Education
For years teachers have been battling against the use of mobile
phones in class. But that is changing as schools start to embrace the
sophisticated technology many of their pupils carry in their pockets.
At its most simple, teachers allow students to use the internet for
research. But imaginative lessons take it a step further. One teacher
describes a history lesson that required students to do mock archaeology
around the classroom to find hidden quick-response barcodes. Once
found, the students scanned them with their smartphones and video clips
about the subject appeared on their screens. And it is not just
secondary schools. Increasingly, primary schools are using iPads and
other tablet computers, which are quick to set up and young children
take to because they are so intuitive.
But the uptake has been painfully slow. Valerie Thompson is head of
the e-learning foundation that helps schools to provide children with
computers. "Schools are the last institutions in the UK to come to the
technology table," she says. "What technology allows teachers to do is
give children an individual learning experience; not give all children
the same lesson at the same speed in the same place."
Teachers, she says, will have an entirely different job in this new
world. "You don’t need a teacher who knows everything when you can go
onto the internet. The revolution is not the technology, it is the
changing role of the teacher to make the most of the technology."
There are already some 200,000 educational apps. One of publisher
Pearson’s products allows the student to do their homework on their
mobile device and participate in class, the teacher to analyse the
student’s performance, and the parents to see what they are doing.
These types of companies have been pushing mobile education for
years, but it is only with the rise of tablet computers that schools
have caught on. Apple chief executive Tim Cook recently said: "The
adoption rate of iPad in education is something I’d never seen from any
technology product . Usually, education tends to be a fairly
conservative institution in terms of buying and we’re not seeing that at
all on the iPad." Last week, the Scottish government announced plans to
spend around £30m on tablets for use in schools, colleges and
universities.
Juan Lopez-Valcarcel, chief digital officer at Pearson International,
says: "We’re reaching the tipping point in terms of adoption and
interest of mobile technology in the classroom. Soon we won’t be talking
about mobile education as a separate thing; all education will be on
mobile devices."JM
Books
The internet began changing the music and newspaper industries over a
decade ago, but its impact on book publishing was not felt until the
arrival of the tablet computer.
The digital revolution has been painful for record labels and press
barons, as the number of people willing to pay for what they produce
dwindles by the day. Book publishers, by contrast, have enjoyed a
smoother transition, largely thanks to Amazon.
The online retailer’s success may have sounded the death knell for
"physical" bookstores, and squeezed publishers’ margins, but its
popularisation of the e-reader has created a new market where digital
books can be sold, rather than pirated.
The Kindle appeared in the UK in 2009, the first iPad in April 2010.
Thanks to these two devices, instant gratification is now possible for
the book buyer and the result has been more reading. Studies say that
e-reader owners buy more books, and this summer Amazon announced that
digital formats had outsold paper for the first time in the UK.
Publishers are racing to adapt. HarperCollins employs a data analyst,
recruited from American Express, to monitor online sales around the
clock and tweak prices accordingly. Its venerable Collins World Atlas is
now an app, displaying its data on clickable globes. Nosy Crow, the
children’s publisher founded two years ago by former Macmillan MD Kate
Wilson, is doing a brisk trade in apps commissioned from the likes of
Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler, creating original content, rather
than "existing books squashed onto phones".
Amazon’s success is not without problems for publishers. While it has
modernised their business, its market power, particularly in the UK, is
almost completely unchallenged. The concern is that it will force
damaging price reductions on publishers, in order to pull in customers
with heavily discounted bestsellers.
Publishing houses responded by forming an alliance with Apple, which
allowed them to set the prices and the iPad maker to take a 30% cut on
every title sold. Bestsellers could then be withheld from Amazon if it
did not play ball on pricing.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos fought hard to have the
agency model outlawed, and he has now won his battle both in the US and
Europe, where most of the big publishers have offered to settle. Penguin
was not among them, but a merger is being arranged with Random House,
to create the world’s largest publisher – and a stronger base from which
to counter the might of Amazon. JG
Health
In Africa, mobile phones are not only changing lives, but saving
them. The prevalence of mobiles in Africa – there are more mobiles than
toilets and 10 times as many mobiles as landlines – has put them at the
frontline of the battle against HIV/Aids, malaria and deaths during
childbirth.
