KomKom is a mobile application that allows craft artisans selling traditional African craft to manage their sales and personal and professional expenses.
Using CAM-equipped Mobile Phones for Procurement and Quality Control at a Rural Coffee Cooperative data sheet 2200 Views
Author:
Yael Schwartzman, Tapan S. Parikh
Publication Date:
May 2007
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
With globalization, small rural producers must compete in a competitive economic market. Due to their small size and limited financial capacity, they face significant challenges in doing so. We discuss the design and evaluation of two mobile phone based tools to help small producers achieve economies of scale and a quality premium.
These tools were developed using CAM, a camera-based mobile phone application framework specifically designed for the rural developing world. CAM DPS (Delivery Processing System) efficiently captures transactions between producers and cooperatives, in order to monitor remote inventory levels, and document the price paid to the producer. CAM RANDI (Representation AND Inspection tool) allows local inspectors to digitally capture the condition of farm parcels, using a combination of paper, text, audio and images. Using this data, rural producer cooperatives can improve their efficiency and monitoring, and ensure conformance with quality and certification standards. A preliminary evaluation suggests that these applications are accessible to target users and will serve a significant need.
The Impact of Mobile Telephony of Developing Country Micro-Enterprise: A Nigerian Case Study data sheet 2543 Views
Author:
Abi Jagun, Richard Heeks, Jason Whalley
Publication Date:
Nov 2008
Publication Type:
Journal article
Abstract:
Informational challenges—absence, uncertainty, asymmetry—shape the working of markets and commerce in many developing countries. For developing country micro-enterprises, which form the bulk of all enterprises worldwide, these challenges shape the characteristics of their supply chains. They reduce the chances that business and trade will emerge. They keep supply chains localized and intermediated. They make trade within those supply chains slow, costly, and risky.
Mobile telephony may provide an opportunity to address the informational challenges and, hence, to alter the characteristics of trade within micro-enterprise supply chains. However, mobile telephony has only recently penetrated.
This paper, therefore, presents one of the first case studies of the impact of mobile telephony on the numerically-dominant form of enterprise, based around a case study of the cloth-weaving sector in Nigeria. It finds that there are ways in which costs and risks are being reduced and time is saved, often by substitution of journeys.
But it also finds a continuing need for journeys and physical meetings due to issues of trust, design, intensity, physical inspection and exchange, and interaction complexity. As a result, there are few signs of the de-localization or disintermediation predicted by some commentators. An economizing effect of mobile phones on supply chain processes may therefore co-exist with the entrenchment of supply chain structures and a growing “competitive divide” between those with and without access to mobile telephony.
We'd like to think that mobiles are a great economic equalizer, decreasing the gap between rich and poor.
But in a case study [PDF] published earlier this year about cloth weavers in Nigeria, authors Abi Jagun, Richard Heeks and Jason Whalley contest the conventional wisdom that more mobile phones result in a more equal society.
"There were few signs, then, of mobile telephony levelling the playing field; and more signs that it had been a technology of inequality," the authors wrote.
The study, which looked at the use of mobiles by the aso oke cloth weaving sector in Nigeria, found that mobiles did help those who had them. "By substituting for some journeys, plus in-person meetings, we can see that phone calls have reduced the time and financial cost of information-gathering, often by several hours and several U.S. dollars respectively per call (not to mention the opportunity cost gains)," wrote the authors.
In many developing countries, labor markets are in chaos--not because there’s a lack of job opportunities, but because there are no good information networks to help job-seekers and employers find each other: Web access is low, public/private resources are few, and infrastructure is poor. As a result, many skilled workers get trapped in cycles of joblessness and hardship. However, a huge number of people in developing countries have basic cell phone access, even in rural areas. Recognizing this reality, Souktel has created a simple, phone-based JobMatch service--a software application that reduces unemployment and poverty by helping ordinary job-seekers get key job information on their phones.
