There are over 7 billion people on the planet, of whom only about 2 billion have internet access of whichever kind. Of this 2 billion, most do not have a) affordable b) reliable c) accessible broadband access. The majority of users in Africa, South America, parts of Europe, Australia and developing nations make do with a) expensive b) GPRS/EDGE c) intermittent signal strength.


Take Africa for example. Africa is three times the size of the USA and there are just over 1 billion people. Only 15,6% have Internet access. Africa is not a village in a developing country (you will be surprised to hear what insights get shared with me from abroad almost daily) but it is an immensely large continent divided into 54 independent nations, mostly hostile towards their neighbours and with "interesting" interpretations of "democracy." Many African countries are ruled in an imperial way and governments are not always in touch with the realities of global communications and the needs of their citizens. Broadband is not being made freely accessible and, therefore, the modern trend of Cloud Computing, in any form or function, is far from being a practical possibility. There are various submarine cables serving the continent but both governments and service providers are slow in making full use of it.


That was just Africa. Now add the users in Asia, Australia, etc., and you soon will realize that the comfort and convenience of cloud computing is a privilege enjoyed by a small minority of users globally. These users usually assume that others can and must be working in the same way they are.


It simply is not possible.


One can begin to understand that users who do not have broadband access, are being compromised now that mobile phone vendors are geared for Cloud-Only interactivity and data synchronisation. On a daily basis, I get confronted with even seasoned ICT professionals who are in denial about this and who simply cannot comprehend the magnitude of the dire situation that faces users in such regions and how it restricts commerce, education, research, health care, etc.


Users are in limbo. Having grown accustomed to the functionality offered by Nokia;s PC Suite and Outlook, they have tailored they way they work around this simple yet efficient local sync via USB, Bluetooth or wireless networking. No need for Internet access.


Nokia removed this functionality from Lumia.
Microsoft removed it from Windows.
Apple removed it from iTunes.


Users are left crippled!


Linux could be the solution but we need more evolution of Evolution and syncEvolution, or perhaps a port of Companionlink, EssentialPIM, etc. In my own experience, I have been experiencing endless sync problems between syncEvolution and Evolution. My Evolution also crashes when I use its calendar and it is doing this on different computers with different Linux distro's installed. Being an advanced user, I can honestly say that I cannot see how a novice will be able to use this software.


The real need, for at least another decade, is a (paid, optionally) ready-to-use user-installable application that will provide USB sync between a Linux installation and, at the very least, Android devices. It needs to be able to sync:

Contacts
Calendar
Tasks / Reminders
Notes sync essential. (Apple is bringing back local sync but not for their Notes app.)


My question is this: when will the Geek's World realise that the lack of exactly this functionality is what mostly keeps Windows or Mac users to be freed into Linux? It is sad that the true geeks generally are unaware of real-life situations faced by a few billion users and they generally reject the message that I am bringing here. They say that users do not complain, so where do I get my information from? Geeks: please note that a few billion have no means of communications with you and that is why you cannot perceive the problem. I am a singular messenger who have found a path to travel to you and bring reports from afar. I represent at the very least a billion people out there, perhaps 2-3 times more.


This is serious!

I am a former financial manager and internal auditor with some excellent IT experience, used to install and set up Windows networks, troubleshoot installations and even wrote useful apps using DBase and Quattro Pro. I am no geek, not by a country mile, but I started out "playing" with Linux around 2006 and have gotten to a stage where I manage to hack around inside the root terminal, usually without breaking my system.


Being not formally educated in IT and also having no programming background, except for writing macro's, I am out of my depth in wanting to marry my mobile phone with my Linux box. I lack the skill and resources to build the much needed data bridge advocated here. In sharing my VISION, my hope is that someone will listen to this cybervangelist, believe the message and turn this into a MISSION.


The world needs your skills and expertise!

Not sure if it is a song and dance routine or real yet.

https://www.outernet.is/

Just to cover the statement of

1 members found this post helpful.

Interesting indeed!!

I run into the same situation. Mobile devices are crippled by slow connections once you get out of the city and capped data connections where you have to pay more for more data so if you access your cloud data a lot you get overage or have to move up to the next higher package.
I setup an old laptop as a server and run my own cloud then sync my devices to it. I have my laptop, phone and tablet all with copies of the same calendar, contacts and files. I can sync over the internet if I choose or just wait until I'm within range of my own network.

1 members found this post helpful.

Are you using ownCloud or how did you achive this?

yep, ownloud.
On top of my three devices I have a wife and two kids starting to use it. I use the owncloud client on our phones for example to auto upload pictures as we take them then share the 'instant upload' folders with each other so I don't have to send my wife pictures I took and vise versa.

I eliminated the need for photobucket, dropbox, gdrive, google calendar, etc but combining all to one service. I can now sync to my own systems without need of getting to a cloud service.

1 members found this post helpful.

I am looking to do the same, but with a small ARM processor - low power consumption and quiet.
Need to get to it ...

FirefoxOS is aimed at "emerging markets" in the third world.

Thumb drives are inexpensive.

I was using a Raspberry Pi but crashed it when I tried to import my calendar. Just a little too under powered. Right now its sitting on an old laptop which is running Drupal and I just started installing phpMyGpx.

Thanks for the heads-up - not quite that small, say something like this.

Ok, odroid, thats what I'm looking at too. It may be find for OwnCloud but I'm wanting a little more, want to try to integrate it with drupal and maybe resourcespace for a more unified system.

Google and Facebook appear to have similar projects:

http://internet.org/

http://www.google.com/loon/

I don't understand yet, if the point is to get information to everyone, regardless of income, etc., won't the need for a receiver and equipment to view the data still be a barrier?