Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

This is an interesting New York Times article on a "consumer anthropologist" who photographs and documents human behavior for Nokia, in order to design more usable and relevant cell phones - especially for the global poorest, who are the last untapped market for otherwise ubiquitous cell phones. Maybe this is an approach that can be used to design other useful products for the proverbial "Bottom of the Pyramid"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magazine/13anthropology-t.html

Some excerpts:

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.