Yesterday was my second last day interning at DEF. Wrapped up my research project into the complex life of the mobile phone in India by happily dropping my report with a thud on Osama's desk. Created a nice sense of closure.
Today: the last day of my internship (can you believe it). Spending the day at the mBillionth awards, an all day conference and awards ceremony about mobile phone innovation in south Asia. Helped out with the registration rush first thing in the morning but the DEF team has things so well in hand now that I'm pretty much free to attend breakout sessions until called upon.
This afternoon's session: crowdsourced platform to report power cuts in the country, similar to canadian or US platforms for reporting potholes, only more of a nuisance factor. One person suggested that if people tweeted every time the power goes out in Delhi then it would regularly start trending on twitter.
Other interesting factoids:
- in some places people have developed a fairly sophisticated language around missed, or dropped, calls. One ring means this. Two calls in a row means that. Three means something else. All to avoid actually paying any mobile usage charges.
- apps built around a phone's vibration feature for the deaf blind
- Android is big here. I-phone, Nokia and Blackberry, not so much.
Anyway, it's been quite a trip interning here and an honour working with the DEF team. Big thanks to them for being so welcoming, being my tour guide and translator when I needed to speak to people in Gaffar Market, Seelampur etc, for introducing me to gol golpe (sp?) - yumm yumm - and for patiently explaining how to dial a phone in India.
Tomorrow morning, at what my mom would have called the crack of birdshit, I get on a plane to Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir, which should be quite a change of scene.
3 comments:
Congrats on completing your internship, must feel good. Didn't know you were off to Ladakh, I was there in '87, be fascinated to hear your impressions. When I got there (by bus from Srinigar) I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, literally!
Sorry we missed you, sounds like an amazing experience! We'll touch base back in Toronto. You are coming back, aren't you?
With a popultion of 1.22 billion,a geographical area of 14,103km...people still use simplistic concepts to communicate. one ring, two ring. three and more. Guess the KISS concept still stands true. Time flies. see you soon.
Post a Comment