Africa's Tweet Data Means Nothing

It is a well-known that due to the availability of digital technology, there is a surfeit of data that represent human behaviour than ever. And yet the availability of vast amounts of data does not mean that it is necessarily more accessible or comprehensible. For instance, Portland, a firm that tracks technology uses has presented the results of its research in a chart appearing in image on this post and appearing on this datablog by Simon Rogers of the Guardian. The chart presents data on the the volume of Twitter messages sent within African countries. As is possible the image looks neat but I am certain that the chart tells the casual observer virtually nothing except that it was prepared by a person who does not understand the data that was collected.

To start with, there is a diversity of countries in Africa and so presentation of the absolute numbers is useful. However, there are number of school boy errors that emerge from that presentation. First, the placement of the data side by side invites comparisons among countries and creates the ranking system that the developers of the charts displays. This ranking is not possible because of the differences in population among these countries. Second, given the failure to account for the populations differences that are truly vast, the data cannot provide information that the heading of the chart purports. This second error may not be the fault of the data collectors but I suspect that the Guardian's data editors would spot this. The volume of messages are definitely provided by a different number of people in each country.  

Why Blame Powerpoint?

I learnt from watching this Ted Talk by Julian Treasure that silence and listening is an invaluable, if increasingly rare, skill. As a result, I try to keep at least three minutes of absolute silence every day and dedicate that time to letting my mind go through small thoughts. A few days ago, in my musing, I wondered why one I always hear more calls for banning things than for letting people decide for themselves.

Looking at an article in the Guardian, I received an email link to this piece by Julie Bindel covering the quest by a determined political group that wants to ban the use of Powerpoint in Switzerland. I agree too that some of the worst presentations that I have sat through were by people who misuse of Powerpoint while thinking that flashing pictures and flying bullets on the screen is replacement for intelligible presentation. It may well be that the existence of Powerpoint reduces the cost of producing full colour gibberish. Despite that fact, it seems that this political party is mistaken in thinking that use of flip charts is a solution. tTo start with, it is obviously paternalistic for anyone to insist on another's use of flip charts in addition to the fact that this solution fails to reckon with the fact that poor presentation is often a sign of poor public speaking skills and cluttered thinking. In my view, one cannot resolve that merely by changing presentation tools.

This reminded me that it is often much easier to build a political case around what should be banished from society than what decisions should be reversed. To my mind, it would be helpful for people who sit through pPowerpoint presentations to remind presenters that colour and theatrics do not a good presentation make. pPerhaps it would help for someone to just stop a presenter and ask, "Assume that you did not have the graphics, what would you want me to know?"    

Two Bungling Mobile Phone Companies

I have not been to business school but I think that there are keen lessons to be learned from focused case studies of leading businesses in order to understand how enterprises are managed and how they respond to the market conditions of their time.  The GSM Association's mobile briefing here addresses an instance in which two mobile phone corporations reversed certain business decisions that they made. The author uses the article to illustrate how poor consultation or testing of ideas prior to full-scale roll did leave the strategy managers of these firms with some egg on their faces. 

One must agree that the situation is ironical for a number of reasons. The first one is that mobile phone corporations would be expected to understand clearly the needs of their customers and the strategy teams are probably meant to watch closely trends to ensure that they are in touch with changing client needs. As Richard Handford states in the piece, the two corporations based in the UK seemed to have "failed to read their clients mood" and with disastrous consequences. 

Secondly, while humility in a fast changing industry is necessary, I am really surprised that these corporations which trade on the ability of people to exchange information seem not to have a method for testing and filtering views among their large client base. I would think that with such a large client base, it would occur to strategy managers to test such an initiative among a small but significant portion before its roll out throughout the network. The big lesson for me is that mistakes do happen in business environments but that even corporations that are data rich have not found ways to make sense of that data that they receive, store and transmit for their clients. Perhaps I should correct myself because if internal strategy teams could easily do this, then the high end business consultants would have to find other work.  

US Networks and 4G Services

One of the profound things that i learned from the book Simplexity is how modern electronics gadgets are crafted by very smart people but who are not perfectly alert to the vast difference in technical knowledge between them and users of those products. It is conceivable that  most of the technical specifications that electronic gadgets bear are not very meaningful to most buyers. To my mind therefore, this chasm of knowledge has made marketing professionals to use technical details in advertising for products in order to make them appealing to the buyers while fully aware that most of the facilities on those gadgets are hardly understood and even unlikely to be used.

David Goldman of Yahoo Finance confirms that these marketing tricks have been deployed by some mobile telephony networks in the US that claim to have upgraded their services to 4G capability when they clearly have not. The author claims that this is the result of a PR mess while I think that the main issue here is the deliberate quest to take advantage of the consumers who are none the wiser.    

Does Electronic Money Have a Future?

