MobileActive's Blog

Shanzhai Phones: Knock-offs are Knocking on Africa's Door

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Mar 10, 2010

Vodafone's release of a $15 cell phone earlier this year at the GSMA Mobile World Conference made waves in the mobile industry, but the phone may have some stiff competition. Shanzhai phones coming out of China provide smartphone capabilities with prices that are significantly lower than phones from Western mainstream brands.

Shanzai.com describes the shanzhai (alternate spelling shanzai) as “1. mountain fortress/bandit 2. a vendor, who operates a business without observing the traditional rules or practices often resulting in innovative and unusual products or business models.” The production of knock-off phones in the Shanzen region of China is having an impact on the mobile industry as a whole. The shanzhai phenomenon is relatively new. New York Times explored the shanzhai phone explosion noting: 

Women and Mobile: Is It Really a Global Opportunity?

Posted by admin on Mar 08, 2010

This review was written by Anne-Ryan Heatwole with Katrin Verclas.

Today is International Women's Day and as we do every year, we are looking at the complex and intriguing issue of women and mobile technology around the world.  A new report, “Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity,” by the GSMA Development Fund, the Cherie Blair Foundation and Vital Wave Consulting, tackles the issue of the gender gap in mobile phone usage with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. 

How to Manage e- (and m-) Waste: The UNEP Investigates

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Mar 03, 2010

The United Nations Environment Programme has released a new study on managing e-waste for developing countries. The report focuses one three major points: the market potential of e-waste recycling, encouraging the adoption of the UNEP’s guidelines to foster innovation in e-waste recycling technologies, and identifying places in which e-waste recycling is thriving. 

The study acknowledges that data of e-waste is insufficient, but the United Nations University estimates “that current e-waste arising across the twenty-seven members of the European Usnion amount to around 8.3 – 9.1 million per year; global arising are estimated to be around 40 million tons per year.”

The report used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.

Finding Some ICT Answers in Benin: A Guest Post by Linda Raftree, PLAN International

Posted by KatrinVerclas on Mar 02, 2010

Countries:

This guest post was written by Linda Raftree who is using social media and ICTs in youth and community development work in Africa and elsewhere. She works for the NGO Plan.  Her article is re-posted here with permission.

Over the past few months, I’ve been supporting the development of a mobile data gathering/ crowd sourcing and mapping workshop for youth in Benin.  The training is part of a broader initiative to reduce violence against children.  We’ve decided to use Frontline SMS and Ushahidi as tools in the project because we think (and want to test whether) mobile data collection/ crowd sourcing incidents of violence will allow for a better understanding of what is happening in this area.  We also think that geo-visualizing reports of violence against children may have an impact on decision makers and might allow them to better plan prevention and treatment programs and services.

Election Monitoring with SMS: Lightweight Mobile Data Collection Meets Powerful Mapping Analytics

Posted by KatrinVerclas on Feb 25, 2010

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As we are getting ready for our event in Washington DC tomorrow that will focus on New Tools for Better Elections, we are excited to see that more open source options for mobile data collection and analysys are becoming available than ever sbefore.  Development Seed, one of the most promising Drupal development shops around right now, has been an innovator in developing platforms for data analysis, in particular.
This article describes the latest release of its open-source platform Managing News, and its integration with a low-cost SMS gateway for mobile data collection. It was written by Development Seed's Robert Soden and is republished here with permission.

We can now dynamically map and visualize real-time SMS messages in Managing News using the new SlingshotSMS feature. All the code is available on github.

This release is particularly exciting for us because it ties together two of our core projects in such a way that each is made better. SlingshotSMS is a lightweight SMS gateway that can be run off of a USB drive, needing only a GSM modem and an internet connection to act as a bridge between mobile phones and the web. Managing News is a powerful data aggregator and visualization tool that lets distributed teams work together to make large amounts of information useful. Together, they provide an extensible framework for teams conducting mobile data collection projects in the field.

Extensibility is key here because we need this to meet a wide variety of use cases in order for it to be useful. We have been particularly focused on use cases related to election monitoring, but this is just one of many possible applications. Here's a graphic that Saman made illustrating how the system works:

 Using SlingshotSMS with your team  

This technology is meant to accompany your existing processes of data collection. You have people in the field, they have cellphones, you have a phone back in headquarters, and they can text in messages to you that are then relayed to a visualization space, which helps keep you and your team on the same page.

 Setting Up SlingShotSMS Since SlingshotSMS runs on a USB drive, you just plug it in, plug in your phone, and set up what website you want to have the SMS messages sent to. The SMS messages are turned into RSS 2.0 and PUSHed, like as a fat ping. You computer just needs internet to send these messages.