As the price of basic handsets drops below , the United Nations is
using them to bring healthcare to distant villages, rather than spending
millions building clinics. "You get a lot more healthcare for your
money [from mobiles]," Kathy Calvin, chief executive of the UN
Foundation, has said. "For decades delivering healthcare in rural
settings has been inefficient and slow. If you run out of drugs or
condoms, or there is an outbreak of disease, the only way to communicate
the problem is to write it down on a bit of paper. It was crying out
for a modern solution."
Calvin believes mobiles have the potential to have as big an impact
on global heath as Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in
1928.
In Tanzania, texts are being used to help eradicate obstetric
fistula, a debilitating condition that causes millions of stillbirths
across Africa and can make social outcasts of the mothers who suffer
from it. The condition can be corrected with a simple £250 operation but
many sufferers either don’t know they can be cured or cannot afford to
travel to the hospital.
"We have a nice big hospital, full of good doctors, but no patients,"
said Tom Vanneste, deputy director of a local NGO, Comprehensive
Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania, which provides treatment for
obstetric fistula, thanks to millions of pounds of funding from the EU
and Tanzanian government.
The problem has been noticed by Vodacom, the country’s biggest mobile
phone network, which has appointed a team of 60 "ambassadors", to
travel around the country diagnosing women with the condition. Within an
hour of an ambassador finding a patient, a date is set for surgery and
money for transport is texted to the ambassador, who takes the patient
to the bus stop.
Mobiles are changing healthcare in the UK, too. O2 has launched a
special service to allow relatives of elderly or vulnerable people to
keep tabs on their loved ones. The monitoring service, called Help at
Hand and dubbed "tag-a-granny", is designed to alert carers or doctors
automatically if a relative suffers a fall or wanders away from home
without warning.
Analysts at Juniper Research estimate global revenues from remote patient monitoring will rise to almost .9bn by 2014. RN
Farming
Farmers in Africa don’t have state-of-the-art tractors with
computer-guided ploughing patterns, satnavs and in-cab entertainment
systems like their western rivals. But they do have access to the latest
weather reports, planting advice, disease diagnostics and market prices
thanks to even the most basic mobile phones.
In Tanzania, local mobile operator Vodacom last month began a new
scheme which allows farmers to negotiate prices for their crops with
market traders without having to take their goods all the way to the
market.
The service is run using Vodacom’s M-Pesa mobile money service, which
has helped to transform financial transactions on the continent. In a
land where the vast majority of people do not have a bank account, money
can be transferred quickly and cheaply, directly between mobile phones.
In Kenya, the amount of money transferred by mobile phone each year
equates to 11% of GDP.
In Uganda, 500 community knowledge workers have been provided with
smartphones to download and disseminate the latest weather and
agricultural information to almost a million farmers. Most of the
information, provided by government departments such the agriculture and
meteorology departments, is displayed in text form, but Grameen
Foundation, which runs the project, is beginning to send images and
videos to help those with limited reading skills.
Even the most basic of phones can be turned into a vital tool for
remote farmers, including a service that can help predict when cows are
likely to give birth. iCow collects and stores milking and breeding
records, sends farmers best-practice advice and the location of the
nearest vets. The service calls itself "the world’s first mobile phone
cow calendar".
A report by Vodafone – which owns a majority stake in Vodacom –
Accenture and Oxfam predicts that enhanced mobile technologies could
help increase agricultural income in 26 countries by 8bn by 2020. It
also predicts that using mobiles to remotely control water pumps could
help towards a 6% saving in fresh water supply. The report envisages the
creation of a "farmer helpline" that would provide critical information
to agricultural workers and help them to deal with problems, such as
pests and the use of chemicals, that they face on the fields.
