November 15, 2009 - Reflections on my Mississippi Genesis

“What Fifty Said” by Robert Frost

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past

I began life in the care of my grandparents—more precisely, my grandmother and my step grandfather. With them, I was an only child living in Mississippi in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those first few years were lived in two worlds. One was in a farmhouse six miles outside of Brooklyn, Mississippi, even today a small one-street rural town, near the train tracks of the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad and Black Creek. The house had electricity but no indoor plumbing. Water came from a hand-pump well and food was cooked over a wood-burning cast iron stove. An icebox kept perishables from doing so for a day or two. The second world was Biloxi, Mississippi a thriving, fast-growing city with a population of 37,000—20,000 more than it had ten years earlier. Biloxi was on its way into the 20th century but holding on to its 19th century wink-at-the-law ways.

On the farm, there were chickens, pigs, milk cows and a horse or mule—I can’t remember which (perhaps both). I do recall following along behind the horse- or mule-drawn plow guided by a relative of my grandmother or step grandfather as it slowly turned the field making a tearing sound as the roots of grass and weeds laying claim to the land were ripped from their mooring. I remember the horse or mule—eyes blinder-bound—straining to pull the plow through the resistant ground and I remember the smell of the newly exposed earth dark and moist, its edges drying from the heat of the sun. The fields on either side of the house were under cultivation at various times with potatoes, okra, string beans, watermelon, cucumbers, corn and sugar cane. I remember my step grandfather cutting and presenting me a sugarcane stick to suck on, which in addition to potatoes and watermelon were about the only things we grew that I wanted to eat. I was compelled to eat the rest.

The foundation of the farmhouse sat atop large tree stumps all around the perimeter of the rectangular shaped wooden structure. The stumps were arrayed underneath the house at stress-bearing points. On the occasions I venture among the stumps, I found the cool dark area filled with spider webs, lizards, field mice, and a wide variety of insects, the damp smell of mildew and no doubt mold. It was just another mysterious place to explore. It never occurred to me back then that raised foundation was a precaution against flooding. My grandmother’s homestead (it was hers) was near Black Creek, which ran behind my grandmother’s property though a good walk down a hill from our back door. It rained a lot in Mississippi and the creek would overrun its banks. The property, which lay on the edge of the De Soto National Forest, was constantly being overgrown by native pine trees and brush and it was muggy. Land was often purchased simply to harvest the trees that covered it.

Daily chores I recall included collecting eggs from the chicken coop in the morning, an enclose affair with a wooden roost with nests for the chickens to lay their eggs. An enclosed surrounded the roost where under the watchful eye of the rooster the hens ambled about during the day pecking the ground for unexpected tiny prey or spilled grain that came under foot, all accompanied by the sound of their continuous clucking. Outburst of bird songs and the grunting of pigs mixed with the chatter of the chickens created the cacophony of the barnyard. The sound of crickets, filled the evenings and nights, which were completely pitch black during the new moon, but countless stars filled the sky. On such nights, I had the feeling that I was completely alone with my grandparents and that there was no world beyond the farm. I knew that there were other families living in the surrounding countryside as we would visit them or they would come to our place for Sunday dinner; the women folk catching up on all the gossip that had transpired since they were last together, the men sitting smoking and erupting in sporadic conversation interrupting stretches of silence.

There was a length of time, perhaps a year, when my parents returned with my sisters to live with us—my father intent on earning a living farming after a tour of duty in the Army. He had re-enlisted after the war so he could return to the Philippines and bring my mother and me to the states. Rather than take me to Ft Benning, Georgia, where my father was ordered upon returning from the Philippines, my parents left me with my grandmother, who had asked to have me stay with her. From Ft. Benning, my parents moved to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, where the oldest of my three sisters was born. From there, they moved to Camp Stoneman, California, near the city of Pittsburg, where my second sister was born and where my father was discharged from the service.

That was when my father returned to the farm with my mother and my two sisters. It took a year for him to realize that farming was a hard way to earn a living for someone who had spent his working life, outside the Army, in construction. He re-enlisted and reported for duty to Camp Stewart, Georgia, where my third sister was born. My life with my grandparents continued after my parents and sisters left, though we moved from the farm to a rented place in Biloxi, 55 miles south on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. After a short stay at Camp Stewart, my father was ordered to a tour of duty in Germany and my mother and three sisters returned to live on the farm during my father’s absence. One of my father’s army buddies, drove my mother and three sisters back to the farm on his way to his next assignment. As I would discover the enlisted man’s Army produced countless acts of kindness that were repaid in kind. My father’s sergeant’s salary went a longer way when there was no rent to pay and only electricity and groceries to buy each month.

