Just having come back from a Paris Trip, I shut off my TMobile Sidekick 3 for fear of being charged 35 cents every time I got a Dodgeball SMS message (keyed into a New York Art Network with my friend Matt sending several messages a day) or getting and making phone calls at 1.99 dollars a minute …in favor of Skype, which cost me next to nothing - when I had the chance to a make a call. Orange is the mobile provider that came up for me when I turned on my Sidekick 3 at CDG and found it “kinda” worked …. and then shut if off for the rest of my trip.

But that’s just one slice of an evolving series of “micro mobile services” that are changing the way we communicate using mobile networks. In Creative destruction: izi killed the public phones

But now comes this new African twist:

Step 3-bis (”assertive” re-claim): Phone companies (like Tigo in Senegal), seeing that there is a market for small increments of phone credit and shared phones, introduce much more granular offers. For example in Senegal, Tigo offers billing-by-the-second (10 seconds for 20 Francs CFA, or $0.02), electronic recharges (”izi”, in Tigo’s Senegalese franglais) as low as 100FCFA ($0.20), and free unit transfers between consumers (available on the “Tigo Jeune” plan).

All of a sudden, users don’t need the ‚Äòpublic phones’ any more. In Senegal most of these t√©l√©centres have gone out of business. Bassirou Ciss√©, the general secretary of Unetts(*) says that “In 2000, there were 18,000 t√©l√©centres in S√©n√©gal, accounting for 33% of the Senegalese operators’ revenues and 30,000 jobs. Today, most of them have closed down.”

It’s not something I’m seeing in the United States right now - but it’s interesting to note that most of the innovation in mobile networking is happening in Asia and Europe, and not the United States or Canada. Maybe it has something to do with the legal and economic frameworks that prevent mobile technology here from being all it can be.

Just having come back from a Paris Trip, I shut off my TMobile Sidekick 3 for fear of being charged 35 cents every time I got a Dodgeball SMS message (keyed into a New York Art Network with my friend Matt sending several messages a day) or getting and making phone calls at 1.99 dollars [...]