July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While volunteering at an orphanage in Ecuador, former Amazon executive David Risher came across a padlocked library. When he asked the orphanage’s leader why it was locked, she said that the key was lost, the books were out of date, and the children were uninterested in reading. That’s when Risher decided to set out to make books more accessible to people in the developing world.

He founded Worldreader in 2009, a nonprofit organization that puts Kindles and electronic books (e-books) in the hands of children and their families. Today, WorldReader expanded its program by launching a mobile application that will deliver e-books to millions of people around the world.

“Worldreader has this crazy vision that every child on the planet should have access to the books they need to improve their lives,” Risher said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Mobile phones are the way people in the developing world stay connected and learn about the world around them. This is an opportunity to have an enormous impact on education in these parts of the world.”

Fifty percent of schools in sub-Saharan Africa have few or no books, while the USAID found that nearly ever home in sub-Saharan Africa has access to at least one mobile phone. Worldreader Mobile is designed for low-end feature phones most commonly used by people in Africa and Asia. Users download the free app and have access to a library of 1,200 books, ranging from romance novels to health textbooks.

Feature phones don’t high processing capabilities and usually operate on slower 2G networks. Furthermore, users cannot afford to spend a large amount on data. The new mobile program takes all of this into account. Worldreader partnered with BiNu, a platform that improves Internet connectivity on mass-market phones, to develop the app. All the data processing happens in the cloud, rather than on the phone, and the data is compressed so people do not rack up high charges while reading.

After months of beta testing, Worldreader Mobile is already on five million feature phones around the world. The organization has over 500,000 active readers a month, and they spend 60,000 hours reading on their phones. In January alone, people consumed roughly 17,000 books on their mobile phones. Risher said the biggest mobile market is India, with 106,000 users, and that the app see use from teachers caregivers, siblings, parents, and children.

Risher formerly served Amazon’s senior vice president for retail and marketing. After leaving Amazon, he took a trip around the world with his wife, their two daughters, and two Kindles, which were just coming to market. Growing up, Risher spent hours at the library and went on to major in comparative literature at Princeton. Reading has always been his passion, he said, and many of the opportunities he had were a result of having books in his hands.

“We heard there were 200 million kids in sub-Saharan Africa with no books,” he said. That is a whole generation of children who are growing up in a world with no culture of reading. Publishing, printing, and shipping books is expensive and books are often out-of-date. But beaming books into kids hands over a cell network should be easy.”

The first Worldreader program began in Ghana in 2010, which distributed e-readers to 20 students. Worldreader works with publishers around the world including international companies and small local publishers alike, to distribute their content, and the digital library includes over 440,000 e-books. This mobile program is a significant step for the organization because it does not require procuring and delivering devices, but works with the technology people already own. It will greatly expand Worldreader’s reach and scale and make books of all kinds and subject in the hands of those who need them most.

“Worldreader is a combination of my pragmatic and romantic vision,” Risher said. “It was opportunity to take technology and put it to a higher use. As I look at my own background, loving books and working at Amazon, it was a way to tie it all together and find a way to change world that taps into my passion and skills.”

 Photo credit: Worldreader

As Secretary of State, Clinton focused heavily on creating programs that promote international commerce. The theme of the conference was to celebrate the global impact of the many public-private partnerships formed under her tenure and to celebrate the launch of four new initiatives, including the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which collectively are valued at around $86.5 million.

“In the 21st century, diplomacy and development is not in any way confined to government-to-government relations,” she said. “Those have to be tended, those have to be respected, those have to be nurtured and grown, but at the same time, in this increasingly inner connected networked world, we wanted to reach out people to people […] Many of the challenges we face extend beyond traditional political and geographic divisions. How do we grow the global economy and give those hundreds of millions of young people, men and women a chance at a decent job?”

Access to the internet and digital literacy skills are vital for securing gainful employment, both at home and abroad. Clinton stated that only 25% of people in developing countries are online, as opposed to 75% in the developed world. A “key element” of economic growth and innovation is to lessen this gap and “help the next billion people come online.” Making the internet more accessible and affordable is a stepping stone towards economic independence and empowerment.

In an article this morning, Bloomberg reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin delved deeper into the story surrounding the Alliance and its implications. “If successful, the project could end up helping many people in poor countries get onto the Web. It could also cement long-term ties between the State Department and the companies- while opening new markets and reaching new customers for Silicon Valley.”

