I’ve been talking to a lot of people over the last couple of days about the importance of “horizon scanning” – that is, monitoring the emerging opportunities and threats that could impact upon your business – using the internet and other means.

The emergence of mobile banking is a good example. Whilst it hasn’t yet taken off to a large degree in the uk, it is becoming easier to use your mobile phone for a variety of transactions such as paying to park, booking tickets online and so forth.

Meanwhile in Africa, mobile banking is booming because users feel it’s safer to have their money held in the cloud than to carry it with them. What might this mean for the banking sector and indeed businesses that don’t make it easy for customers to pay via mobile phone?

Although the transaction size is modest by Western standards, the volume is increasing and the overheads of operating the system are small. Added to that it’s very convenient – provided that the network is up and the phone has a charge!

Mobile banking has also been used to good effect in Haiti following the eathquakes that have damaged a lot of the traditional infrastructure – so should we look at mobile banking as a standard recovery option for areas affected by devastating natural disasters?

It would seem relatively straightforward to issue cheap, pay as you go, telephones to victims of disasters and broadband can be beamed in a spotlight fashion to areas that lack a traditional mobile mast network – I believe M12 solutions based in Fareham have provided broadband this way in southern Ireland?

So that just leaves a bit of straightforward setting up that can be done when the phone is issued via a node that is able to connect to the clients bank in order to transfer credit to the phone – of course if the customer has cash with them, that could be taken at point of issue.

But what about charging? If the electricity supply is unavailable we’d need to provide charging hubs (maybe an opportunity for Costa and Starbucks!) or perhaps solar charging capabilities.

I know that Twitter@Documentally has experimented with a variety of solar charging capabilities in the UK and I’m certain that companies are exploring how to improve these and increase their portability and resilience.

Hmm, might be worth looking into this a bit more…