The meek shall inherit the web

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: Safaricom’s airtime-sales agents, and send funds to each other by text message. The service is now used by around a quarter of Safaricom’s 10m customers. Casual workers can be paid quickly by phone; taxi drivers can accept payment without having to carry cash around; money can be sent to friends and family in emergencies. Safaricom’s parent company, Vodafone, has launched M-PESA in Tanzania and Afghanistan, and plans to introduce it in India.

Similar services have also proved popular in South Africa and the Philippines. Mobile banking is now being introduced into the Maldives, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean where many people lost their life savings, held in cash, in the tsunami of December 2004.

For the W3C, M-PESA and its ilk are harbingers of far more sophisticated services to come. If mobile banking is possible using a simple system of text messages, imagine what might be possible with full web access. But it will require standards to ensure that services and devices are compatible. Stéphane Boyera, co-chair of the new W3C interest group, says its aim is to track the social impact of the mobile web in the developing world, to ensure that the web’s technical standards evolve to serve this rapidly emerging constituency.

The right approach, Mr Boyera argues, is not to create “walled gardens” of specially adapted protocols for mobile devices, but to make sure that as much as possible of the information on the web can be accessed easily on mobile phones. That is a worthy goal. But Ken Banks, the other co-chair of the W3C’s new interest group and the founder of kiwanja.net, which helps non-profit organisations exploit mobile technologies in the developing world, points out that simple services based on text messages are likely to predominate for some time to come, for several reasons. All mobile phones, however cheap, can send text messages. Mobile-web access requires more sophisticated handsets and is not always supported by operators. And users know what it costs to send a text message.