While my mother and sisters lived on the farm, my grand parents and I lived in Biloxi and visited them on the weekend. My grandmother worked in a restaurant on Beach Blvd, Highway 90, which hugs the coast from Pass Christian through Biloxi to Pascagoula in Mississippi. My step grand father worked in construction at Keesler Air Force Base. We rented a wood frame house in the colored part of town that has since been torn down. I went to school with neighborhood playmates and in the evenings we ran free along the sidewalks and backyards of the neighborhood, a striking contrast to my solitary escapades on the farm with only the animals and my adult relatives to interact with.

Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1720 was the capital of French Louisiana until it was moved to New Orleans three years later. Though not as well known, the former has much in common with its Louisiana neighbor. Tourist came to Biloxi because, much like New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities of the 1940s and 1950s, it was wide open with illegal gambling widespread. The city resembled Las Vegas as hotels such as the Pine Hills, the Edgewater Gulf, the Tivoli, the Buena Vista, and the White House openly offered roulette wheels, dice tables and slot machines. Slot machines appeared in grocery stores and other businesses and, though the act of using them was illegal, owners paid federal and state tax on all slot machine that operated anywhere in the state.

Roadhouses for the white population offering gambling were called “honky-tonks,” and for blacks the roadhouses were called “juke joints.” I don’t recall being in a juke joint but I do remember sitting at what seemed to be a bar, kneeling on a stool eating fried chicken and French fries with my fingers from an oval red plastic basket lined with wax paper. The bartender laughingly remarked to my step grandfather how much the boy seemed to be enjoying his fried chicken—funny the things you remember from childhood. I also recall driving with my grandfather at night along the coast road, the bright lights of the restaurants, motels, and other businesses along either side of the road a joy to behold as I knelt on the front seat looking out the window—better than television and so unlike the solitary, moonless nights on the farm.

To visit my mother and sisters over the weekend, my grandparents would drive the 55 miles from Biloxi to the farm seven miles east of Brooklyn—a one-block town with drug store—one where the pharmacist actually mixed the prescriptions himself, post office, and a few other stores—along the Brooklyn-Janice Road. It’s funny that I don’t have vivid memories of my time spent with my sisters other than to recall my mother feeding my youngest sister hominy grits mixed with egg yolk and fresh churned butter. Sometime during his tour of duty in Germany my father was involved in a car accident that shattered his hip. After recuperating in Germany, he was flown back to William Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso, Texas. My mother’s uncle, who lived in San Francisco drove out, picked up my mother and sisters and drove them to El Paso, where my father was assigned during his rehabilitation. I stayed behind in Biloxi with my grandparents, their relationship of over 20 years beginning to strain. My step grandfather was a good timing man and my grandmother had gotten tired of being a good-hearted woman.

The break finally came a year or so after my mom and sisters reunited with my father in El Paso. My father had completed his rehabilitation and was given the option to receive a medical discharge or continue his tour of duty. My father back on his feet and with little or no residual affects from the crash decided to remain in the service and the army assigned him to Ft. Bliss. When he received the call from my grandmother that she had divorced my step grandfather, she told him she needed a medical procedure and didn’t have the money to afford it. My father said he would bring the two of us to El Paso, where he would claim her as a dependent. She could have the procedure done at William Beaumont.

And that’s what happened. He took the bus out from El Paso loaded my grandmother and me and our belongings in the Pontiac that my grandmother got out of the divorce settlement, and drove us west. Back then my father didn’t believe in breaking up a road trip and drove the entire 1100 miles stopping only for gas. We arrived in El Paso in the early morning and I remember waking up later in the day inside my parent’s rented house. The first thing that struck me about El Paso was the absence of the lush green that engulfed us in Mississippi. There were no shade trees and the sun seemed incredibly bright. The ground was dry, hard, and rock strewn. Small houses on 9000 square foot lots looked out on the gravel road my parents’ house was on. The street rose for about two miles heading west at a good grade to the foot of the Franklin Mountains. The further up the street you went, the fewer houses lined the street, which eventually dead-ended. One thing you could say about the neighborhood, there were no two houses that looked alike and all of them looked in need of some repair or another. The desert is hard on man made structures.

Shortly after my grandmother and me arrived, my father found a larger house for us in Ysleta, Texas on the outskirts of El Paso. Less than a mile from the Rio Grande, the house had trees in the yard and lots of bedrooms. I remember going into first grade at an elementary school near the house. I recall being put into a class that had already started the school year and having to catch up with my studies as well as make friends with a room of strangers, most of them white. The students in the school I had attended in Biloxi and Brooklyn had been black, though the color difference wasn’t something I remember. I felt equally alienated in both, though over time I blended in with the others, just another kid struggling to recognize, articulate, and write letters, numbers, and words.

While I was acclimating to school (my sisters still too young had not yet started), my grandmother was being examined and prepared for the medical procedure she had come El Paso for. The plan was that when she left the hospital, she and I would return to Mississippi, no doubt back to her life with my step grandfather. She couldn’t live with him but she absolutely couldn’t live without him. I can’t remember how I felt about being one place or the other. I only knew that I would be going with my grandmother where she chose and that was okay by me.

