Press Room
>The Spread of Android
>The Android team at Google has just produced a video that shows the growth of new activations of Android phones throughout the world. It’s very impressive to see how from a trickle in late 2008, users are now coming to the platform in floods, in particular after the Motorola Droid came out. You can even see how the major urban centers like New York or Paris are the first ones to adopt, followed by smaller cities.
Of course, the action right now is mostly taking place in the richer countries. But you can already see a nice amount of activity in Latin America, most of Asia and even Africa. The question is, when will the trickle there take off. What phone will play the role of the Droid in Mexico, for instance?
But there is no question that the flood is coming and that raises the hope to quickly close the digital divide. At Frogtek we are extremely excited and will be expecting it with excellent apps for the Base of the Pyramid.
>We have won the mWomen App Challenge!!
>
Today at the Mobile World Congress awards ceremony our CTO Guillermo picked up the award for the best smartphone application that benefits women at the Base Of the Pyramid. As you can see in the picture, the award comes with a generous check of $10,000.
We participated in the online challange, competing with a total of 63 entries from all over the world. You can see the video we prepared to describe our application here.
Other than the great recognition and funds, we’ll get special access to Carmel, a venture capital firm, and to Frog Design, a design consultancy.
So THANK YOU so much GSMA!! And special thanks go to Vodafone, Guillermo’s and my former employer, who sponsored the challenge.
UPDATE The official press release from the GSMA can be found here
>Expanding the Moral Sphere
>Two weeks ago Echoing Green held its annual conference for all its Fellows. It was a great break to get together with friends and fellow social entrepreneurs, learn about each other’s exciting developments and strengthen the bonds of a fantastic community.
As part of the weekend activities, EG hosted a Be Bold Summit with ten presentations at a beautiful venue in UT’s campus. I was invited to speak and decided to focus on the history of social entrepreneurship through a concept borrowed from Peter Singer: the expanding moral sphere.
Here you can see a video with the complete chat:
>The evolution of smartphone prices
>It is well known that Moore’s Law models the exponential growth in processing power and the exponential drop in its cost. IT technology is constantly getting cheaper and better at a fast clip. But it is harder to visualize the impact of that progress in the sales and prices of electronic gadgets.
The Washington Post has just created a great visualization that shows this effect in the most common gadgets we use:
You can clearly see the exponential growth in US sales of feature phones and the reduction in their price. In 1998, the average one cost $268 and 27M were sold. In 2008, these numbers were $112 and 102,8M.
From there on, sales started dropping. Why? Simple: smartphone sales were taking off. From less than 8M in 2005, sales have grown to 54M this past 2010. Meanwhile, the average price has dropped from $537 to $325.
That’s a more drastic change than what we saw with feature phones. In my opinion, the reasons are the existence of honed distribution channels and the pull of the internet and apps. Since both causes are also present in emerging markets, I hope the spread of smartphones there will be even faster. And Google seems to think the same way!