Time to update your RSS feeds: Acumen Fund has launched a new, RSS-compatible web site (the site is a re-design of their previous effort).  In addition to being syndication-friendly, the new site is rich with stories, photos, videos and lots of dynamic content.  I like how they've organized things around their three pillars: capital, knowledge and talent.  For more on this three pillars approach, check out my post from the annual Investor Gathering last week.

While you're checking out the new Acumen site - be sure to read Jacqueline Novogratz's recent Pakistan and India journals, by the way - also add Immersion to your RSS feeds or bookmarks.

Immersion is the title of the 2008 Acumen Fund Fellows blog.  The seven fellows - with whom I met a few weeks back - are working in India, Pakistan and Kenya, and have been blogging regularly about their work and personal lives "in the field."  I've enjoyed the early posts, and encourage NextBillion readers to check it out.

A new report from Vodafone shows that data revenue topped 1 billion pounds this past year, not including text messaging revenues. Moreover, data revenues grew 49% over a year ago, compared with 7% for voice and 9% for messaging. Think of this as a measure of the growing use of internet-based mobile services, clearly the next big thing in mobile telecommunications.

So what does that have to do with the Base of the Pyramid?  A lot.  True, most of Vodafone’s revenue now comes from the EU, although that is starting to change rapidly as the company focuses its investment on emerging markets. But an article in the Economist, A Bank in Every Pocket?, reinforces what we have been arguing (in The Next 4 Billion:Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid and elsewhere on this site)—that mobile phone banking is starting to take off. 

Fully commercial in the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa, mobile phone banking could add as much as 1 billion new customers to the banking system in the next 5 years.  Such explosive growth would reflect the huge benefits of access to financial services for the BOP, many of them spelled out in the Economist article. 

And banking traffic is data traffic, whether done via messaging or directly via the Internet. So think of the Vodafone report as a harbinger for what will happen in developing countries too, even before the growth in voice customers begins to slow.

For those of us in the United States, tonight marks a tradition - the tradition of Thanksgiving traffic.  This is especially true on the eastern seaboard, where air and car traffic get particularly bad as families attempt to gather and celebrate the holiday.

So, since NextBillion.net is based in Washington DC, we're taking a few days off.  Who knows, we might just log on and do some blogging from the airport or while stuck in traffic - you never know.

See you Monday.