But life is never a matter of clear alternatives as the two roads in Robert Frost’s poem suggests. It chooses its own direction and the protagonist in his life story suddenly finds himself in an alternative universe. My grandmother died on the day she was to be released from William Beaumont Hospital and we went into mourning as my father made arrangements for the funeral. My grandmother and I made the journey back to Mississippi, she within her coffin, on a train; me in the Pontiac with my parents and my sisters. She was buried in the cemetery next to St. John Baptist Church near our farm in Brooklyn. I returned to El Paso with my family and began a life completely different than the one I knew before. And as Frost so eloquently pointed out “…that has made all the difference."

October 6, 2009 - Trapped in a enclosed space at Stanford Radiology MRI Lab for 90 minutes

It’s Monday morning, October 5, 2009 and I’m being shot up with gadolinium in my left arm as I lay strapped onto a sliding table the width of my shoulders and over seven feet long. I’m in the home stretch of a procedure that will eventually run for around 90 minutes. Having arrived here at 7:00 o’clock this morning and voluntarily submitted to this procedure, I’m in a room that reminds me of the sterile inside of a UFO as abductees describe it. Set to accommodate the huge white General Electric MRI machine, the temperature makes me feel chilly, dressed as I am in flannel one-size fits all open-front hospital gown and baggy pants. The long table I’m on is at the mouth of a tunnel that is three-feet in diameter. (Freud would have a field day.)

I began the day at 5:30 this morning, outside still dark with the temperature in the low 50s Fahrenheit. It’s the ideal coolness for my morning run that I’m delaying to drive to Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto for an MRI of my heart my doctor has ordered. I have a heart muscle that has shown signs of wall thickening as a result of 30 years of daily running. Though this occurs in everyone who regularly exercises vigorously, doctors are looking at heart wall thickening as a possible cause of athletes, who appear perfectly normal, keeling over from heart failure. This can occur for a whole host of reasons: leaking heart valve, undetected heart damage from disease or injury or a genetic heart defect, among others. Considering the over-60,000 miles I’ve put on my heart over the years, I’m expecting this MRI angiography to eliminate all of these culprits.

The drive north from San Jose to Palo Alto retraces my commute in past years, having worked in offices at Waverly and Lytton and Emerson near Hamilton: North on Monterey Highway to just past East Alma Avenue, there a right turn and then left onto Third, north to East Reed Street and right for a block and right again on South Fourth Street and the on-ramp to Interstate 280. On 280 west for less than a quarter mile, a San Jose Police Cruiser merging into the lane just ahead of me as we both begin the 50-MPH right curve atop the elevated on-ramp from 280 to Highway 87, the Discovery Museum barely visible off to our right and on our left two separate lines of headlights streaming to confluence with us at the San Carlos Street off ramp from 87. Cars from the two left lanes wanting over to the right; most of the cars in our lane wanting over to the left to avoid having to exit the freeway. Finally, the police cruiser—on its way to the police garage‎ on North San Pedro Street at the end of its shift—and I merge into the slow lane of 87 and begin the northward run to Highway 101. All of us spend our lives going somewhere, the stream of traffic on the main arteries a metaphor for the flow of blood racing through our veins.

The MRI procedure began with me getting out of my civilian clothes and donning hospital attire. I’m told to use the facilities before we begin because it will be a long time before I get another chance. I take the point. Pattering into the sterile room in white running socks, I’m struck by the size of the MRI machine, how white it is, and the size of the tunnel I will be rolled into. The attractive lady lab technician asks if I’m claustrophobic. I gulp, smile, and answer that I didn’t think so. As I lay on the table, my legs extending into the machine’s open mouth, she explains the drill I’ll be required to perform during the time I’m in the tunnel.

On her command, I’m to take in a breath, let it out and refrain from taking a breath until she says inhale—15 to 20 seconds tops, she says. She asks if I want a blanket and I quickly accept—I’m chilled by the air conditioning set to cool the equipment. After placing four electrodes on my chest in the general area of my heart, she straps me onto the table, wraps another sensor around by diaphragm—to monitor my breathing. Because the machine is imaging a moving object, instead of a relatively static one such as the brain or a knee joint, it needs to compensate for breathing and heart movement to create the 3-D image. The final apparatus is a curved plastic breastplate—I’m told it helps align the image—which she straps across my chest before we begin.

The drive north on Highway 101 from the Highway 87 on-ramp in San Jose to the Embarcadero Road exit in Palo Alto moved at the limit this morning, just before the full stream of northbound commuters floods the artery. Like my own arteries, the asphalt and concrete thoroughfare bearing the load of 101 traffic has deteriorated over the past 30 years, the analogy not lost on me as I travel toward the MRI that will reveal how well mine have fared over the same number of years.

