• Is India Developing its Own OS? [Boing Boing] — Indian IT ministry is looking to reduce reliance on foreign operating systems. 
• Plastic Books on the Rise in Brazil [PSFK] — A new plastic paper is under development in Brazil to create more resilient books and printed matter.
• Billions Pour in for India's Insulated Superclass [The Guardian] — The empires of India's wealthiest magnates and their families and networks continue to grow.
• Can Mobile Banking Save Emerging Markets? [Mint.com] — Mobile financial services are providing a boost to growth of developing markets.
• Holons and Economic Resilience [Global Guerillas] — Sustainable subsystems may be a key to resilience within complex systems.

Scott talks about the DevNet and the BOPNet - the existing developed Internet and the emerging social networking services on the mobile platform meant for the BoP. Ultimately, the whole Internet is nothing more than a huge social network on the global scale, allowing us to connect with, share with, communite with and, perhaps, do business with, anyone else out there in the world.

And while the DevNet is accessible by anyone with a browser and a data connection, regardless of device, the same is not yet true for the bopnet. Its still under construction, with bits and bobs and pilot programs, spread around the developing pockets of the world. It works on mobile phones and its simplest components use only voice and/or sms as a means of communications. Basic social networks provide the semblance of the "read write" aspect as chat forums, games and news proliferate. Underlying the chatter is the increasing advance of the financial transactions layer.

Creator of the blog Mobile Banking, CEO of Fundamo, Hannes van Rensburg, has been posting of late on the eventual need for all these mobile payment systems to start becoming interoperable (a word under debate on his blog). This is inevitable if a true transaction layer is to emerge underlying the mobile net particularly for the BoP.

Lets take these thoughts a step further, and contemplate the Border Zone between the BOPNet and the DevNet, the bridge that we're slowly building across the global digital divide.

Will it continue to be the no-mans land that currently exists between the formal economy and the informal, unorganized sector? Or will it be able to provide a way for the cash based economy of scarcity from the base of the social and economic pyramid, the teeming billions of unbanked, to interact with and permit the two way flow of resources, connecting with the far wealthier formal economy?

At this point, it would be interesting to begin observing those spaces where these two economies already begin to merge or connect. In the real world, how and where does is exchange take place, which touchpoints provide value for both sides and how does value get created, infusing new wealth into the hyperlocal BoP economies, inside urban slums and between the rural and urban markets?

How does this translate into lessons for the future development of the technological roadmap? What opportunity spaces for innovation emerge?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maryjoyce/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This week I'm headed off to Istanbul, at the heart of the 11th largest Internet market in the world. Often overlooked, Turkey is a mini-BRIC in Internet and mobile usage, with almost 26 million of its citizens having access to the Web, over 5 million of which are connected via broadband. With over 66 million mobile subscriptions, the country is on par with some of Europe's largest mobile markets. According to CGAP, Turkey is one of the most progressive mobile money markets at the moment. 

Scanning the news today on mobile + africa over Google is throwing up some interesting dots that I thought might be fun to connect. I'm seeking signs of whether the sub Saharan African mobile phone market is about to take off the way the Indian (or even South Asian?) market did about four years ago when Reliance Comm just dropped their basic sms and phone call pricing. Of course, in the Indian market, that happened almost at the same time that our friend Nokia launched their then lowest priced phone ever, the immortal 1100. To be honest, that phone has been both the saviour and the bane of the Finnish company in global emerging markets. However, I digress.

I've just come across bits on Nokia's emerging market moves (something I'm sad to confess I stopped getting excited about about a year or so ago when I decided we needed to move on to making larger scale things happen in the wireless world, not just what one, albeit fearlessly pioneering, company would do), and I've come across these other bits just now. Snippets first:

Essar, an Indian conglomerate's moves in Uganda and Congo's telcom sector. South African pressure continues on cellular operator pricing structure. The indisputable fact that Africans pay higher rates for basic services (with Steve Song's hard  work on comparitive pricing across SSA here). And now, some interesting bits, from The East African:

Kenyan telecom companies are bracing for an increase in customer migration and the possibility of price wars when the proposed mobile number portability becomes a reality in a few months.

Speaking separately to The EastAfrican, the four operators — Safaricom, Zain, Orange and Yu — have indicated that they will start positioning themselves for the technology in such a way that it makes a positive difference for their subscribers.

“The move by the industry regulator is welcome and we are ready to embrace it,” said Michael Joseph, Safaricom CEO.