Dwoskin interviewed Ann Mei Chang, a “25-year veteran of Silicon Valley” who left her job as  senior engineering director at Google to join the State Department in November of 2011. Chang moved to Nairobi, Kenya which many have pegged as Africa’s emerging tech hub, and began investing why Kenya has had greater technological success than its neighbors. She said that in most developing countries, an entry-level internet connections can cost as much as an individual’s monthly income. This is primarily due to high taxes on equipment like computers, mobile phones, and modems; a lack of the physical infrastructure (IXPs) to support the Web; and telecommunications monopolies that limit access to infrastructure or make it prohibitively expensive to set up.

Addressing these barriers is a critical part of making the internet accessible to underserved populations.

“The idea behind the Alliance is to use corporate and diplomatic power to push foreign governments to change was and policies- in this case, the obstacles that governments put up to wider Internet penetration.”

There is a lot of excitement right now about emerging technology hubs around the world and the potential for online educational, health, and social companies to create meaningful change. Change, as I learned as a Peace Corps volunteer, is most significant when it comes from within. Internet access may not be a basic human right, but the right to work for fair pay, the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, and the right to education are. Without shaping policies and infrastructure at a foundational/national level that promote equal access and digital literacy, the ability of the internet to transform the whole world is restricted.

If that doesn’t sell you, just think of the impact a billion new users will have on the growth prospects for U.S. tech companies.

Watch video of the press conference.

It may sound like an impossible dream, but two designers in London have built functioning prototypes of GravityLight, a cheap way for people in developing countries t0 light homes, recharge batteries, or power a radio. And they just exceeded their Indiegogo fundraising goal by more than 500 percent with 21 days left in their campaign, so they’ll have the resources to mass-produce the light for less than $5 a unit.

Source: GravityLight

The GravityLIght comes in the bag that will be filled with dirt or stones to power it

Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves have spent four years developing GravityLight, which uses the Earth’s gravity to generate enough power to light an LED bulb for half an hour — no electrical grid, batteries, or any external generator required.

Using the GravityLight simply requires removing the small white lamp from its bag, hanging it up, filling the bag with about 20 pounds of dirt or rocks, and attaching the bag to bottom of the device.

Gravity powers a generator, light fills your room, and every 30 minutes, you hoist the bag back up.

The goal is to provide clean, efficient light for the 1.5 billion human beings on this planet who still do not have reliable access to electricity and use kerosene-powered lamps. According to Riddiford and Reeves, the use of kerosene results in vastly higher cancer rates due to smoke inhalation, and 2.5 million burn victims due to dropped or jostled lamps every year in India alone. Not to mention the cost: 10 percent to 20 percent of a household’s income in the developing world can go to fuel for lighting.

The initial run of 1,000 GravityLights will be distributed for free to villagers in Africa and India, the designers say. Based on the results, they will tweak the product and then seek NGO and non-profit organizations’ help in distributing it even more widely.

Here’s their explanatory video:

Thousands of backers have contributed anywhere from $10, which gets a thank-you, to $100, which pays for three GravityLights to be sent to needy villages in developing nations, a GravityLight of your own, and several other perks. And four sponsors have signed up at the $5,000 level to help the project succeed — and get their names and logos on the initial run of devices.

Image credits: GravityLight Project

Latin America is rife with opportunity — especially for mobile-minded, feature phone-friendly apps and startups — and a new fund has just launched to capitalize on those opportunities.

The fund is Amérigo, a public-private network of venture capital funds; it was officially launched today by Telefónica, the fifth largest mobile carrier in the world and formerly a part of the Spanish national telecom monopoly. The fund network totals around $377 million and is intended to be “an international network of capital for those investors and industrial partners that want to participate in the acceleration and financing of high potential technology companies,” we read in a release on the news.

So, why would one big mobile carrier care so much about jumpstarting tech startups in an area of the world so underserved by the larger international community of VCs?

To find out, as always, we’ll follow the money.

While Telefónica has its roots in Europe, it is rapidly expanding through Central and South America. In those regions, it operates Movistar, a Latin American mobile carrier that is the largest operator in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Peru.

Telefónica also owns a majority stake of Columbia’s government-owned telecom monopoly, and it owns 100 percent of Bellsouth Panama and Bellsouth Guatemala. It controls the largest landline operator in Argentina, and it is one of only three mobile carriers operating in Ecuador. The company is also buying smaller mobile operators and negotiating government contracts in places like the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.