One last thing, she says, stuffing my ears with plugs. You’ll need these as it gets noisy inside the machine. I’m not to be alarmed as it’s the sound the machine makes as it pulses a magnetic field through me to first align then flip the magnetic orientation of hydrogen atom protons in the water, comprising 75 percent of lean muscle in the heart. The protons’ rotation produces a miniscule magnetic flux that the MRI detects, thus creating a three-dimensional picture of the heart. Incidentally, these machines exert a magnetic force around 60,000 times the earth's own magnetic field effects—though nothing to be concerned about as magnetic flux produces no ill affects in tissue and cells or so they say.

A few seconds after she leaves the room, I hear her disembodied voice from speakers inside the dimly lit tunnel, that I now find myself in, and quickly close my eyes realizing I am going to freak if I keep them open. Just as I get my momentary panic under control and my breathing less labored, she asks if I’m comfortable and I say I am—liar, but I can’t admit to being a wimp. She says if I’m ready we would begin. I prepare for the sound and as soon as it starts that labored breathing returns. The sound is the shrill alarm of a truck backing up, but at a faster rate, two or three pulses a second it seems, and a different pitch. The sound reminds me of the staccato screeches accompanying the shower scene in “Psycho”—that rhythmic intensity but at a different pitch. I resist the flight response the sound invokes in me and will myself to relax. She’s no doubt aware of how I’m reacting to the machine. My breathing slowly becomes normal as I become accustomed to the sound.

When we begin the breathing drill, the tempo of the machine’s sound changes: same staccato beat, but slower. I count 15 to 16 repetitions as I hold my breath and wait for her to allow me to inhale again. Then she periodically changes the routine, telling me that the next time I must hold my breath longer and I count 20 repetitions before I breath again.

When I’m pulled out of the tunnel halfway through the procedure, I open my eyes and take in the bright light and expanded space of the larger room. She asks for my left arm for the gadolinium injection. According to Wikipedia, solutions of organic gadolinium—symbol Gd and atomic number 64 in the periodic table of the elements—are the most popular intravenous MRI contrast agents to enhance images. However, for anyone with impaired kidneys gadolinium side affects include hard, shiny, darkened skin that tightens and becomes extremely painful, joint inflexibility, loss of movement, yellow-colored eyes, painful joints, and lung, heart and organ damage. My kidneys are pretty healthy so I’m not concerned though I should have been informed rather than finding out from a google search.

Sliding back into the tunnel the second time was a piece of cake. I had become accustomed to the confined space. We finished the series of breathing drills and concluded with the same sequence of loud staccato pulses that began the procedure. And then like every event in life it’s over and I look forward to the prospect of caffeine, something I’d been denied for 24 hours before the procedure. As she removes my constraints and unhooks the electrodes, I ask her how long before the results are in and she says my doctor will have them within the week. I thank her for getting me through the process and return to claim my civilian clothes and start my day. It’s 9:00 o’clock on a beautiful October morn. What could be better than that?

October 1, 2009 – Pain

Pain is primeval and integral to every life form on the planet, since life began. There is much to learn from Pain. Its wisdom is likewise as old as life itself. On Saturday night November 3rd, 2007 all the clocks in most of the United States fell back by an hour to return to standard time after an extended period of daylight savings time. Like most of my fellow citizens, I have come to regard this aggravating ritual as an unarguable fact of life. My biological clock like those in everyone else was suddenly out of step with the officially recognized time of the country. The entire nation was living under jet lag that would take a few days to sort itself out. In the meantime, our collective judgment was befuddled: car and pedestrian accidents would spike as would every other kind of calamity—near misses at airports, on the job mishaps, you get the idea.

The return to standard time meant one extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning November 4th, which I happily accepted. And it meant rising on Monday would be easier because my body really thought I should be waking and hour earlier. As expected, I awoke at 4:30 Monday morning and thankfully fell back to sleep for another hour. Roused by my alarm clock at 5:30, I dressed and started my morning jog, now with the morning rays of the sun illuminating the ridge of the Hayward Mountain Range east of San Jose much sooner in my run than the previous week. Last Friday I would be completing my run at the time I’m beginning it now.

Monday’s run went off without incident. However, Tuesday’s run at 5:30 started off badly. Unlike on Monday, San Jose was enshrouded in a blanket of fog that dropped visibility considerably. I could see less than a quarter mile in any direction and the streetlights had that balloon glow resulting from light colliding with water vapor as it seeks to escape its source. The fog also intensified the cold permeating my tee shirt and shorts blown by a persistent 25 to 30 mile an hour wind that pushed me along as I headed west on Branham Lane from Snell Avenue. It was right around 50 degrees Fahrenheit though the wind chill factor was considerably lower.

