Ethan Zuckerman from Geekcorps gave an excellent presentation on the need to end the "digital divide" that exists throughout the world. In the course of his presentation, he showed a slode about the ilkone i800, a new brand of mobile phone, conceived in the Middle East. The name ‘ilkone’ is driven from an Arab word meaning ‘universe’. Here's how the phone was described on gizmodo:
Dubai-based start-up IltoneTel has announced their first handset designed for the Islamic community, the Ilkone i800. While the phone itself isn't that interesting in and of itself (it's even promoted as being "moderate looking"), the software provides some interesting and useful tools, including Hijri and Gregorian calendars (including date conversion), 5-method Qibla direction (for determining the correct direction in which to pray), English and Uthmanic versions of the Quran, and alarms with prayer times for more than 5000 cities (including the "azan voice," an audible call to prayer). The i800 should be available before year's end in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India (but not Dubai?).
Ethan's point is that there is a great deal of real business opportunity in creating products for the emerging world market. According to Ethan, they see a market of 350 million phones for this product!
pls try to help me with the software in mobile telecommunication (Handset)
Posted by: Usman Ibrahim Manga | February 26, 2005 at 04:53 AM