The conference call with Orange earlier today went better than expected.
Orange is quite strong in West Africa where it has large market shares and is the leading company in 12 markets. They have been doing quite a bit of CSR but apparently they have hit a wall as this has not translated into market opportunities. In any event, they are currently working on:
- Education
- Agriculture
- Civil registration and birth certificates
- Land registration, management and GIS
- Mobile identity
- Scaling-up
After presenting our approach to mobiles, I made a pitch for citizen participation and crowdsourcing. They were receptive to these ideas as they are keen in making a big push for SMS applications and effective government response to people’s claims and demands.
Int he end, we agreed to meet F2F in NY sometime in November. One of the colleagues of Orange mentioned that GSMA is organizing a Mobiles for Development Summit that till take place in Cape Town in November. Details are here.
Thanks to our Insights posting, a rep from GSMA contacted me. We will be meeting in London next week. Orange is also working closely with GSMA.
Talking about a networked world.
Cheers, Raúl