The exertion of running was staving off the cold for most of me but I had to continuously flex my fingers and move my neck side to side to force blood flow to my digits and to my ears to keep them from complaining of the cold. When I reached the Highway 87 overpass on Branham, the sun’s rays should have begun spilling over the crest of the Hayward Mountains, but the blanket of fog was concealing any advancing sunlight and keeping visibility down to a half mile at the most. As I crested the overpass, I lost the dual cones of headlights bursting from cars racing north beneath me on 87.

Fifteen minutes later I had ran from Pearl Avenue to Chynoweth Avenue after turning left off Branham at its intersection with Pearl. I was on the home stretch rejoining Branham at Vista Park Drive and heading toward Snell. Now, the wind that had been at my back was blowing against me increasing the chill factor of the fog. My sweat-soaked tee shirt had now lost any of its protection against the cold. My only source of warmth was now my sustained exertion: head swinging side-to-side, fingers on both hands continuously flexing.

Pain caught up with me at Mia Circle just after I had passed Kingpark Drive. Despite my exertion, the cold had numbed my fingers and begun to chill my arms and chest. I had increased my pace to escape its discomfort. There’s a round-leaf Eucalyptus tree at the corner of Mia Circle and Branham between the sidewalk and Branham Lane. Its roots have raised the sidewalk, something I knew as well as every other obstacle along the six-plus-miles of my morning circuit. However, for whatever reason: my jet lag still not caught up to official time—putting my timing off just enough to miscalculate the height of the raised concrete; my preoccupation with escaping the cold and/or the fog—obscuring my judgment just the small fraction needed for the concrete to ensnare my right foot long enough time to interrupt my forward motion... In any event, I found myself being propelled forward by a force not of my own making. My body flooded with adrenalin straining every muscle to slow my accelerating advance.

My left foot managed to get under me enough to keep me upright for an instant longer. In retrospect that exacerbated my plight because it allowed my forward momentum to gain force. Balanced on my left leg and my own accelerating weight making it impossible for my right foot to catch me from falling, I went crashing down, both knees contacting the cement first, followed by both hands—the heals of each taking the brunt of the impact. Then, the inertia of the fall was trying to flip me over my hands and knees—like a gym teacher trying to teach a reluctant student to do a summersault—my every muscle straining to resist. I watched helplessly as the contest played out between my body’s forward motion and the physical brake my muscles applied to halt its advance. In the end the latter lost and my forehead staining backward to avoid the collision kissed the concrete with a light thud, breaking the skin between the bridge of my nose and my right eye.

I could see the entire sequence in slow motion, like a car braking and almost managing to stop before finally colliding with the rear bumper of the car in front. The endorphin rush kept me insulated from sensation for just enough time for me to get to my feet, reclaim my unbroken glasses thrown free of the collision, appraise the damage: bleeding silver-dollar size raspberries on both knees and right hand where the torn skin hung loose from a hinge near my wrist. The only damage to my left hand was gouged out quarter-inch-square patches of skin on the knuckles just above the fingernails. The gouge on my left pinky finger was the deepest and it leaked blood in a slow steady stream reappearing shortly after I wiped it clean. A similar deep gouge on my right thumb also kept seeping blood. The bump on my head complained the least. It bled slightly at first then stopped.

Realizing I had dodged a more dangerous bullet, I slowly resumed my run home, testing my legs by walking a couple of steps before easing into a slow lope then moving to a sustained run. As soon as I increased the pace, all the insulation from the pain and cold the endorphin rush afforded during the fall had vanished. Now I was completely aware of the pain in my knees and in my right ribcage. But the pain and cold in my digits—refusing to move as I tried to clench each fist—created the greatest discomfort of all. Hurt and in flight all I could think of was getting home and tending to my wounds. And that concern only lengthened the apparent time it was taking for me to complete the final mile of my run.

When I finally arrive back at home, my hands were so unresponsive that I had a difficult time grasping my door key, getting it into the lock, and turning the tumblers to allow me into the warmth inside. Once inside and in the bathroom, I turned on the hot water faucet full blast impatient for the feel of warm water to thaw my frigid fingers. As the water warmed I lathered both hands washing away the dirt and dried blood from each open wound, pain screaming from each one—the large opening on my right hand shrieking loudest—warm soapy pink water coloring the white porcelain wash basin. Blotting both hands dry with paper towels, I sterilized my Swiss Army Knife scissors in alcohol and cut away the loose skin hanging from the large open wound on my right hand, wrapped bandages around the deep wounds on my right thumb and left pinky finger that refused to stop bleedings. All the others including the large one on my right hand had stopped bleeding and had started sweating a clear liquid tinged pink by small amounts of oozing blood.

In the shower I used my left hand to clean the small wound on my forehead and the two round skin avulsions on my knees both crying out in pain from the soap and my rigorous scrubbing. The entire morning routine took nearly an hour to complete but in the end, I had replaced the water soaked bandages from the two wounds still bleeding with clean ones and place a large square patch bandages on the skin avulsion on my right hand and two knees. I noticed a slightly darkened patch beneath the skin of my right hand filling the area to the right of my palm’s Mars line to the base of the thumb. The hand was sore and had little gripping strength.

