Isn’t that the best title ever? Jan Chipchase strikes again, talking about the anthropological outcomes of the proposed universal micro-USB phone charger format:

Widespread adoption of Micro-USB lowers barriers to entry for would-be services providers – they currently need support a range of memory cards, umpteen data cables, Bluetooth and InfraRed […] A mobile phone optimised Bollywood movie can take 20 minutes to transfer from a laptop onto a generic micro-memory card – currently it’s hardly convenient.

If you follow Chipchase’s Future Perfect blog (and if you enjoy the stuff we talk about here at Futurismic, I suggest that you really should do) you’ll be aware that developing nations are far more dependent on their cellphones for infrastructural purposes than we are in the West; universal accessories would remove a number of small and pointless obstacles from the flow of commerce. In other words:

There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It’s largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed.

[Image by Ken Banks, kiwanja.net]