Tammisto was speaking at the Finnish Foreign Ministry event on publishing the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) survey “Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlooks in Turbulent Times".

Janne Rajala, Senior Manager, Nokia Siemens Networks, in his own comments underscored the importance of general liberalization of the markets. Nokia’s surveys have revealed that most of the costs in mobile telephony consist of various kinds of taxes and subscription fees.

MobileMonday has been actively participating in African mobile development. Tammisto emphasized mobile technology as an actual, multi-faceted dynamic force. In the best possible case, it could make e-banking services available to those living in developing countries, enhance the transparency of administration, and facilitate empowering social innovations.

Tammisto thinks that the most important objective is to use ICT for encouraging people towards entrepreneurship, citizenship and participation. Operators in particular should understand to support the actual needs of their customers and enhance their loyalty instead of concentrating on competing with the price alone. In his remarks Tammisto said: “It is important to understand the impact to local cultures, capacity beyond access to ICT usage. We need to understand how the available services are used, how innovation is encouraged and enabled, how the private sector and especially SME’s and micro companies can be supporting agriculture and other the local industries, how the government collaborates with the private sector and what is the role of NGO’s.

“The ICT sector should be viewed as an enabler for other economic sectors, as well as a source of economic growth in and of itself. The ICT sector provides larger opportunities for SMEs in development of applications, in delivering information technology and in business process outsourcing services to other sectors, such as education, health, finance, and agriculture. “For the success, it is vital to nurture entrepreneurs (business and social) via business incubation, open knowledge share, plan competitions, academic-industry R&D, and entrepreneur community networks.” In Tammisto’s view the most important and effective service is bringing the financial services to the community.

Have ID, will do banking

“If we consider the case of Uganda where 6 months ago financial services from banks were only available to 5% of population. The rest of economy is still fully cash based – providing enormous inefficiencies, fraud, gender inequalities like physical abuse. Compare that to Kenya where it is 47% of all money transfers are taking place thru mobile phones.”

“Now the government and private sectors in Uganda have set up a plan where 15 million of the people are brought to the formally managed economy thru combination of central bank approved ID cards and mobile financial services. Imagine the difference in people’s lives where earlier they had to travel on foot long distances to pay in cash for all services. Now they can settle their accounts online.

“The entire economy is transformed. Individual accounts are safe, they ever draw interest, and people can make payments even for international transactions. This is increasingly important, since international remittance is becoming fastest growing source of revenue to many countries. In Uganda the incoming remittances were 650 million us dollars is 2007 and 1.4 billion dollars in 2008.

The implications go far beyond financial services. Right now 75% of African population doesn’t have bankable ID’s. What happens when they get official, transactional ID’s? There will be huge opportunities in healthcare, education and other citizen services. Political processes are also impacted. The manipulation of elections will become a lot harder when the community gains tools to monitor them. Disabled beggar gains income and pride To describe the impact of mobile communications on people’s live, Tammisto quoted a blog entry by MobileMonday activist Tomi Ahonen.

Ahonen wrote about Gambia and how disabled beggars become mobile communication dealers. Gambia is a very tiny country on the Atlantic Ocean side. It has a population of 1.7 million people. The capital is Banjul and the biggest city is Serrekunda, with about 140,000 population. Over 70% of the country is agricultural and the only significant export crop is the peanut. English is the official language and over 90% of the population is Muslim. The GDP per capita is 380 dollars or a dollar per day.

Yet they have mobile telecoms. Even competition in mobile telecoms. The national mobile phone penetration rate is still very low, at only 18%. The one hundred dollar cheap laptop is totally beyond the reach of the average Gambian, it would mean four months of their total income, not four months of their disposable income.

Tomi Ahonen wrote that he has not visited professionally countries as poor as Gambia, and has no first-hand knowledge of their phone markets. He was basing his story on a lunch discussion with Mr Almamy Kassama, the Director of Customer Service at Gamcel, a Gambian mobile operator, in Hong Kong.