In the aftermath of the fall, I took a perverse satisfaction in knowing that I had survived the mishap with only superficial wounds that would scab over in a day or two and be gone within a week. I was also reassured that my survival instincts were still sufficiently intact to protect me from a fate far worse. And Pain once again reminded me of what it means to be living creature having to cope with the vagaries of nature and the world around me.

September 30, 2009 - Boom in SMS digital mobile phones depositing and dispensing electronic currency

The international financial services industry is beginning to leverage the enormous subscriber base mobile network operators (MNOs) command, 4 billion in 2008 according to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA (the GSM mobile phone operators trade association) research arm in London. Banks are initially targeting consumers in the third world by converting their mobile phones into a mobile wallet where cash can be deposited to and spent from. The mobile wallet has generated great excitement and has demonstrated a huge potential in the third world. Electronic currency enables the mobile handset to dispense cash and accept deposits through a bank-affiliated merchant or MNO airtime reseller, thus enabling customer savings and even microloans. The capability leverages the short message service (SMS) on nearly every mobile phone.

Today, most electronic currency successes have been within national borders, but enabling the 190 million migrant workers—3 percent of the world population—to send electronic currency home via mobile phones is the next application financial institutions and MNOs are targeting. And for good reason, according to the World Bank, in 2008, migrant workers sent $433 billion to their home countries, most in the third world.

What’s surprising is how rapidly electronic currency is taking hold in the third world. At the Mobile Money Summit 2009 from June 22 to 25 in Barcelona, Caroline Pulver, FSD (Financial Sector Deepening) Kenya, an independent trust developing inclusive financial markets reported on the impact M-PESA (mobile, PESA money in Swahili) has had on the country. Pulver’s research found that by May this year, 40 percent of Kenya’s adults had used the service. The table below shows what Pulver found Kenyans spent their electronic currency on.

Usage Percentage
Store/save money for everyday use 14 percent
Store/save money for emergencies 7 percent
Pay bills 2 percent
Send money 25 percent
Receive money 28 percent
Buy airtime for someone else, 8 percent
Buy airtime for myself 14 percent

According to the central bank of Kenya, at the start of 2009, there were over 7000 M-PESA agents. This represented substantially more points of service than the combined number of bank branches (887) and ATM (1,435) in the country—serving 6 million customers or 15.3 percent of Kenya’s 39 million population. Since the program’s launch in March 2007 until February 2009, the cumulative value of M-PESA money transfers had reached $1.5 billion. As of February 2009, the monthly value of person-to-person transfers was $190.3 million.

Sponsored by the UK-based Department for International Development, M-PESA began by using Safaricom’s (a subsidiary of UK-based Vodaphone) airtime resellers to issue microloans that borrowers would repay at an interest rate reduced by eliminating the overhead conventional microloans carried. However, the tech-savvy, skilled worker in Kenya began using the facility to transfer cash from working husbands in the city to their families in the country: Safaricom had unintentionally become a bank with its handset providing a teller function and it airtime resellars dispensing cash. Today, according to Stephen Rasmussen, technology program manager at CGAP, an independent policy and research center housed at the World Bank, 70 percent of M-PESA subscribers are banking customers, not the unbanked customers originally targeted.

The service’s popularity drew the attention the Western Union Company, which has a 17 percent share of the international remittance market. (The World Bank estimated that Sub-Saharan Africa received around $20 billion in remittances in 2008, with Kenya accounting for $1.3 billion.) In December, last year, Western Union partnered with Vodafone, parent of Safaricom, to pilot a cross-border Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) service between the U.K. and Kenya. The service would enable customers to send remittances directly to Safaricom mobile subscribers in Kenya in minutes from the UK. The World Bank estimates the fees for transferring $200 cash from the UK to Kenya at $26.64: $15.25 for the money transfer and $5.69 for the currency conversion. It will be interesting to see if the cost comes down or is increased by $0.11 charge for the SMS message charge for an electronic currency transfer.

In June this year, Western Union expanded its reach in international remittance signing a deal with Zain, owned by Kuwait-based Mobile Telecommunications Company KSC, to enable Western Union currency transfers to Zain handset with the Zap platform. Zain’s service is available in Tanzania, where it’s larger than Safaricom, and Kenya where it’s smaller. Zain other distinction from Safaricom is enabling consumer-to-merchant purchase eliminating the need for a cash transaction. For the unbanked the additional fee will makes the transaction uneconomical. However, for business-to-business transactions, the service will have great appeal.

