And keeping with yesterday’s theme – a phone kiosk service using the Nokia 51xx phone – 0.50 Egypt Pounds (0.07 Euro) per minute. Typically the phone is chained to the kiosk – as seen in the bottom-right quadrant of the photo below.

Why should this be of interest tomorrow’s emerging markets service designers? Simply that the cutting edge functionality available on today’s mobile phones becomes tomorrows norm. In societies where a decent percentage of the population doesn’t have access to PC’s, dedicated digital cameras, camcorders, audio players and services such as banking what are the opportunities for intermediaries will step in and offer mobile services.

Barriers to market entry? The cost of a used phone, and some pre-paid credit.

The ‘street services’ space becomes mighty interesting when we head down the path of embedded technologies.