Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
there’s a name for this stuff?
future implemenation prototype?
SIM App via Nathan Eagle
Tools for doing this:
SIM Toolkit
Symbian SIM Application Toolkit
I want to do more research on this. Looks like apps might be built with C++. Eagle asks some good questions on his post that were never fully answered.
mobility
Nathan Eagle’s mobility
“mobility is a collaborative project which brings together some of the leading academics, technicians, educators and practitioners in the IT and mobile fields with the common goal of developing an exciting and empowering range of tools and resources to unlock the power of mobile applications development for users in the developing world”
Design Missteps
The main brick column here is about 6 feet tall. I assumed that the top of it was closed off, so I set my wallet and two sets of keys on it, which promptly fell into a crevice. It took the hotel staff about 30 minutes to help me fish out my belongings with wire hangers. The builder of the building happened to be eating dinner at a table about 10 feet from the column during the event.
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The San Ignacio market has about 10 vendors on weekdays, but on Saturdays the market area is flooded with a huge number of merchants. In the last year, a new, large structure was built for the market to house the everyday vendors and a new concrete slab was laid for the weekend merchants to set up temporary tents on.
I think it’s great that there is investment being put into infrastructure for something so obviously important to the local economy, but I think there are a few major oversights in the design of the site. The most major one is that the majority of the vendors are on a north-south axis and the east to west brightly shining sun blasts in on the vendors and their products essentially all day every day. To deal with this, all of the vendors have strung up tarps or sheets to block out the sun.
Additionally, the design of the stalls just doesn’t seem to consider what will happen in them. Every stall has added a system of ropes and pipes to hang bananas and other good off for selling. They are making the most of their space, but the design of the stall could have anticipated and assisted in this and other produce selling needs.
Also:
“A message oriented phone system for low cost connectivity”
I stumbled on a paper by R.J. Honicky, et al., called “A message oriented phone system for low cost connectivity” when I was on Nathan Eagle’s publication page. Nathan Eagle is the PI for EPROM.
This paper excited me because it’s about an idea for a voice message based system for people living in developing countries. The system it proposes is much more concerned with hardware and infrastructure than my Pigeon idea, but it a great point for helping me to continue generating questions about communication in developing countires and to begin more academic research.
I had been thinking about Pigeon more in terms of international calling, but domestic use could be useful also. As I’ve been talking to people about mobile phone use in Belize, there are still hoops people will jump through to save their credit. Something that could help them save money and communicate more easily would have a good chance of being adopted.
The paper mentions how a voice message system would effectively put people on the grid who live in areas where there is no mobile coverage but travel often to areas with coverage. In this case, asynchronous communication may be beneficial since when a person will be avaliable is unknown. Honicky’s proposed system would allow people to record when they are unconnected and then to upload when they are in a connected area.
Entrepreneurial Programming and Resarch on Mobiles at MIT
Entrepreneurial Programming and Resarch on Mobiles (EPROM) at MIT works on education, research and entrepreneurship for mobile phone programming in East Africa.
In education, they have developed a variety of courses in mobile phone programming which are being taught in a variety of East African universities. They are training programmers and comuter scientists to generate localy useful mobile phone applications.
In research, students are developing applications that can be run from any GSM SIM card and can be used for medical data collection in the field, amongst others.
In entrepreneurship, the group runs a SMS bootcamp teaching how to launch SMS-based services and supports small mobile phone application-based services such as MoSoko, a SMS based Craigslist, and Airtime Banking, which transfers a certain amount of credit over a desired amount of time.
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