Celpay, owned by South African FirstRand bank, is the another service that has gotten a substantial following in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo where the DRC government uses Celpay to distribute government payments to former soldiers who have turned in their guns. Registered customers can use their electronic currency for merchant transactions, monthly bill payments, and fund transfer between participating phones. The company’s model is unique first because it provides solutions to businesses rather than end customers. Second, its nascent P2P model reaches unbanked customers without mobile phones, by sending the payment to agents with phones who perform money transfers or dispense cash. In June this year Celpay was processing $25 million per month in gross transactions.

One common element that permeates these successes is that all flourished because they were plowing a green field. Nothing existed before they emerged to provide the service. Another is that each found regulatory agencies willing and able to permit the services to take hold and flourish. In the case of M-PESA, once its popularity got notice, the conventional financial services sector attempted to derail the project only to be rejected by the Kenyan government. In the case of the DRC, electronic currency was an effective means to pacify a military force surrendering its arms.

According to the GSMA, the successes in Africa are being attempted elsewhere in the world. A greenfield deployment in Indonesia, the AXIS mDUIT project, is due to launch in December, 2009. In the Philippines, the SMART Communications’ Island Activations Program hopes to bring electronic banking to isolated customers on remote islands. Mobile network operator Roshan hopes to build an M-PESA-like service in war torn Afghanistan. Electronic currency is taking hold in the third world and in won’t be long before it will get a foothold in the developed world as well.

September 13, 2009 - A short history of consumer driven technology development

We’re in the midst of yet another evolution in communications. This one is the social networking transformation in which mobile devices are not merely used for voice and E–mail but now Internet terminals for the many social networks we all belong to. It’s yet another example of an activity that began on our desktop and notebook PCs that have migrated over to our handsets, just as text messaging and e-mail did before. And as with every disruptive social phenomenon, those trying to serve this fast moving trend have been caught unawares and are trying desperately to catch up.

In the early part of this decade, users in the 100s of millions outside the U.S.—Asia, the Pacific Rim, and Europe—began to use instant text messaging as a lower cost alternative to voice. The carriers supplied this data service in the spectrum unused for voice calls, which cost them next to nothing and for which they reaped large profits. Instant and short text messaging became its own social phenomenon, with a use model unique from voice and e-mail. The messages were likened to whispering in someone ear—especially during meetings or when you didn’t want anyone but the recipient to know what was being said. In The Philippines text-messaging, citizens-organized daily protests resulted in the ouster of Philippine President Joseph Ejercito Estrada in 2001.

While instant text messaging continued building a following in the U.S., Internet-base social networking on a PC started taking off in early 2004 with the debut of MySpace. Membership went from zero to a million users from January to February of that year and the numbers kept rising from there. Social networkers were now hanging out on MySpace with their PC, talking on their cell phone and/or texting on their cell phone. Cellular service providers in the U.S. were oblivious of the trend. They continued making it more expensive to text than talk, while in the rest of the world service providers did the opposite. Is there any wonder European cellphone users were texting more than twice as much as U.S. users (according to Forrester Research reporting in 2005)?

By mid century, U.S. service providers finally realized that data service was a viable business model. In 2005, CTIA-The Wireless Association, cited an installed base of 190 million cell phones and 90 percent could send text messages and 60 percent of those texting were aged 18 to 27. (A great many of the texters were voting for their favorites on “American Idol.”) By this time, too, the Blackberry demonstrated to telephone service providers that there was a business providing e-mail access via a mobile handset for enterprise users. But, who would want to surf the web with a mobile handset?

In January 2007, with the advent of the iPhone, the notion of providing total Internet browsing on a handset took hold. The idea wasn’t entirely foreign to service providers as they had dabbled with the notion by supplying radios you could plug into your laptop and access the Internet over the cellular infrastructure. And the Blackberry could be pressed into surfing duties, but the experience was painful and cumbersome. However, service providers had no idea of what it was going to take to keep up with millions of iPhone users accessing and moving large media files around the 3G network, something they are now reluctantly coming to terms with.

It took a year but the rest of the smart phone vendors with the service providers excluded from carrying iPhones finally caught on to how to provide web browsing and similar handset functionality—a compelling user experience. This is where service providers find themselves today, facing growing numbers of smart phone users disenchanted with the slow response from the web. And it’s only going to get worse as Apple is no doubt on the verge of introducing an iPhone with full 1080p HD video capture and playback, 20-megapixel still image capture, and no doubt higher fidelity audio capture and playback.

For wireless service providers the once the wireless spectrum is completely utilized, there is nowhere to go except to offload traffic onto the wired infrastructure. The handsets and wireless infrastructure will have to contain increased intelligence to route wireless connections so as to preserve bandwidth while still providing a responsive experience to the user. It’s conceivable that, like toll lanes on congested highways, wireless service providers will begin charging a toll for a faster browsing experience. Those unwilling to pay will be subject to operating speeds that will begin to resemble dial-up 64 kbits/s or less as large numbers of users flood the system during prime usage time.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

September 11, 2009 - Augmented Reality, Do I Want to Join in?

