Dialstation: low cost radical business model and self-bank for the poor?
Dmytri Kleiner, with whom we had a lively discussion some time back, has launched an initiative which marries business and radical ideas, in the form of a very low-cost platform for international mobile phones.
Here’s the info as summarized for IDC. You can find more information at their website as well.
Dmytri writes that: “mobile phone is quickly becoming the world’s communication device.
- Far more people in the world have access to a mobile phone then to computers or even regular phones.
- Telephone credits, calling cards, and vouchers have become a sort of currency in remote places, being used as a payment currency in lieu of cash, which is often hard to transmit where bank accounts and Internet is scarce.
Why a calling product:
- Communication is important for trans-local communities and the growth of the informal economy. Two emerging trends we believe have the potential to shift power away from transnational corporations and nation states.
- The historic unbundling of the international telephone system along with it’s convergence with IP networks allows new calling products to be developed with highly skilled labour and relatively little capital.
Other criteria for Dialstation that make it suitable to the periphery:
- Dialstation can be used with a normal telephone and requires no special software, and perhaps no Internet access.
- Money held in Dialstation accounts can be transfered between accounts using the create voucher feature available to all users, this opens up the possibility for Dialstation to be used where bank accounts and credit cards are scarce to enable both market opportunities and gift
economies.
Next steps:
- Test Dialstation under actual international usage and fine-tune origination and termination issues. (and fix bugs of course)
- Extend the voucher system to a full-blown mobile-enabled distributed community currency system in partnership with the Ripplepay project.
- Encourage and support entrepreneurship in making Dialstation vouchers available where paypal and bank transfer are not used.
- Promote usage of Dialstation generally.”
July 7th, 2007 at 9:40 am
[...] Not all of us, but I do get the point. A heartbreaking number of indy ventures never get a chance to succeed or fail on their merits. They get drowned out in the roar over annoying gewgaws, trends and gimcracks. Same thing happens to people in the arts, for that matter. There’s a lack of the kind of sustained consideration that would at least give people who are taking a risk some feedback. Speaking of which. . . Hey, Jon! Michael Bauwens of P2P has written them up and there’s a post on them too from Phillip Smith, of Community Bandwidth. There’s also this interesting comment at neural.it: Telephone cards and vouchers have then become a sort of currency in remote places, being used as a payment currency instead of cash, which is often hard to transfer where bank accounts and Internet are not easily available. Thus money held in Dialstation accounts can be transfered between accounts using the voucher feature, available to all users, opening up the possibilities of being used for both market opportunities and gift economies. [...]