Our solution is simple: from any phone, job-seekers create SMS "mini-CVs" that include basic data on their skills, location, etc. These are then sent by mobile to our central database--which hundreds of employers search daily, via web or phone. From their side, employers create similar “mini job ads” and post them on the same database—so that job-seekers can search these jobs from their own phones. The database also matches job-seekers/employers who have similar profiles, sending them SMS alerts with each other’s data.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
SMS-based querying of information databases
SMS-based user profile creation
SMS-based matching of similar user profiles
Main Services:
Bulk SMS
Voting, Data Collection, Surveys, and Polling
Mobile Social Network/Peer-to-peer
Information Resources/Information Databases
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Platforms:
Linux/UNIX
Windows Mobile
All phones -- SMS
Current Version:
2
Program/Code Language:
.NET Compact Framework
PHP
Other
Organizations Using the Tool:
Employers - Middle East:
Ernst and Young
Red Cross/Red Crescent
CARE International
Deloitte
YMCA of East Jerusalem
Education Development Center, Inc.
Institutional/Funding Partners - Middle East
US Agency for International Development
World Bank - Quality Improvement Fund for Higher Education
NAFIS (the National Farmers Information Service) is a voice service that offers agricultural extension information which farmers can access through mobile phones. NAFIS is updated through the web, and the IVR is created automatically through a Text-to-Speech engine in both Kiswahili and Kenyan English.
Souktel, an SMS service based in the Middle East and East Africa, is all about connections. The service, launched in 2006, uses SMS to connect users to everything from jobs and internships to humanitarian aid and youth leadership programs.
The name comes from "souk," the Arabic word for "marketplace," and "tel," or "telephone. Although at least 80 percent of people in Palestine have access to mobile phones, most people have Internet access only in cafés or public places, said Jacob Korenblum, co-founder of Souktel. "Getting information about medical care, jobs, and food bank services can be difficult," he said. And even at Internet cafes, Korenblum said that many people, especially women, lack access to these services. "We wanted to develop a very simple service," he said. "That's how Souktel started."
The World Wide Web enabled quick and easy information dissemination and brought about fundamental changes to various aspects of our lives. However, a very large number of people, mostly in developing regions, are still untouched by this revolution. Compared to PCs, the primary access mechanism to the WWW, mobile phones have made a phenomenal penetration into this population segment. Low cost of ownership, the simple user interface consisting of a small keyboard, limited menu and voice-based access contribute to the success of mobile phones with the less literate. However, apart from basic voice communication, these people are not being able to exploit the benefits of information and services available to WWW users. Spoken Web is designed to provide the benefits of IT to the underprivileged population in developing countries who are characterized by illiteracy and poverty.
Spoken Web is an entire platform that lets ordinary phone subscribers create and deploy their own applications and services over a simple phone call. It can be used to proliferate IT information and transactional services to masses on existing IT/Telecom infrastructure. It requires no additional cost of ownership to end users other than an ordinary phone.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Creation and deployment of voice apps
Reaching out to masses on existing infrastructure
Main Services:
Stand-alone Application
Tool Maturity:
Under development/pre-launch
Platforms:
All phones -- Voice
Current Version:
1
Program/Code Language:
Java
Number of Current End Users:
1,000-10,000
Number of current beneficiaries:
1,000-10,000
Languages supported:
multi-lingual
Handsets/devices supported:
All voice-capable phones.
Reviews/Evaluations:
Article in the Economic Times: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Food/IBMs-spoken-web-to-ramp-up-Amuls-milk-business/articleshow
Mobi is a java-enabled application allowing users to send and receive market information and other data over SMS, all from a user-friendly interface. For example, users can request commodity prices in nearby markets by choosing a location and commodity from menus. Mobi is highly extensible, allowing third party applications on the Esoko platform to include a mobile component, or to add free-form polls to the existing application.
Here are some mobile events for the month of September that we thought are noteworthy and of interest to the MobileActive.org community. If you know of others, please mail us at info at MobileActive dot org.
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camps are local events for people passionate about using mobile technology for social impact and to make the world a better place.
Mobile Tech 4 Social Change Camp in Bangalore includes:
GeoChat is intended to ensure that no one is excluded from critical information flow before, during, and after a crisis. It allows groups of mobile users and Internet-based users to set up chat groups, monitor news feeds, and keep track of who is doing what where. When a major humanitarian crisis occurs, every second matters for the affected community – the longer it takes responders to reach them, the worse the outcome is likely to be. What is needed is a response that is agile, efficient, and effective, where diverse groups can self-organize into a coherent, coordinated whole to provide assistance.
