Technovelopment Tools

We may be just a few days into 2008, but already there are some signs of new technologies and new applications that will shake our world up over the coming year... Let's take a look and see if any of these offer new tools or new potential on the economic development side of things.

At first glance, 2008 brings a lot more of the same, just with more bells and whistles.  Apple will release its iPhone 2.0, with a few extra features like GPS.  HDTV will continue to drive new TV sales in the developing world.  Superfast Internet (with speeds of 160Mbps or more) will start to appear, but only where there's a cutting edge infrastructure in place to support it.  It's hard to see many innovative connections to development strategies here...

But there are some areas of interest.  Computer hardware manufacturers will begin to increasingly shift away from magnetic storage fro computer memory, and into solid-state hard drives.  This means computers will become more durable and rugged, which may help with their viability in more remote areas.

But the most interesting development of the year - and the most mysterious, in terms of understanding its potential impact - is likely to be the introduction of Google's Android phones.  Android is an "open source" operating system for mobile phones, designed to be flexible and continuously upgradable.  In theory, this system could make all Google applications (search, maps, etc.) available via cellphone, as well as several new applications such as "GPay" which would allow cellphone-based transfers of money from one bank account to another.

Because Google is going open source with the project - that is, because they are making the basic computer programming platform on which the phone operates freely available to anyone who's interested - it is likely that many different companies will rush to manufacture Android phones, and that a fair percentage of these will be low-cost models suitable for markets in developing countries.  Many others will work to develop new software applications that can be sold or marketed to Android users.

If that's the case, this could put significant new cellphone-based communications and computing power into the hands of a lot of people in a lot of places that don't yet have this kind of access.  It remains to be seen what impact this could have, but it likely means that there's at least one good news story for development advocates coming down the technology pipeline in 2008!

Next: Unleashing the eBay effect for community development