NextBillion - A WDI Publication

MChek Aims to Grow 10-fold in Five Years with Telecom Majors

Bangalore: Sanjay Swamy has hit it off with the big daddies of telecom and banking— Bharti Airtel Ltd, State Bank of India and ICICI Bank Ltd—offering their customers options to make payments over the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone. The cheery Swamy heads Bangalore-based start-up mChek India Payment Systems Pvt. Ltd. Its payment feature comes inlaid on every subscriber identity module (SIM) card issued by Airtel and Tata Docomo, allowing customers to use it through a b...

Source

LiveMint.com (link opens in a new window)

Region

South Asia

Nokia Launches Its Cheapest Phone Yet for Emerging Markets

Nokia has unveiled the 1280, a mobile phone for emerging markets that is 20 percent cheaper than its predecessor, the 1202. The unsubsidized cost of the 1280 is €20 (US$30), which makes it Nokia’s cheapest mobile phone yet, according to a Nokia blog post . But the prize squeeze won’t end there: The concept of a €5 mobile phone doesn’t seem s...

Source

PC World (link opens in a new window)

Region

South Asia

Welcome to China’s “Wild West” of Capitalism

Not long ago, Tsoi Chun Bun made potato chips. Now he designs and sells millions of mobile phones a year. He is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs seeking overnight fortunes in Shenzhen Inc. — the Wild West of the mobile-phone industry. Phones made and designed by these Chinese vendors will account for about a third of the 1.1 billion cell phones that will be sold around the world this year.... ...

Source

San Jose Mercury News (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

MBAs Turn to Social Enterprise

By developing a low-cost structure and specialising in maternity care, LifeSpring Hospitals, a fast-growing private healthcare chain in India, can charge Rs2,000 ($43, €29, £26) for a normal delivery, a cost that runs to Rs12,000 in mainstream Indian private hospitals. Learning how to deliver services to the world’s poorest consumers is not what MBA students aspired to. But with a new wave of students looking to use their business skills to tackle global problems, stories of so...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

Peddling Trash: Waste Management and Income Generation

Daily quantities are sold for daily needs in Nairobi’s ever-growing slums. Called the kidogo economy, Swahili for ’little’, laundry detergent, margarine and anything else manufacturers haven’t packaged in small boxes are divided and resold in tiny affordable sachets. In this context of severe urban poverty, micro-enterprise isn’t a buzz word. It’s a lifestyle. So it’s appropriate that a solid waste management program ...

Source

The Ecologist (link opens in a new window)

Categories

Finance

Tags

waste

The Internet Address Goes Global – with Local Languages

Bill Radke: The Internet address goes global. The company that acts as the world’s clearinghouse for Internet domains is a California-based non-profit called ICANN. Reporter Kurt Achin says ICANN is about to help the Web speak the local language around the world. Kurt Achin: Up until now, Internet users have had to type out web page URLs using the Roman alphabet. But on Friday, ICANN’s board -- meeting here in Se...

Source

Marketplace (NPR) (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

At the BoP, Companies First Need to Create the Market

Around the world, four billion people live in poverty. And Western companies are struggling to turn them into customers. For the past decade, business visionaries have argued that these people, dubbed the Base of the Pyramid, make up an enormous, untapped market. Some of the world’s biggest, savviest corporations have aimed to address their basic needs—by selling them everything from clean water to electricity. But, time and again, the initiatives have quietly ...

Source

Wall Street Journal (link opens in a new window)

BoP Guru Named World’s Top Business Thinker

Few management thinkers have the ability to come up with one winning idea after another. C.K. Prahalad is a rare exception. He has the remarkable ability to be ahead of the times. Look at any of his key ideas — be it core competence, co-creation or the bottom of the pyramid — Prahalad’s influence on the study and practise of management has been immense. It is no wonder then that for the second time in a row, the Indian-born management guru has earned the distincti...

Source

Forbes India (link opens in a new window)