Re: report on Leveraging ICT for the Base of the Pyramid

Hi,

> 2. I note your objection to making commercial sustainability (profit) a
> criteria. However I (personally) imagine that the phone projects that
> work with small businesses (such as Village Phone, Zain, Madagascar; and
> the Djaama Phone Orange system develolped my MNO Orange) are the way to
> go, mainly because these businesses have other revenue, they don't
> depend on the phone; so when people get individual phones the businesses
> do not die; they just have to find a new market, which they are quite
> used to doing. Of course the business should be small, should feed back
> to, hire from the community.

I didn't make any objection on the use of the lens of commercial 
sustainability as a selection criteria. My point is that it is a very 
specific focus, and should be highlighted as such. There are lots of 
very interesting output in this report, but this is relevant to this 
category/context and not to delivering ICT to the BOP in general imho.

> 3. Regarding how to best reach rural, international farmers, I don't
> quite agree with you that SMS text broadcasts of crop prices for
> different markets, if encoded with symbols in a graph-like format, would
> be much less accessible to rural farmers than voice information.

> Thus I think unlike you that, if done right, SMS data or mixed SMS data
> with pictures (for rural farmers) is workable.

Here i was not trying to debate whether SMS or other text-base option is 
workable for illiterate farmers or not, but im saying that, based on our 
analysis of current systems deployed, they are unable to reach the 
targeted customers directly.
My own approach is to look at voice-based system for now, because this 
is a technology that is available right now, and deployable using 
current phone and network. I believe that there are surely other 
options. For instance, icon-based interfaces has a lot of potential 
imho, but need further research.
That said, what you are describing, i would summarize it as using ascii 
art, is interesting. At least, this is the first time i'm hearing such 
idea, and i found it quite interesting. Are you aware of anybody doing 
similar work (using ascii art as a way to provide interface to 
illiterate people) ? that said, SMS, in 99% of the countries and network 
i know, would not be able to support unicode and U+1F35A, but it is 
worth trying.

> 4. Another note -- if it's allowable to take this space to describe an
> "ideal project" instead of just comment on the report:

This space is surely appropriate for discussing that kind of project, 
but perhaps i would recommend you start a specific separate thread.

Cheers
Stephane



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Stephane Boyera		stephane@w3.org
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Received on Sunday, 25 September 2011 10:42:22 UTC