InSTEDD GeoChat is a group communications system that lets teams coordinate around events as they unfold, linking mobile responders in the field, decision makers at headquarters, and the affected local community in a unified effective response. The systems allows online and mobile users to share information, report from the field, broadcast alerts, post their locations, and chat with each other on the surface of a map using SMS text messages.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Translates location names sent by users to a position on a map
Supports a variety of explicit location formats, as well as other user-defined tags.
Enables shared awareness/coordination on a map
Enables creation of and participation in SMS chats
Enables field reporting, alerts, and interactions
Dedicated international SMS gateway supported by 96% of the world’s mobile carriers.
The "mom-and-pop" shops that dot every street in Latin America and the rest of the developing world, despite selling well over 500 different items, typically don't keep any accounts because it is very time consuming to do so with pen and paper and they can't afford a full-blown PC system. As a result, most of these businesses don't know their break-even sales point, cannot analyze an investment opportunity or their cost structure, can't trust family outsiders as employees, don't optimize their inventory or purchasing decisions, find it daunting to take out a loan and in general have a severe lack of clarity on the business status. All these combine to keep the micro-retailers operating in a sub-optimal manner, reducing their profits and limiting their growth.
Tiendatek is an accounting and inventory management tool for small shopkeepers in the developing world. It runs on Android phones and connects to our servers for backup and business advice. The applications will be installed on phones which will then be distributed locally and financed by Microfinance Institutions. In addition, Frogtek will offer an internet-based service to provide the micro-entrepreneur with real-time reporting, analysis, and personalized recommendations to improve business and increase profits.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
Touchscreen interface to register transactions. Camera phone for barcode reading. Accounts are synchronized with server.
The pre-cursors to mobile phones were walkie-talkies, and the first generation of mobile phone networks only supported voice communications. With second generation networks and a happy accident came SMS, and only with the third generation networks came mobile data services in the form of GPRS.
Most applications using mobile phones these days tend to use these newer channels of communication—SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a part of mobile phone communications. This article profiles interesting ways in which voice technology is being used for social work all around the world.
Asterisk is a powerful PBX system, but requires a lot of effort to just install. There was a need for something that was easier to install and administer, thus the creation of TrixBox.
TrixBox offers two options, TrixBox CE and TrixBox Pro. TrixBox CE is an open telephony platform that combines the best of the open source telephony tools into one easy-to-install package. Based on an enhanced LAAMP (an open source bundle of Linux®, Apache™, Asterisk®, mySQL®, and PHP), the TrixBox dashboard provides easy to use, Web-based interfaces to setup, manage, maintain, and support a complete IP-PBX system. TrixBox Pro is an enhanced version that comes with more support than TrixBox CE.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Unlimited Extensions, Voicemail and fax Support, VoiceMail to email and web, IVR Menu System, Ring Groups, Call Queues, Conferencing, Time-Based Routing, Music On Hold, Paging and Intercom, Admin Status Screen, Package Manager for easy updates, Network Settings and Phone Provisioning Tool, Opern Source Echo Cancellation.
VoiceGlue is a GPL tool that allows the integration of Asterisk with OpenVXI, and thus create a VoiceXML interpreter based on an Asterisk base. Because of the flexibility of Asterisk, VoiceGlue allows VoiceXML to be run on more than just SIP systems.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Interaction with Asterisk; VXML 2.0 interpreter with some VXML 2.1 features; Pre-recorded audio playback in Asterisk audio formats; Asterisk DTMF detection; High-performance, high-scalability architecture.
Nuance Cafe, or Bevocal Cafe, is a free, Web-based development environment for developing VoiceXML-based applications. You program VoiceXML applications, and Nuance Cafe will interpret these for you. A generic number is provided that users can call (with a PIN), and corporate support is available to build larger and more dedicated systems.
Tool Category:
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Web-development environment for VoiceXML applications. Availability of a carrier-grade back-end VoiceXML hosting platform.
