MobileActive.org

Polls, a mobile tool developed by the company Pollimath, is an Android mobile-phone software used to conduct opinion polls. The concept is simple; draft the opinion poll on a phone, add voters, and open the poll. The list of voters will receive an SMS and/or E-Mail notification with a web browser link in it.  Users vote via a lightweight web page that opens up on clicking the link in the notification. The pollster can see the poll statistics and the voting details.

The Mobile Researcher platform coordinates communication and data collection, exposing live data for management, processing, monitoring and evaluation. Surveys are designed and deployed from a web console where administrators log-in to collaborate on survey design, manage staff and analyze and export response data. The mobile application, installed on fieldworker or end user handsets, downloads assigned surveys and facilitates their conduct, storage and submission directly from the phone.

Fluid Nexus is an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists to send messages and data amongst themselves independent of a centralized cellular network. The idea is to provide a means of communication between people when the centralized network has been shut down, either by the government during a time of unrest, or by nature due to a massive disaster. During such times the use of the centralized network for voice or SMS is not possible.

Yet, if we can use the fact that people still must move about the world, then we can use ideas from sneaker-nets to turn people into carriers of data. Given enough people, we can create fluid, temporary, ad-hoc networks that pass messages one person at a time, spreading out as a contagion and eventually reaching members of the group. This enables surreptitious communication via daily activity and relies on a fluid view of reality. Additionally, Fluid Nexus can be used as a hyperlocal message board, loosely attached to physical locations.

Mobile Commons’ software makes it simple to create mobile campaigns and applications, and to connect them to the web, CRM Tools, and other media. Mobile Commons clients focus on cause-related marketing, fundraising campaigns, and advocacy. Mobile Commons provides tools that allow full two-way messaging, integrated audio, and web tie-ins.

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.

Pigeon is a voice-based social network for people with limited technological access and even limited literacy. With Pigeon, a person can record a one-minute voice message telling their world what's up and broadcast that message to a group of their choosing.

Freedom Fone merges the mobile phone with citizen radio programming. Audio files are stored by Freedom Fone in a content management system which is updated through a simple-to-use browser interface. These audio clips populate an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu which callers can navigate through for information. Individuals can contribute questions, content and feedback by leaving voice messages via the IVR interface. Freedom Fone can be operated as a collective, with different groups managing different channels of information from the same installation.

Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and visualize and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.

The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones and web browsers that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Available as an iPhone application, The Extraordinaries enables organizations to connect with their supporters through these micro-volunteer opportunities, strengthening relationships and leveraging crowds for varied work such as image tagging, translation and research.

FrontlineSMS is a free software that turns a laptop and a mobile phone or GSM modem into a central communications hub. Once installed, the program enables users to send and receive text messages with groups of people through mobile phones.

Handheld Human Rights provides a secure hub for groups around Burma’s borders documenting human rights abuses. By allowing users to submit data directly from their mobiles, Burmese refugees in community organizations will be able to turn data on abuses into action. Once abuses and alerts are channeled through the hub and mapped, this information can be used to raise international awareness and support advocacy campaigns.

Catalista helps users find timely and local volunteer opportunities, rate them, and share their good deed with the world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.