Mobility

I feel like Martin Fowler when he tells how he wrote a post on the way to Singapore. Because the neat thing about this post is that it’s being written on the way from Santiago to Valparaíso, and it will be posted via modem over GPRS, something Fowler can’t do. Of course, he’s flying business class on a jumbo, and I’m on a plain Tur Bus coach.

Mobile broadband

I have to say the cellular network is pretty good in general, and mobile broadband is quite decent and already reasonably priced. I connect using that Nokia marvel, the 6230, and the link between my notebook and the phone is Bluetooth. How cool is that :)

Sure, that’s a privilege some of us Chileans have, but one we have to make sure reaches everyone. That’s why the ULPN project is so important, because putting PCs in every classroom is no longer enough. Mobility has been part of the equation for a while now. Computing is mobile, it will be everywhere, and we have to be able to operate on the move, and kids have to get used to that new reality.

Internet access for 7 million Chileans

In Chile we have a high cell phone penetration rate: over 50% of our population has a cell phone. But call prices are still high, which forces massive use of prepaid plans. That holds back the development of a services industry around mobility like the one in Japan, where each DoCoMo user pays just 4 dollars a month to use a wide range of services. Of course, that’s 60 million users. Still, that doesn’t justify the high prices, which are due to non-technical reasons, but I’m not going to get into that, for now.

The much-touted digital agenda talks about giving internet access to as many Chileans as possible. I say there are already 7 million users connected to the internet through their cell phones, and I’m not talking about mobile broadband, I’m talking about more basic technologies like SMS and WAP. I remember that some 3 or 4 years ago we offered to publish government news inside a WAP portal that Telefónica Móvil was setting up. The service would be free for 3 months, and after that a ridiculously small fee would be charged to access it; in fact, we proposed that some public services be free of charge. Of course the project got lost in the bureaucracy, and we ended up setting up an adult service, which made quite a bit of money, more than we imagined (of course it did, sex always sells).

M-government

WAP interfaces don’t have the popularity they deserve, but they are a cheap, simple alternative, especially with WAP 2.0, which is easier for designers. The other thing is that with SMS short messaging you can do more useful things than just entering contests or chatting. A small business being able to coordinate a sales force out on the street, or to provide field support quickly: all of that is possible with SMS. Finally, Java-capable phones are now quite affordable, and we can build high-performance services with minimal bandwidth use.

Mobile services will probably be more relevant in the near future, but we missed the chance to innovate here. People talk about e-government, but why not talk about m-government instead? It would bring in more users.

I’ll give just one example. A birth certificate costs about CLP 400. Well, who needs the paper? Suppose I go to the bank and they need my birth certificate. I send an SMS from my cell phone with my RUN (national ID number), and the service answers with a token (a short text, like a temporary password). I tell the bank executive that he can pick up my certificate using that token, and I give it to him. The executive goes to the civil registry’s website and “picks up” the certificate. Or he simply enters the token value into the system, because when it needs to be confirmed, the bank’s server runs the verification transaction against the civil registry.

Nobody had to go stand in line at any office. The citizen paid for the certificate through a micropayment channel like a text message. We have a digital certificate, covered by the electronic document law.

There are many more applications, such as cutting the lines at public health clinics. We know that many low-income Chileans have access to cell phones; it would be enough for them to send a message and get their appointment ticket along with its date and time.

There are budget problems, but using technology can reduce costs by freeing up (human) resources that can be assigned to more productive work.