mobile technology

About 1 year ago, some colleagues from graduate school and I had the privelage to work with DataDyne for our final project for our studies. We had the opportunity to work with Dr. Joel Selanikio, the co-founder, and evaluate user adoption of DataDyne's EpiSurveyor in Kenya.

If you are not familiar with EpiSurveyor, I won't hesitate to say that you should be. EpiSurveyor is one of DataDyne's key products and has won a number of acolades and awards over the past few years (including the 2008 Tech Museum Award for Health, the 2009 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, and the MIT-Lemelson award for Sustainability).

The basic premise is that a user can download the software from the web and create forms for data collection. Data can then be collected regardless of internet or mobile connection, as the mobile phone acts as a database. Once the user has a signal, they can send that data to be aggregated at a central loctaion.

I received this by email recently:

"The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the GSMA Development Fund are pleased to announce the publication of Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity, following it’s launch yesterday (Feb 16, 2010) at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The report is the first detailed study of its kind on the mobile phone gender gap in low and middle-income countries and showcases how using a mobile phone can improve the socio-economic status of women. We hope to use the report to launch a larger initiative to increase women’s access to the mobile market."

The document appears to appeal to shed light on issues about women and mobile technology, including hang-ups and market opportunities.  As I've heard more and more about mobile technology's ability to address gender equality, I thought it might be helpful to pass along.

Kenya is the global hotspot for all things mobile money.  The two chief payment systems, Safaricom M-PESA and Zain Zap, not only share ten million subscribers, but moved ten percent of Kenyan gross domestic product last year.  According to Danson Muchemi, Philip Nyamwaya and Agosta Liko, the respective CEOs of JamboPay, iPay and PesaPal, those figures represent a massive market opportunity.

Danson highlights “very low banking services penetration” as the impetus behind JamboPay, the first online payment gateway in Kenya that processes credit & debit cards.  By topping up an “online purse” via credit/debit card or mobile money, JamboPay enables users to buy online goods from Kenyan merchants without exposing their information.  Unbanked users can access the service by topping up their accounts via mobile money.  Ultimately, JamboPay aims to mitigate the same market failure that gave rise to PayPal in the West: the need for secure and multi-channel access to e-commerce.

This post contributed by Ashley Metz Cummings.

Across the globe, the computers used in underfunded schools share similar characteristics.  Outdated hardware grumbles to a start each morning to serve classrooms crowded with children.  Slow processors and limited storage space confine the possibilities for learning computer skills and using the Internet.  The students in these classrooms have never dreamt of owning their own PCs and cannot fathom the world on the other side of an Internet connection – they have enough on their minds at home.

Yet in many of these places, the speed of the Internet connection is ample for mainstream computing purposes and children are eager and excited to learn.  WiHood, a name originating in the phrase, The World is Your Neighbor, offers a virtual personal PC that overcomes the physical barriers to digital learning by making clever use of cloud computing and modified USB drives.

This video profiles Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Hilmi Quraishi's work with mobile innovations in rural India and demonstrates the power of collaboration between the private and citizen sectors. The video premiered during yesterday's panel session on building the business-social bridge.

This evening, the Ashoka-Lemelson fellows had a dinner at ISB's lovely mirror pool. It was a stylish way to kick off the Tech4Society event, and it was also a great opportunity to hear fellows' stories and ideas.

David Green has been working for years to make health-care products that are high in quality and low in manufacturing overhead, thus making them accessible to people and communities without access to traditional care. Here, he tells us about his latest project, a hearing device that can be programmed using a mobile phone:

As someone who suffers from hearing loss, I'm touched by David's ideas. Even in nations with ample access to health care, hearing is a frequently misunderstood issue. The technology that David describes here is amazing, but just as amazing is the simplified approach to distribution. All around the world, these devices could bring much-needed help to the ears that need it most.

The following post is by Lukas Biewald, originally published on CrowdFlower's blog and reposted with his permission.  Lukas is the founder and CEO of Dolores Labs and CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing technology and resource.

Image source: Ushahidi

Friday night I was getting ready to spend the weekend working on my board meeting slides when my friend Ian Monroe came by the office and told me to talk to Robert Munro. Robert is a computational linguist who does research on large scale processing of text messages — an obscure subject until the earthquake in Haiti happened two weeks ago.Robert had been working with Josh Nesbit, cofounder of FrontLineSMS:Medic, an awesome NGO dedicated to building SMS based communication infrastructure for people in the developing world.

Deadline Feb. 1, 2010

Apply for up to $650,000 for "Wireless Projects Demonstrating Promise Of Solving Critical Global Issues and mHealth." The Wireless Innovation Project identifies and rewards the most promising advances in wireless related technologies that can be used to solve critical problems around the globe. Although projects may be global in scope, applicants must be nonprofits, educational institutions or social entrepreneurs based in the United States. Up to $650,000 will be awarded to wireless projects demonstrating exceptional promise to solve a critical global issue in the following fields: education; health; access to communication; the environment; or economic development. Final winners will be announced on April 19, 2010 at the annual Global Philanthropy Forum in Redwood City, California.

Find complete detailed information about eligibility and an application here.

This post contributed by Ben Lyon.

This post contributed by Ashoka's Osman Ashai. The following is Part 3 in a case study series following Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi's collaboration with Microsoft to use mobile technology to educate the public and health care workers about Tuburculosis prevention and treatment.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/focus2capture/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi and his organization, ZMQ, are working to tackle Tuberculosis in rural India through technology. With support from Microsoft and using their software, Quraishi and ZMQ have developed a two-pronged approach:

First: increase Tuberculosis awareness among the public.