dell claims to be the leading maker of 3G netbooks in the country, so offering a smartphone is a nice extension—and it makes a great place to trial a new product, as well as one running on a new platform like Android. 

Brazil, while a smaller market, also shows promise for high-end mobile brands, Like China and India, Nokia and others have targeted Brazil as an area of strong future growth, and Nokia has gone so far as to place a design studio in the country, as it has in Beijing as well. 

This move by Dell marks a minor but interesting new turn in mobile introductions. In the past, high end devices would be pushed out first in Europe or the US (excluding Japanese and Korean-focused devices). Clearly Dell sees the markets as mature enough not only to support a new mobile maker, but also mature enough to appreciate its brand extension into a new area, and be ready for something as new and fast moving as Android. It's probably right, which marks a new phase of confident technology consumption in the BRICs overall, not just taking cheaper local brands or becoming afterthoughts for global brands, but standing up as the entry market for something wanted elsewhere. 

Filed under  //   Brazil   BRICs   China   Dell   economies   mobile  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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October 17, 2009

Mapping Favelas

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tcelestino/ / CC BY 2.0

Several sources today pointed to this article about a group that is using GPS to map the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in detail. The group, Rede Jovem, is doing the project to put information about locations and services in Brazil's slum cities into Wikimap. It's goal, in it's own words, is "to work towards promoting social inclusion using virtual and mobile production by the new collaborative logics inherent in social relations, taking virtual and interactive maps as main resource, since available mapping services have never offered information related to these areas, until now."

This is a great example of bottom-up cataloging on local information in areas that might otherwise continue to be at best detailed in statistical reports on poverty or public health, and at worst be digitally invisible. Through this mapping effort, to paraphrase Jan Chipchase, the area now gains a digital identity of its own.

Thanks to @mobileactive and @janchip for the initial link.

Here are related links from @agpublic on similar mapping in Rio and Africa.

Filed under  //   Brazil   cities   favelas   GPS   localization   location   mapping   wikis  
Posted by Scott Smith 

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