Q&A with Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Vijay P. Singh

ASHOKA: What are some of the obstacles to mobile phone access and adoption of mobile innovations?
VIJAY: 1) Common Operating System and application standards – These are required particularly in low cost mobile handsets, adoption of these standards based on open source could help in furthering of services access on mobile platforms far and wide. Google’s Android initiative in this direction is appreciable. Open standard is the way to go, proprietary standards cannot help grow the mobile market. 2) Mobile Value Added Services  (VAS) is the future market – lowering entry cost barrier for owning a mobile device and Mobile Network Operators (MNO) connection can actually make accessibility higher and get more people connected. Usable mobile VAS could supplement incomes for both MNOs and service providers.

ASHOKA: What has the most potential in the mobile phone ecosystem to create even more positive outcomes in economic development?
VIJAY: 1) Decentralization of service support for mobile hardware devices, including suitable changes in hardware standard to enable capacity enhancement possible using a base hardware at local level. 2) Entry barrier for mobile services should be reduced by MNO, to enable mass expansion. 3) Common Networking standards across internet, would enable greater access a cross multiple platforms. 4) Mobile VAS is the way forward, MNO and Mobile Device manufacturer should enable level playing field for service providers to offer application enabling greater services access to clients. Low cost and volumes should be targeted instead of tying down clients in prohibitive contractual agreements. 5) Common Access Protocol should be adopted for financial and other such information based services transactions. Necessary regulatory changes in various country Banking norms and trade bodies should be advocated.

ASHOKA: What hypothetical invention or a new technique to solve one of the challenges that you think is most pressing in the field of mobile tech?
VIJAY: Software Sim Card – The necessity of having new sim card while moving into new networks (while traveling to different countries or sometimes in the same country), to save on “Roaming an Network cost”, could be resolved by having a software sim card. These sim cards could be downloaded at any time using a Common Access Protocol and paid to similarly. This sim card would solve a major bottleneck for clients, allowing them to use both sim cards (or more at the same tine), thus remaining always connected.

See Vijay's full Ashoka profile here.