Clearly, Telefónica has a vested interest in promoting web and mobile (and mobile web) innovation in the region; its services are only as valuable as the information, entertainment, and communities its customers can access using those services.

Amérigo will begin with a focus on Spain, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil. Later efforts will focus on China, where Telefónica has a partnership with China Unicom. Funding for entrepreneurs will come from private sources, such as companies and individuals of means, as well as public sources, such as government programs.

The arrangement, while set up for the ultimate profit of the investors (including Telefónica), will likely be a win-win-win for all parties involved. Innovators and entrepreneurs in underserved or ignored areas of the world will have more opportunities to get funding and grow businesses; investors will get new dealflow in rapidly growing markets; and Telefónica will get the technology it needs to keep its customers buying mobile services and bandwidth.

That’s one of the conclusions of a new report commissioned by consulting and outsourcing company Capgemini. The company interviewed 16,000 people in both mature and developing nations to understand today’s digital shopper.

“Shoppers in developing regions place greater importance on all digital channels,” Brian Girouard told VentureBeat.

For example, 72 percent of shoppers in India and 69 percent in China say they’re more likely to buy more products online in a single shopping spree than in a physical store. That compares to just 31 percent in the U.S.

In addition, more than three quarters of respondents in China characterize themselves as either social digital shoppers or digital shopaholics. Only 14 percent say they’re techno-shy or only occasional online shoppers … but the corresponding number in the U.S. is 27 percent.

Part of the reason is infrastructure, says Girouard. Developing nations don’t necessarily have the entire shopping ecosystem that mature economies often have, with malls, superstores, and strip malls. But also, Capgemini found that developing nations tend to to skip our historical approaches in favor of the latest tools and formats … especially mobile.

Source: Capgemini

Digital shopper segments by country

Across all countries, half of respondents believed that physical stores are destined to become simply showrooms in the next eight years. But in mature economies the number was only one-third, meaning that more than half of those in developing countries expect traditional stores to die.

That’s problematic, of course, for those with a stake in traditional retail. But Girouard still sees a future for stores:

“Large amounts of in-store stock will not be as necessary as shoppers become more comfortable with having their purchased items delivered to their location of choice at a time convenient to their schedule … having a shopper — potential buyer — in your store is a tremendous advantage, and retailers must provide an inspiring experience or “inspirience” for the shopper.”

And social? How will Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media channels affect retail?

“While only about half of shoppers expect the use of social media and mobile apps for shopping to increase significantly in the next three years, the number is considerably higher in developing markets and among young shoppers as well as digital savvy shoppers who are already using digital channels and devices, and those shopping for high-end products like electronics.”

Here’s the full infographic:

Image credit: Capgemini

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton just launched the GSMA‘s ambitious, new campaign to bring mobile access to 150 million women in low and middle-income countries within the next 3 years. The GSMA is the trade organization for the world’s mobile carriers and 20 carriers operating in 115 developing markets, including AT&T and Vodafone, have signed up for the campaign. Nokia has also committed to the program.

This isn’t just a charitable initiative for the mobile carriers. Two thirds of the 1.25 billion people in the world who have mobile coverage, but don’t own a mobile phone, are women. This untapped female market represents an enormous revenue opportunity ranging from US$740 Million in Latin America to US$4 Billion in East Asia.

Across all the targeted countries a woman is 21 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. This figure increases to 37 percent if she lives in South Asia. Women in rural areas and lower-income brackets are least likely to own a phone but often borrow phones regularly. The main barrier to ownership is cost. When the price of a mobile phone service drops below 5 percent of household income, ownership among the female population starts to increase dramatically.

Access to mobile services has major benefits for individual women and the economies of their countries. According to the GSMA’s report on women and mobile, 93 percent of women in developing countries reported feeling safer because of their mobile phone and 41 percent said they had increased income and professional opportunities once they owned a mobile phone. Mobile phone ownership is also an engine for economic growth. Research by Deloitte linked a 10 percent increase in mobile penetration to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP.

20 percent of women who don’t own a phone say that the reason is because all their communication is local. According to research from mobile payments company mChek in India, even among women who are not willing to pay for voice services, a subset would value mobile money services enough to pay for mobile access. This is because lower-income women have few options for saving or transferring money securely.

As part of the mWomen campaign, Vodafone has also launched an application competition for apps targeted at the specific needs of women in developing countries. There is a $10,000 prize for an app in each of the smartphone and feature phone categories.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in-depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.