Open Source VoiceXML Interpreter that is platform-independent. (VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations.)
A free VoiceXML interpreter for JAVA with an open architecture for custom extensions. Demo implementation platforms are supporting JAVA APIs such as JSAPI and JTAPI. It implements VoiceXML 2.1. The platform independent implementation can be used for free.
FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat driven products. It can be used as a simple switching engine, a PBX, a media gateway or a media server to host IVR applications using simple scripts or XML to control the callflow.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
FreeSWITCH includes many modules which provide applications by default including conferencing, XML-RPC control of live calls, Interactive voice response (IVR), TTS/ASR (text to speech/automatic speech recognition), Public switched telephone network (PSTN) interconnection ability supporting both analogue and digital circuits, Voice over IP protocols including SIP, Inter-Asterisk eXchange, H.323, Jabber, GoogleTalk and others. Applications using the FreeSWITCH library can be written in C/C++, Python, Perl, Lua, JavaScript using Mozilla's SpiderMonkey engine, Java and Microsoft .NET via Microsoft's CLR or via Mono. FreeSWITCH is designed to be modular, easy to use with scripting done entirely in XML, and more stable than Asterisk.
Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. See the wikipedia article for more.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a server
Key Features :
Voice mail, conference calling, interactive voice response (phone menus), and automatic call distribution. With hardware, can attach traditional analogue telephones to an Asterisk installation. Direct support of VoIP protocols, including SIP, MGCP and H.323. Large Userbase, and a large collection of proprietary and free add-ons and features.
VoiKiosk: Content Creation and Dissemination by-and-for Users in Rural Areas data sheet 69888 Views
Author:
Sheetal Agarwal, Arun Kumar, Amit Anil Nanavati, Nitendra Rajput
Publication Date:
Jan 2009
Publication Type:
Report/White paper
Abstract:
83% of the world population does not have access to Internet. Therefore there is a need for a simple and affordable interaction technology that can enable easy content creation and dissemination for this population. In this paper, we present the design, development and usage pattern of a VoiKiosk system that provides a voice-based kiosk solution for people in rural areas. This system is accessible by phone and thus meets the affordability and low literacy requirements. We present usability results gathered from usage by more than 900 villagers during four month of the on-field deployment of the system.
The on-field experiments suggest the importance of locally created content in their own language for this population. The system provides interesting insights about the manner in which this community can create and manage information. Based on the use of the system in the four months, the VoiKiosk also suggests a mechanism to enable social networking for the rural population.
MXit provides and instant messenger and social networking software application that allows one to chat from mobile or PCs for none other than data/internet costs. Users can connect with Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger contacts. In South Africa, the service is reported to cost fractions of a cent for sending a message that is as short as an SMS.
Tool Category:
Is a web-based application/web service
Key Features :
Instant Messaging Application with Low Costs of Messaging; Large Young User Base in South Africa and Indonesia, and growing elsewhere.
As smartphones proliferate around the world, we ought to remain cognizant of what information we share on those phones with applications, application developers, advertisers and marketers. Phones are incredibly personal, always on, and always with most of us. As a result, they can reveal sensitive information. In fact, it is time for smartphone users to put pressure on application developers, platform providers, and eventually legislators to protect private and potentially sensitive information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a paper on locational privacy. Because smartphones know where we are (using GPS, and if not, using applications such as Google’s My Location service), they can reveal a lot of information about activities, patterns of behaviour, and relationships we have.
Avaaj Otalo - A Voice-Based Community Forum data sheet 22482 Views
In places such as rural India, small-scale farmers struggle to meet the challenges of fierce global competition, increasing costs of farm inputs, water shortages, and new diseases and pests brought on by a changing climate. To deal with these challenges, information has become a critical input to farming operations: faced with rapidly changing conditions, farmers need market information, timely technical advice, and alerts on new and improved techniques. There are currently few sources for reliable, timely knowledge. Television and radio have achieved remarkable penetration in rural areas and stand as an effective means of information dissemination. However, without a platform to discuss, debate, and relate personal experience, information is not actionable.
