beyondbrics

In India, some 600m people own mobile phones but just 60m have access to broadband internet. Hewlett-Packard is aiming to bridge that gap with apps that can access the web from any cell phone using voice and text messaging.

Meanwhile, a service called Txteagle employs mobile phone users in developing countries to perform “micro-tasks”, like translation or transcriptions, via text message in return for cash or airtime.

Mobile technology was a hot topic at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative as participants praised its potential for everything from improving health to creating jobs to, of course, enabling mobile banking.

“The starting point is always mobile devices”, said Google’s Eric Schmidt on the first day of the conference. “They are the lifeline for information for many of the people in the world.” Once people get online, he said, they can start businesses, advertise and connect with each other – driving economic growth.

Mobile phones can “create commerce for people who in many cases haven’t had an opportunity to have a job before”, said former T-Mobile USA chief John Stanton.

Stanton’s current firm, Trilogy International Partners, runs wireless companies in Haiti, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and New Zealand. Its Haitian concern, Voilá, is part of a project announced at CGI to provide mobile financial services to 100,000 Haitians.

Devices are also allowing people who wouldn’t otherwise have internet access to connect for the first time – which is where HP’s project, called siteonmobile, comes in. It’s a platform that allows developers to create cloud-based applications using voice and text messages to access the internet.

Larry Irving, HP’s vice president for global government affairs, says people could use those apps to buy train tickets or find out the latest crop prices. “That will get people an entry point to the web”, he said. “There is a huge pent-up opportunity for emerging markets to use apps in lots of different ways.”

The program is currently in pilot testing in India, where it was originally conceived in an HP lab in 2008. While it’s still “in the nascent stages”, Irving says he expect that by next year’s CGI the platform will be more fully developed.

“We’re creating an ecosystem where people will have access to the web whether they have a smartphone or a low-end phone”, he said.

And, of course, once people start using HP’s “entry-point” mobile web services, the company hopes they will eventually move up to its Palm smartphones.

After all, Irving says, “there are billions of people [in emerging markets] who could be HP customers.”

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