“One of the most heart-warming stories he told, was about disabled people who used to be beggars on the streets in the cities of The Gambia. The nation does not have a strong social framework to support those who are disabled, so the disabled had been forced mostly to a life of being a beggar on the streets. They would typically sit in the sunshine all day, asking for a coin or two from passers-by.

“The Gambia has a significant tourist industry especially from English-speaking countries, and it would often be tourists who would then provide most of the money to the beggars. Much due to the specific locations of tourist destinations, and significant other 'good spots' for begging, location-location-location apparently hold even for beggars - the same beggars tended to be in the same locations.

“Gamcel decided to do a little experiment and offer the disabled of The Gambia a chance of part-time employment. They offered the disabled the chance to sell SIM cards, ie mobile phone subscriptions. As part of the 'dealer kit' they offered sun shades, umbrellas, which had the Gamcel logo.

“As a single disabled person, the beggars had no 'power' to ask for support of the local policemen, who would know the disabled persons very well but did not bother to protect them, as they seemed to be at the bottom of the order of power. Gamcel as the big national telecoms company, came to the police department and asked that the police extend their protection to their disabled 'dealership network' and almost overnight, after a few highly publicized arrests and prison sentences, the crime towards the disabled had almost disappeared in the Gambia.

Working – as always – long hours

“As they were accustomed to working long hours begging, these new entrepreneurs were not concerned about working past the official hours and would happily serve their regular clients late into the night if one needed a top-up or a new SIM card etc.

“The disabled of The Gambia then organized into an association, with paying dues, and now offer a basic social services care system, such as assisting with the costs of death and burial, if one of their members dies, etc. “Through this type of micro-employment these disabled people rose above the national average in income, earning far more than a dollar per day, out of their commissions with Gamcel SIM cards and top-ups. They also had now the sunscreens, the umbrellas, that they would never have afforded to buy from the income of their begging.

“These disabled also now can afford to be connected, they have their own phones and they can serve their customers even more. And when their own sister or brother or parent or child has a special day, a birth day, etc, they can call and congratulate, and even afford to save a little bit of money to buy a gift.

“But most of all, these former beggars have gained employment, and a true sense of achievement and accomplishment. Pride in their lives.”

"We are really pleased to have the launch event at the Orange concept store in Bucharest," said Jari Tammisto, CEO and President of Mobile Monday. "Romania is fast becoming one of the largest mobile markets in Europe with nearly 30 million users, we are committed to building the bridges between the Romanian mobile development community and rest of the world", Tammisto said.

GoMobile 2009 is organized by CommTechAsia Sdn Bhd together with Multimedia Development Corporation, the custodian of MSC Malaysia, as its Strategic Partner and Maxis as Pinnacle Sponsor. Yellow Pages Malaysia is Diamond Sponsor and Ericsson is on board as Gold Sponsor. A host of other companies namely RRecords, Dapat Vista, Raffles International College, M3 Technologies, Cyberview Sdn Bhd, i-Pixel and Bitemark are also partnering to make this year’s edition of Malaysia’s Ultimate Mobile Lifestyle Event a thrilling, fun-filled and learning experience.

CommTechAsia Director, Kashminder Singh said that building on the spectacular success of GoMobile 2008, which drew close to 60,000 visitors, this year’s show will be spectacular. “Not only will visitors enjoy great bargains and offers on handsets, accessories and packages, the GoMobile Expo will also feature daily mobile lifestyle fashion shows and appearances by music artists. GoMobile will truly showcase mobile lifestyle in action. “I can assure visitors that GoMobile 2009 will be multi faceted and very exciting. Visitors will experience mobile technology in action through mobile downloads of the show directory, Bluetooth based treasure hunts, text based registrations and more. Mobile World magazine is repeating its overwhelmingly successful promotion from last year by giving away free phones to the first 50 subscribers every day at the expo.”

