I don’t usually work on planes, even eleven hour transatlantic flights. But this time I thought I’d give it a go – maybe do something a little bit more interesting than reading reports or doing email. So I plumped for this. I’ve wondered for a while what the FrontlineSMS footprint is, you know, where it’s … Continue reading Out of nothing comes something
Tag: software development
m-Reality bites
Going through an old hard drive backup over the weekend (a spot of well-overdue housekeeping), I ran across a Word document showing how someone could – potentially – pay for a newspaper using their mobile phone. This, of course, doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary today – mobile banking is one of the hottest topics around. But … Continue reading m-Reality bites
Battleship Google fires its new gun
The smoke has finally begun to settle. At times it reached almost fever pitch. Rumours that this was going to be the big shake-up the industry needed were followed, as reality set in, by sobering recognition of the challenges that lie ahead (and a scratching of heads as people tried to fill in much of … Continue reading Battleship Google fires its new gun
Considering Africa
During the summer, sandwiched between the end of my first Stanford Fellowship and a trip to Uganda with Grameen, I was asked by the Corporate Council on Africa to give an interview about my work. They were putting together a feature on “ICT innovators” for their Africa Journal, and wanted to talk about FrontlineSMS. I’m … Continue reading Considering Africa
The unpicking of FrontlineSMS
Going by the title of this Blog post you might be expecting a little online session for prospective FrontlineSMS users. You know the kind – what it is, what it does, where it’s been used and so on. Well, however useful that might be, this posting is more for my benefit. It’s time for a … Continue reading The unpicking of FrontlineSMS
FrontlineSMS on a Mac?
Bobby, a friend of mine from the Philippines (who I met at a recent Fahamu workshop in Nairobi), has been doing some great work with FrontlineSMS lately and has become a real supporter of the software. Over the next few weeks development of the next version will begin – thanks to funding from the MacArthur … Continue reading FrontlineSMS on a Mac?
Bridging the knowledge divide
A common theme in my work, and in many of my conference talks, centres around a very simple message – appropriate technology. It’s nothing new, and as a concept has been around since the 1970’s with Fritz Schumacher’s defining book, “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered”. During my recent interview with Nokia’s “New … Continue reading Bridging the knowledge divide
It’s capacity building, stupid..!
Most of us know the story about teaching a man to fish. It goes something like this. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he can feed himself and his family forever, or at least a lot longer than one day. I have a similar … Continue reading It’s capacity building, stupid..!