Report:W3C International Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries

This is the report of the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries, held in Bangalore, India on 5 and 6 December 2006.  

Following a proposal of the MWI Steering Council, W3C held an international Workshop to start investigating the idea of using the Mobile Web as a means to bridge the “digital divide” and to leverage access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for populations in developing economies. Here are some observations that helped motivate the Workshop:

• today almost 80% of the World population is covered by a GSM network,
• more than 2 billion people already have access to a mobile phone,
• high speed mobile data networks are available,
• we are seeing increasingly-affordable web-enabled phones;

In light of these observations, the aim of the Workshop was to understand the people’s needs and expectations, and the specific challenges and issues of accessing the Web from a mobile phone as a primary and often sole platform, so that the potential of resolving the divide becomes reality.

The Workshop gathered experts in mobile technologies, and NGOs, organizations or individuals with ground experience and expertise in the digital divide in order to initiate discussions between the two communities and to gather use cases and potential challenges to be resolved.

Over the two days, five panels presented different view of the challenges of accessing the Web through a mobile phone in the developing world.

The first one discussed on the potential mobile applications to help rural communities and participate in their development.

The second panel discussed some challenges about network technologies and potential solutions.

The third panel was on technology - what mobile browsers can do, statistics on mobile web usage in developing countries, and Java technologies to facilitate mobile applications development.

The fourth panel presented different initiatives, mostly in Africa, to understand what are the usage and needs of people from the developing world in terms of ICT.

The last panel was on specific UI Design problems within mobile phones, particularly with respect to internationalization.

Link : W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries (Bangalore,India)

Source: W3C Mobile