Supporting #mobile phones in #India

When you look at the distribution of traffic for #Wikipedia on the mobile phone, it is quite obvious. The "other" languages of India are not on the map. With not even one megabyte of traffic they hardly register.

As the Wikimedia Foundation has partnerships with Telecom organisations like Orange, asking them to help us promote our "other" Wikipedias is so obvious. Obvious because so far it was hard to come up with an argument explaining such a partnership.

The traffic by mobiles is so low, that this request to the Indian readers of my blog will actually register in the statistics. Click for instance here. A more interesting result will be had by clicking here. Some communities need to invest some effort to enable the mobile interface for their language.

So what can these Telecom giants do for us. They can provide a service to the people in India will show these languages flawlessly. If they want to do even more, they can make the browsing of mobile Wikipedia really cheap or even free.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What #Orange had to say at #glamwiki

Orange labs presented two projects they did with the Louvre and the Versailles palace. Projects Orange developed in partnership with these two GLAMs.

To be brutally honest, based on the questions, I think the objective of Orange was not understood. Orange is in the business of developing new technology to promote its business. The technology is to develop new applications for mobile telephones and develop an interest among GLAMs.

The question that was asked was: "is this application freely available". It is the wrong question because the it should have been: "is this technology available". The answer we got was that it is not freely available because it was developed in partnership with the Louvre and the palace of Versailles. The answer we were looking for was can we make use of this technology for our own projects.

The answer to the second question is dramatically different because you may only care about the Louvre or Versailles projects when you care about the Louvre or Versailles. Informing us about the lessons learned and enthusing about the possibilities of the newly developed technology is important to Orange. That is what generates new business for them and us.
Thanks,
       GerardM