I’ve been interested in the next big enablers of the mobile Internet and I keep reading that they are likely to be LTE—the 4G wireless replacement for 3G and location technologies—augmented reality (much more intriguing). LTE is simply next generation technology replacing the previous and we can take that as a given. Everything will run faster; you’ll be able to move large files around quicker, etc.

Augmented reality, on the other hand, suggests something unique. According to Wikipedia, AR is a “real direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with, or augmented by, virtual computer-generated imagery.” Your phone knows where you are using its on-board GPS and by accessing Google maps, it can determine what’s around you and can—with a touch-enabled screen—tell you about what’s around you.

I connected the term, which I heard today, with the Apple iPhone 3GS ad "Travel" in which the voice over asked if you want your own personal tour of Paris and declares “there’s an app for that” at which time the iPhone articulates “you’re standing at the center of Paris…” with a picture on the iPhone of the front of Notre Dame and the legend below “Point Zero & Notre Dame.” The iPhone app has a series of sites installed which pops up when the phone comes within range of the landmark (using its onboard GPS location finder) and voila!

I get the impression that the ultimate realization of AR will be a phone that is tied into a cloud-resident data base of all landmarks—not a preselected few a free app on the iPhone can store away. With the right app on your portable device, you will be able to ask the phone about anything you’re in the vicinity of—natural or man made—and it will give you all the relevant facts.

The reason AR will be successful is because of the enormous commercial potential the technology affords. The system that knows the exact location of Notre Dame in Paris will also know the location of nearby coffee shops, restaurants, and every other commercial establishment. Furthermore, the software that can tell you about the world around you is also cleverly evaluating you to determine whether to present you an offer for 10 percent off on a Latte from a nearby merchant or a special deal on a French author the software has determined you might like.

The great problem of becoming an integral part of an AR is that you’re being marketed to by the behavior you exhibit in the augmented reality. And the phone is the device that’s enabling it to happen. The device has not become big brother yet. All it currently has is GPS—the network knows where you are at all times (ironically, the average honest citizen is better monitored than nearly every parolee from a correctional institution), a compass—so the network knows which way you’re going, and an accelerometer which could detect if you’re moving or stationary. In the future, the plan is to attach biometric monitors—great for detecting medical emergencies, but wonderful for marketing to you if your blood sugar is low and you need a sugar fix—the patisserie is offering croissants at 10 percent discount with coffee purchase.

I begin to feel as if I’m part of a closed loop feedback system in which I respond to stimuli that are then readjusted to achieve some kind of behavior in me. The Stimuli are marketing incentives and the response from me is the purchase of a good. Great, I’ve become an element in a machine works that’s designed to endlessly cycle virtual coinage.

September 8, 2009 - Presenting our lives for the social graph to view in full 1080p HD

Presenting our lives for the social graph to view in full 1080p HD

I’ve had a chance to read through a number of articles this Labor Day Weekend on the next generation of smart phones. I’ve been struck by the innovation that chip suppliers and mobile handset makers are cramming into these small portable devices. All this innovation aims to serve users increasingly employing handset as a terminal into the “social graph.” I love the term social graph as it connotes a collective consciousness: what all the connections on all the on-line social networks have become.

And what are we putting into our on-line social networks: pictures, video, audio, and lots of text. These multimedia and text files provide tangible evidence of the significant as well as trivial moments of our lives: reminding ourselves as well as our connections of that trip to London, Paris, Taipei…; the birth of our first, second,… child; the Duran Duran, Grateful Dead,… concert…; the minutes and seconds of our lives.

Up until the first decade of the 21st Century, most of these memories resided in our mind, on paper, or stored away in boxes of photographs, 8-mm film, or VHS cassettes and DAT tape. Now, all of that emotional memorabilia has found a home in the social graph, stored away for as long as we keep our accounts active and available for others to view.

What’s making all this possible is the continuing availability of low cost silicon. This eighth most common element in the universe by mass, a tetravalent metalloid with the symbol Si, atomic number 14, and atomic mass 28.0855, has become to the information age what coal was to the industrial revolution. For the social networker silicon is providing the continuous improvement in the fidelity of these captured moments.

Texas Instruments’ new OMAP chip is promising to allow HD quality image and video capture and playback. The specs call for 20-megapixel photographs and 1080p HD video capture in handheld smart phone. How incredible is that! You will be able to capture an unheard of amount of visual detail to share with your connections. Though the images and moving pictures will only be as good as the eye that captures them, the detail will be there in every frame.

What’s propelling the continuing drive to electronically capture and share these transient moments? Are we all modern day Robinson Crusoe’s stranded on planet earth and needing the affirmation of our man Friday that our lives are meaningful, that what we do is contributing to some collective good for the world around us, and—most important of all—that we’re not alone in our small part of the infinitesimal huge universe?

Or maybe we just need to hangout and brag about what we've done.