Oct 20, 2014

Smartphones in Ghana: Jenna Burrell on Marketplace

From Marketplace, from American Public Media

Making a smartphone for just $25

by Queena Kim

Here’s a market you’ll be likely to hear more of in tech: “The Next Billion.” It's shorthand for the next billion people that will become online consumers, and that makes them the target of tech giants like Google, Facebook and Samsung.

The next billion live in emerging economies like China, India, Brazil and Africa. Jenna Burrell, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, has been studying one of these markets, namely Ghana, since the early 2000s. She says even back then, it was clear that people who wanted to get online weren’t going to use desktops.

You know it’s a small number of people who were going to Internet cafés, but almost everyone was either using, or owning or getting possession of a mobile phone,” Burrell says....

Burrell shows me a phone she bought there. It has an antenna for the built-in transistor radio, and it has a flashlight for when the electricity goes out....

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016