Smartphones have made everyone equal...

Smartphones have made everyone equal…almost

There, I said it.

Smartphones have achieved in years what governments have failed to achieve in decades even centuries of policy and spending. The poorest person with a smartphone can potentially have the same access as the richest to information and services through the internet, and soon, through the internet of things.

There is a social revolution happening silently, powered by people’s thumbs, their faces glued to a small bright screen at all hours of the day and night.

Loneliness? – banished,

Entertainment? – instantaneous,

Information? – always available.

Smartphones have penetrated horizontally across all social levels and vertically through every glass ceiling – we are all members of the same growing club, whether rich or poor.

So why do I feel like the more things change, the more they stay the same?

By way of example, I occasionally ride the train or bus to the office and I see a site familiar to all of us – people on their way to work either listening to music or interacting in some way with their phone. No-one speaks, no-one interacts, everyone concentrates within their personal space. And my mind wanders back to before the advent of the smartphone and I recall a similar ride to work, people reading the paper or magazine of choice, looking out the window, no-one speaking, no-one interacting.

So that aspect hasn’t really changed that much for most people.

Smartphones do provide unprecedented levels of access, however to be fair, achieving the most out them requires apps, and usually there is some cost involved. Most app stores require credit cards, whereas most emerging economies have very high proportions of un-banked or under-banked people, so economically speaking that divide most definitely still exists.

A colleague relayed a story to me recently about smartphone users in Iran and the problems they face. Not because they don’t have money, surprisingly, it’s because they can’t spend it online with the major app stores and in particular Google Wallet. They need to buy gift certificates internationally to redeem into one system, in order to have credit in another - simply so they can download and play a game.

So if smartphones don’t bring equality in their wake, what do they bring?

Opportunity.

Sadly, technology can never make us equal in and of itself. But it can be used to highlight the inequalities we overlook on a daily basis and be used to help us address them.

I realized shortly after arriving in Hong Kong in 2005, that there existed an entire strata of people who lived and worked in a cash only economy. I’m talking about the maids from the Philippines and Indonesia primarily. People who deal only in cash cannot enjoy some of the things we take for granted – such as online shopping. Why? They mostly don’t have accounts that provide them with credit or debit options. Why? Possibly because the banks simply don’t view them as prime customers or as a market worth addressing.

This highlights the inequalities of the system – for example, airfares available to domestic helpers may be considerably more expensive than you or I would pay because they are unable to source their tickets online.

So in this instance technology has widened the divide it was meant to bridge as it puts walls between good and services and some customers.

When I work with our team at Key Ideas to design systems such as Thred and the financial platform that will underpin its peer-to-peer technology, it’s important to me that we start at a place that involves solving a ‘real-world’ problem and not just creating a tech product because we can. In this way benefits emerge that we didn’t forsee at the outset – by enabling interactions cross-platform, we generate a mountain of traffic that didn’t previously exist for the platforms we link to.

Similarly, when we release the financial system we’re designing called EZPAY (note: this project is about to be launched as Pay'D), we will be enabling previously un-banked or under-banked people to have the same benefits and digital rights that we enjoy by default. And that in turn will create new economic and business opportunities by bringing a whole new audience online.

Building bridges, not walls is what the people of emerging economies need. And that is good business for us all because emerging economies don’t stay that way forever.