Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

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Archive for the ‘EPROM’ tag

“A message oriented phone system for low cost connectivity”

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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.

Written by drewcogbill

July 15th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

Entrepreneurial Programming and Resarch on Mobiles at MIT

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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.

Written by drewcogbill

July 15th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

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