Simeon Oriko is a student at University of Eastern Africa – Baraton, and today he is talking about the Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm. He starts by saying that web experience cannot be superimposed on mobile phones. It can be terribly frustrating to find information using mobiles. For rural areas where he often does IT outreach to students at schools… if the information they need to fulfill their dreams is available online, and the students do not have computer access; they should still be able to find that information through mobiles. There is a long way to go.
He goes through the 4 problems of mobile web.
- Storage in mobiles is paltry
- Flaky connections particularly in rural areas
- Small display screens (I should also add differing display screens. @cellstories had to deal with this when the Droid came out)
- Flaky browsers. So many to choose from, optimized for different devices.
Solutions
- Put the processing in the cloud. Think Amazon EC2. Put the storage there too so the mobile acts as a dumb terminal of sorts. Storage space on mobiles is still quite expensive, but storage online can be very cheap, and processing information online is much easier that on mobile phones.
- Create a common platform that all mobile phones can share. Its tedious to make apps for the myriad OSs like Android, Iphone, Symbian, J2ME
- Integrating solutions like PesaPal
Think of the potential of processing information on the cloud and delivering it through mobiles. With the increase in mobile subscribers forecast to reach billions in future. Think of the young people who have dreams of being a pilot, a doctor…whatever. Can we meet the challenge of providing this information through mobiles? Can we develop applications that meet our local needs of educations on basic phones?
Attached is his presentation… I was greatly inspired by his talk… off to lunch to chat about this some more.Mobile Cloud Computing.pptx
Africa Gathering: Mobile Cloud Computing – A concept http://is.gd/5x90Y
Awesome post. I’m glad you were inspired by the talk. My hope is that someone will get a shot at their dreams because they had access to right knowledge and resources through mobile cloud computing.
Deffinately interesting stuff
Beautiful concept!! Sounds very promising and exactly the type of thought & solutions that must and needs to come of Africa that address our unique problem. The question now is if it can be implemented would carriers play nice with each other or do they run a separate walled garden? I wonder if Simeon has further developed his idea and take it the concept to the likes of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)? I would say the majority of websites that Kenyans or for that matter most Africans access are predominantly foreign sites so those foreign providers have to use and apply the mobile cloud computing concept if the African mobile must benefit from the concept.
Africa Gathering: Mobile Cloud Computing – A concept http://is.gd/5x90Y Africa can warp to the latest trend positively.
Interesting stuff that seems to already have been applied by Palm to back up info on its smartphones.With new tablets[ipad etc.] hitting the stores it will be interesting to see how they might integrate into existing corporate/educational structures for disseminating information given their additional screen real estate.