“We at MDeC fully support GoMobile 2009 and hope that this showcase will encourage more Malaysians to leverage on mobile technologies to take their businesses operations to new heights as well enhance their own lifestyles,” said En. Kamil Othman, Vice President, Multimedia Development Corporation.

Kashminder added that GoMobile is contributing towards achievements of national ICT targets. “Mobile broadband technologies will be prominent at GoMobile 2009 making it a perfect avenue to disseminate information and for visitors to experience mobile broadband. We hope that through this showcase of mobile lifestyle in action, more Malaysians will embrace these technologies and help the nation achieve its target of 50 percent broadband household penetration by 2010.”

Among the major activities planned at GoMobile 2009 include:

Mobile Fashion - Mobile Fashion Shows daily in collaboration with Raffles International College. Visitors will vote via SMS to choose their favorite designs.

Mobile Entertainment - an Entertainment Zone set up by RRecords with artists appearances, listening stations and mobile downloads. RRecords is also creating a special GoMobile theme song for the expo.

Multimedia - two photo competitions namely The Cyberjaya Mobile Photo competition in collaboration with Cyberview and the GoMobile Photo competition. In addition, a mobile video competition will be hosted by TrulyAsia.tv.

The Mexican mobile market provides many opportunities for the development of innovative businesses and as a consequence international industry players as well as the start-ups and venture capitalists, have focused their attention on this market.

Addressing the market potential require tight networking and collaboration among industry participants, and this requirement led to the creation of the Mobile Monday Mexico Chapter, founded by Arturo Robles, managing director, Noon Venture Consulting and Mauricio Delgado, executive vice president, Agave Mobile, with the objective of becoming the leading community for mobile professionals in Mexico.

The second issue MobileMonday e-zine is now available. It covers Momo-community internal news as well as the community’s interaction with the global mobile industry from CTIA in Las Vegas to Digital Africa Summit, Communic Asia in Singapore and announcement of MobileMonday Global Summit in Vancouver right after the Winter Olympics.

You’ll find both issues here.

MobileMonday annouces the web debut of "The Mob Rulz" flash e'Zine.

The premiere issue has news, reviews and announcements of past and upcoming events ranging from LA to Barcelona and Vegas to Singapore.

The competitors have been selected by local MobileMonday chapters based on the originality, creativity and innovativeness; technical and operational feasibility; and economic and financial viability.

An international jury of industry experts, investors and entrepreneurs will select the 20 finalists that will present on stage in Barcelona on February 16, 2009. Last year’s jury included representatives from Telefónica, Vodafone, Google, Yahoo!, AdMob, MobHappy, GoMoNews, Nexit Ventures, and Xtract. There are startups signed up to the competiton at least from from Buenos Aires, Boston, Berlin, Sweden, Belfast, Dublin, Jakarta, New York, Chennai. Mumbai, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Madrid, Barcelona and Finland.

Previous MobileMonday Peer Awards winners include Realeyes 3D, Mobile Complete (now Device Anywhere) and Plazes in 2007; Buzzd, Funambol, Taptu and Kimia in 2008.

The Mobile Peer Awards will take place in the Petit Palau of Palau de la Musica on February 16, 2009 from 16H till 20H.

Opened almost exactly four years before the Mobile Peer Awards event takes place, on the 18th of February 2004, the Petit Palau hall is a new auditorium with 538 seats. The space features cutting-edge audiovisual equipment and has a modern, multi-purpose foyer for receptions.

The PICNIC Green Challenge offers a 500.000 Euro award for best green initiative in the field of lifestyle, design, mobility and communications technology. The Chairman of the Jury is Sir Richard Branson.

As part of the cooperation with Amsterdam Cross Media Week Foundation, organizers of PICNIC, members of the MoMo community are entitled to a 10 percent discount on any conference ticket bought up until the event. MoMo members use the discount code: 272010 during their ticket purchase at the conference website.