"Mobile telephony could have significant potential to help the
poorest farmers towards greater food and income security," says Barbara
Stocking, chief executive of Oxfam. "In Cambodia, the Philippines and
Indonesia, we are testing market information accessibility through SMS
servicing and in Bangladesh we are working to provide storm warnings to
fishing communities via mobiles." RN
Technology
The third coming of the web is upon us, and it is mobile. The advent
of the smartphone is changing not just pre-digital companies but also
those that rose to prominence via the internet.
Web 2.0 firms such as Google and Facebook are having to adapt to the
small screen. Failing to make the transition to 3.0 could cost them
their futures. Fears that Facebook would not be able to keep up with its
young customers – 600 million of its 1 billion users are mobile – were a
big reason its share price halved after its flotation. The picture has
improved this autumn. Founder Mark Zuckerberg told investors that in its
most recent quarter, 14% of Facebook’s ad revenues – some 0m (£94m) –
were from mobile.
These are not print ads scaled down. Facebook is succeeding because
it is reinventing the format. Among its new ideas are injecting
promotions for apps into a customer’s news feed, describing the product
and linking to the relevant page of the app store.
Mobile advertising is still in the research lab, finding new ways of
using location information, maps, calendar alerts and "click to call"
buttons. Restaurant reviews, hotel bookings and store sales are all
fruitful themes for advertising to those on the move.
Google has become particularly adept at this, and says that it
expects to earn bn from mobile this year, up from .5bn a year ago. The
number includes sales from its app store, but the "vast majority" is
advertising, according to Google’s finance chief.
So why did the search giant’s share price slump 20% before being
suspended on the day of its last financial results? Investors were not
just unnerved by a clerical error which pushed the earnings release out
early; they took fright at a rapid decline in the all-important "cost
per click" of Google’s ads.
The price paid decreased 15% from the same period last year, even as
the number of paid clicks on ads climbed 33%. Mobile advertising is
worth less than desktop advertising, which in turn is worth much less
than television and print advertising. Making money from mobile devices
is no mean feat, even for digital natives. JG
Retailers
It’s no longer enough for clothing retailers to fill their stores
with the latest fashions, as the popularity of smartphones feeds a new
mobile shopping culture. At the relaunch of New Look’s store in London’s
West End on Friday, model Kelly Brook, who designs a range for the
retailer, was clutching an iPad to demonstrate the use of Blippar – an
app that links smartphone users to extra video and product content on
the retailer’s website – throughout the store.
Tech-savvy shoppers are embracing these "augmented reality" apps,
which turn phones into barcode scanners that glean extra information and
gather online prices. Phone companies on the lookout for trends in the
millions of texts, calls and internet searches every hour have also
identified hotspots around changing rooms as shoppers photograph
themselves trying on new outfits, then beam the images to friends for an
instant verdict on Facebook.
The growing might of internet – and now mobile – shopping has spawned
retail industry buzzwords such as "multichannel" and even
"omnichannel", which attempt to describe how customers increasingly use
stores and websites in tandem. Retailers find that the more channels
their customers use, the more they spend. M&S says people who shop
on its website as well in its stores spend four times as much; throw
smartphones into the mix and they spend eight times as much.
Jon Copestake, chief retail analyst at the Economist Intelligence
Unit, predicts that by 2022 mobile commerce will be mainstream as
consumers make impulse purchases directly on their smartphones. Within a
decade, at least a third of UK retail sales will be rung up on phones,
computers and social media websites, he says, compared with around 10%
today. Copestake also predicts that bargain-hunting websites such as
Groupon and mysupermarket will have merged and expanded into
sophisticated sites tailoring and personalising the best offers for
consumers.
With the internet increasingly part of modern life, chains such as
Tesco and M&S are starting to offer free instore Wi-Fi as a matter
of course. Tesco boss Philip Clarke argues the tough economic climate
has made digital technology even more important: "People are shopping
online to take control of their budgets, seek the best bargains, find
out what offers best value," he told a recent conference. "By Christmas,
we reckon one in five online purchases will be via smartphones." ZW
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