NYT: 'Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?'

The New York Times' Sara Corbett wrote a fascinating piece exploring the transformative potential of cell phones in a recent Sunday Magazine profile of a Nokia "human-behavior researcher" who wanders less-developed countries looking for design insights.

Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which mean that there are at least three billion people who don't own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

The article goes on to talk about the economic advantage of cellphone owners, its representation of "bottom-up economic development" and the potential of mobile-phone banking to revolutionize the industry. It's well worth a read.

Labels: mobile phone, News, phone