Maria Auma: The Mobile Phone Era – and all that comes with it

A lot is happening in the tech world and will continue to happen for the next decade. It may come as a surprise to those outside this fascinating tech world that technological inventions were predicted as far back as the mid 1800s by none other than Jules Verne. 

Jules influenced science fiction into present day reality with his extraordinary gift of envisioning a future well beyond his time. He believed in the power of the human brain to create things that were in his time preposterous. Besides his most famous book "Around the World in Eighty Days" (worth reading if you haven’t read it yet), there was one concise yet astonishingly accurate piece he wrote that to this very day keeps me marveling at his literary abilities; "In the Year 2889" a short story written by Jules and published with the help of his son Michel that speaks about the advancement of human life eight centuries from now. I daresay, some of the aspects he mentions about computers and cutting time in more than half are already happening. 

We see teleconference services and webinars like Skype ease communication in real time between different time zones. Landlines are being phased off for more convenient portable handsets that are themselves evolving into smartphones. Verne predicted wider roads and sky-scrapers, infrastructure that we already see today. 

And yet new inventions keep cropping up every single day in Africa and around the world. Young tech enthusiasts work late into the night trying to find that one big product that will be the world's first love. Funny enough, society is changing just as rapidly. What people loved three years ago is being replaced with newer social addictions. Myspace was the biggest thing, until Facebook showed up at its door, then Twitter, then Instagram, an app based platform and then, for the developing countries, Whatsapp became the king of social interfacing. Whether it will supercede the dominance span of its parent company is yet to be determined. However it is safe to say that the Whatsapp developers really invested time into their product to make sure it was the one that gave them and the world of communication the big break.

In Uganda for example, money transfer applications has been the frenzy. And banks have jumped on board, supporting tech lab development because they want to decrease the speed of time spent in transactions at the bank. If you walked into Centenary Bank on a back to school day, you would marvel at the enormous lines that seem to twist and turn through the waiting areas leading up to the teller. If you don’t have the stomach for extended waits, you might just about cancel your banking errand that day. This is where technology comes in to play.

Recently, Barclays Bank South Africa announced a new initiative dubbed “Rise Africa” where a bunch of young entrepreneurs pitch forward their app ideas in exchange for mentorship, seed funding and business development. The apps have to demonstrate a unique benefit to the financial sector, say for example, improved banking experiences, financial education etc. This however is not the only example of a banking-mobile application marriage.

Mobile money in Uganda started 2008 with MTN Uganda pioneering mobile money transfer. Not long after, the other telecom operators followed suit. And then the banks jumped aboard. Now banks are designing their own mobile applications in attempt to provide a much more convenient banking service. For example, Bank of Africa as recently as two years ago launched the “mobile wallet”, a very handy application that allows customers to make transactions without the hassle of going to the bank. Think of it as a paypal account with all the banking functions.

The interesting aspect about it all is the interrelation between the inventions that preceded the innovations. For without a smart phone, apps would not find their platform; without computers, smart phones would not have been birthed as handier devices to carry out the same tasks; without electricity, creating these electronic devices would never have happened. One invention led to an innovation that sparked a one billion dollar idea in a tech enthusiast. 

We need more sector applications being innovated from within Africa by the youth. Applications that enhance and ease the way we interact with each other, and that build productivity. A phone is now much more than a calling and texting device. If used wisely, it can be used to improve livelihoods. Tools like e-books to have on the go, calculators to compute costs, speech-text recognition, social interaction at reduced costs so you can speak for longer and explain in detail, applications designed to share files across platforms all contribute to improved productivity if managed well. And again, the key component here is time management.

Maria Auma is CEO of Blue Luxury Investments, Kampala, Uganda.

 

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