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Fun
National Geographic "Live Curious"
0:50 · September 2011
This video is a short National Geographic “Live Curious” film from September 2011 about the inspiration behind FrontlineSMS. Ken Banks describes how the idea for the software took shape while he was working in Kruger National Park in South Africa.
Read the transcript
Some work I was doing in South Africa, in Kruger National Park, for the park authorities: we were trying to figure out how to communicate mass messaging to the communities around the park. I couldn’t find any tools that allowed the park authorities to send messages to hundreds of people and get information back. The idea for the software really started to firm up in my mind one Saturday evening back home in Cambridge, when I was watching Match of the Day with a bottle of beer, just relaxing. For some unknown, random reason, the thought came to me that a way of getting around the lack of internet connectivity would be to plug a mobile phone into a laptop and use the mobile phone network. Why the idea stayed in my head for a year without popping out, I’ll never know. But that bottle of beer was very, very helpful in the end. I’m Ken Banks, and I live curious.
Transcript edited from YouTube’s auto-generated captions for accuracy.