Blended technologies for development 1

Report from the first one-day course on “Blended technologies for development”.

On Monday January 26th we were 23 IPID members that visited Ericsson in Stockholm for a full day education on Mobile technologies for development.

Ericsson started the day by sharing their view on what is happening in the field of M4D. They told us about their work with the Millennium villages and their project “Communication for All”. Recent trends and applications were discussed as well as the challenges and opportunities they see for the uptake of mobile phones. The major challenges they perceive are: infrastructure, affordable services, regulation and taxation. Solutions suggested mainly concerned the lowering of energy consumption – solar and wind power have produced some astonishingly good results. Furthermore, many personal stories of people in developing countries were presented to show how the use of mobile phones has managed to increase both their quality of life and income.

The most popular themes for the day were, however, the practical, hands-on demonstrations that we were given. The first demonstration took us on a historic journey from the very first telephones to the first “mobile” phone (not so mobile actually) up until today.

The second demonstration was in Ericsson´s Site City where we were physically introduced to different solutions for base-stations, antennas and power supplies. The Site City enabled us to see these solutions in a real life setting, which highly deepened our understanding. After this we were demonstrated the future trends within mobile technology including a miniature beamer that projected what you had in the phone extremely well.

After a long, informative and entertaining day we were all very satisfied with what we had learned.