vodafone webbox by Gaurav Roy from india

Free access to information is widely regarded as a key factor in improving social mobility in emerging economies like India or South Africa. Our challenge here was to find a proposition that connects this part of the population to the internet by using the country's available GSM network. Vodafone's dedicated on-site user research revealed, that even in the poorest residential areas of South Africa or India, TV-sets are prevalent in even the most improvised homes and shelters. WebBox is fully based on this finding: it is essentially a low-price GSM-phone, reconfigured and reshaped into a full-size QWERTY keyboard. It can do without an onboard display (like a notebook) because it can be connected to any standard TV-set instead. WebBox is activated for online use with a standard Vodafone SIM-card. In this way, WebBox (ca. 50$ per product) managed to undercut the cost of the "One Laptop Per Child" device ( over 100 $ per product) by about 50% in cost, thus making web-access for the poor a much more viable and affordable proposition in emerging markets.