Conventional wisdom holds that mobile telephony and related gadgets will form the entry point for low income countries to enter into and expand the digital economy. It is true that usage of mobile telephony in developing countries has developed so phenomenally and surprised many business analysts. indeed, with the exception of radios, I consider mobile telephony as the second most ubiquitous piece of electronic gadgets in most households in developing countries. Mobile phone service providers are now on the frontiers of innovation in these countries as they try to leverage on the largest networks available in order to provide other services.

One of these services is the M-Pesa service featured in the BBC news item that is available in Kenya that pioneered the use of mobile telephone platforms for the transfer of money and completion of payments. Essentially, the service relies on text messaging to allow payments to be made by one subscriber to another and is convenient for traders and people who wish to transfer money. It is unlikely that electronic transfers will altogether replace cash transactions soon because mobile telephony is not yet universal in many low income countries. Despite it wide acceptance, it is highly likely that claims such as use of electronic wallets to pay dowry are anecdotal. However, it is clear that further inovation will follow because every mobile network operator is developing a competing device. Of interest to me would be what innovations follow from creating the ability to transfer funds across networks.

How Vietnam Reached Mobile Penetration of 140%

Many people claim that the huge changes that have been attributed to computers in higher income countries will only be recorded in lower income countries through mobile telephony. The main argument being that the infrastructure required to utilize the mobile telephone is developed by the network operators and often through private developers. Evidence that supports this is that many low income countries have a quantum of mobile telephones that far exceeds the penetration rate of computers hence the mobile telephone is the development tool of our time.  For many developing countries, it is often stated as a matter of pride that the penetration rates of mobile telephony has gone beyond 50% and that this is  rare and important technological feat. 

Looking that this edition of the GSM Association's newsletter, I was amazed that Vietnam has a mobile penetration rate of 140%. In spite of Vietnam's really furious pace of economic growth over the last decade, this number is still worthy of understanding especially since the profile of countries with perfect penetration at 100% is very different. To start with, they tend to be small Baltic states and northern European nations where technology development is clearly ahead. 

Like other developing nations, the high rates of mobile telephone penetration in Vietnam and other countries reflects different circumstances. Among these are that many of these countries have corporations that are uninterested in interconnection hence the tariff across networks exceeds that within networks. The clever response from users is therefore to hold multiple SIM cards in order to communicate in the cheapest way. This is confirmed by the view that a number of callers have as much as three separate numbers. Secondly, the absence of number portability means that many of the mobile telephone users are unwilling to change their numbers by migrating to another network. In some instances, reactivation of lost SIM Cards is more onerous than simply acquiring a new one and so the subscriber base is smaller than the total number of SIM cards in issue.     

Registration of Sim card ownership is ongoing in many jurisdictions including Kenya, India and other countries but Vietnam seems to be trying to limit ownership to three. It is not clear to me what this will achieve as the acquisition of SIM cards by itself does not harm to the networks or subscriber. However, the government of Vietnam, which has a hand in all the mobile networks seems to think that Sim Card ownership ought to be rationed.    

Governments Find Blackberry Devices Too Secure

Soon after President Obama was elected, it was a matter of concern that he was reluctant to accept the surrender of his famous Blackberry phone and communication device. At the time, the concern was that the nature and extent of presidential communication required a high degree of security that would not be guaranteed by such a service. I blogged here that the Research In Motion, the corporation that manufacturers the device would take that as a challenge to assert that the degree of security for that device would make it fit for presidential communication.

Some two years later, a different set of governments have pressured the RIM into some concessions on security based on the thinking that the device provides a very tight level of security that national governments of a number of Asian countries cannot reach.  As the dated piece in the NYT states here, governments of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and India are concerned that by guaranteeing a high level of privacy in communication, the security of states may be compromised. It seems that the device is not fit for a president but is too safe for citizens half a world away.

Images are subject to copyright and extracted from RIM website.

Full of PowerPoint

One thing for which I give credit for professionals in the military is that they understand the need for clear communication. I am not surprised therefore to read here that the US military uses PowerPoint presentations a lot in explaining strategy and for information across ranks. And yet the story emphasizes that a number of officers are frustrated with the uses of PowerPoint as a tool because it fails to capture detailed connections between separate ideas.

As I see it, one is bound to suffer frustration with a tool such as PowerPoint for a number of reasons. the first one is that many people who use the facility forget that it does not dispense with the need to communicate clearly. And so choice of flashy slides is good but that still requires that the presenter should understand the substance. So I cannot be as sure as some people are that Power point is the problem though I have seen enough people forget that it is a tool for communication that should be used with a lot of forethought.  I favour power point in situations where there is limited time as it may help one to construct the presentation by thinking in a sequence. It may just be that the tool is inappropriate for certain levels of communication.