 SlingshotSMS in the field

Going back to this election monitoring example, here you see the election monitor is texting in that the polling station is closed. You'll notice that the text message contains a few things: a polling station ID, the word "closed", and the word "security." These are key terms we are going to want to look for on the Managing News side to flag.

 SlingshotSMS integration with Managing News  

SlingshotSMS just pushes the data up to Managing News. The Managing News site will have a custom parser that will break up this text message, pulling out key words and numbers.

Customizing SMS parsing for each project

Out of the box, the Managing News/SlingshotSMS bridge simply accepts the SMS and incorporates it into the default Managing News workflow, ignoring important information in this example like the fact the polling station is closed and there is a security issue. This is where the pluggable nature of Managing News proves its worth. It is simple to write a custom parser that replaces the default parser that ships with Managing News. With some creative use of the Drupal taxonomy system to filter incoming results into Managing News channels and some very basic regex, you can quickly have a system that is able to capture this data and let Managing News users react to it. We'll publish a blog post soon explaining exactly how to do this.

Authentication

Authentication of incoming SMS messages is vital in these situations, and we took extra care to make sure the Managing News Slingshot feature will only receive data from authorized sources. The framework is dependent on the Drupal KeyAuth module which allows signed messages to pass between a SlingshotSMS installation and Managing News. When setting up the Managing News Slingshot feature, users are given public and private keys that they then copy into the SlingshotSMS configuration file. In the future we are considering switching to an OAuth based solution.

To get set up, you'll need the following:

Editors Note: We will test-run Managing News and Slingshot in an upcoming software review but meanwhile congratulate Development Seed on the ongoing efforts in building better open source tools for mobile data collection and analysis.

HarassMap: Tracking Sexual Harassment in Egypt with SMS

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Feb 23, 2010

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For women in Egypt, sexual harassment is an unwelcome but all too common part of life. In 2008, the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights released statistics stating that 83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women in Egypt reported exposure to sexual harassment. HarassMap, a project based in Cairo, plans to give women an outlet to report instances of haramessnt. Combining FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi’s mapping platform, HarassMap aims to be a voice for women. 

Mobile Benchmarks 2010: How Are Non-Profits Using Text Messaging?

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Feb 19, 2010

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We are releasing today the first-ever Nonprofit Text Messaging Benchmark Study. The study, sponsored by Mobile Commons and mGive, takes a look at how organizations in the United States are using text messaging and how subscribers are responding.  It reveals that mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular for advocacy with organizations.

Written by Michael Amoruso and Jessica Bosanko of M+R Strategic Services and Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, the report “provides benchmarks and metrics by which nonprofit organizations can measure their success with text messaging and illustrate the various ways in which organizations are using text messages.”

Mobile Voices: Creating a Voice for Day Laborers

Posted by PrabhasPokharel on Feb 18, 2010

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Note: This is the second of two articles about Mobile Voices, a project based in Southern California. The first post can be found here.

Voces Móviles / Mobile Voices is a Los Angeles-based citizen media project, a collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (ASC) and the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA). Mobile Voices describes itself as "a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones. [The project] helps people with limited computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere."

MoTeCH: A Mobile Approach to Maternal Health Care

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Feb 10, 2010

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In an effort to bridge the gap between community health workers and patients, the Grameen Foundation is in the midst of a two and a half-year project called Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH). MoTeCH, a joint initiative between the Grameen Foundation, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Ghana Health Service, is working to determine how best to use mobile phones to increase the quality and quantity of antenatal and neonatal care in rural Ghana.

The project is two-fold.  One service targets what Tim Wood, director of the Grameen Foundation’s Mobile Health Innovation and ICT Innovation divisions calls “pregnant parents,” and another targets community health workers.

Book Review - SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Feb 10, 2010

Global Regions:

SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa is a new collection of essays and case studies examining how SMS has been used in Africa for acticism. Essays include Amanda Atwood’s report on Kubatana’s experiences in Zimbabwe setting up mobiles as a means of sharing news outside of government propaganda, to Bukeni Waruzi’s essay on collecting data on children’s rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2004.  SMS Uprising is published by Fahamu, a British-based organization with a focus on information services for Africa.

SMS Uprising provides the reader with a decent understanding of the state of mobile SMS usage in Africa today. The essays are written by writers, developers, activists, and researchers who are committed to Africa, and cover a multitude of ways SMS can be applied for advocacy work – everything from alerts about political unrest to sharing health information. The book is divided into two parts: context and case studies.

Soukari Ekine, the editor, notes:

SMS Uprising is significant for many reasons not least because it has been edited by an African woman activist. Often initiatives in Africa are studied by people who are quite distant from the continent or are academics who are remote from the grassroots of the subject under discussion. The book is also unique in giving an insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technology to facilitate these changes...The intention is that the information contained within the book will lead to greater reflection about the real potential and limitations of mobile technology.