This week’s video interview features Andi Friedman, Managing Director of Clyral Digital Solutions. He talks about Mobile Researcher, an application developed by his company that allows researchers to collect data in the field using their mobile phone.
There are many applications that support mobile surveys out there, but this one seems to be outstanding in terms of its simple approach. The company started working on this project three years ago and developed the first prototype together with Health Systems Trust, a South-African NGO. This allowed them to observe how people were using surveys in the South-African context and to determine user requirements. The fact that they involved their users from the beginning was probably crucial for coming up with an usable and easy-to-use solution.
Surveys are created using an online web tool and can be deployed to the devices, even while they are in the field. No installation of any additional software is necessary (unless you want to use their mobile application channel, which allows for richer survey representation on the device). They also provide a prepaid system without any licensing or subscription costs, which makes the service accessible to NGOs and other organizations of any size.
Clyral Digital Solutions is based in Durban in South Africa. Check out the video below to learn more about Mobile Researcher.
This is the 17th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
A quick note on two events that were announced recently: The 1st International Conference on Mobile Development (mDEVELOPMENT 2009) will take place in Barcelona 2-4 September 2009. It seems that the conference has emerged from last years mLife event , where they held a session on mobile development.
The other event is a workshop organized by Matt Jones and Gary Marsden on the theme “Taking Ubicomp Beyond Developed Worlds” (Globi-Comp 2009). The workshop will be held at the Ubicomp 2009 conference, which I find really exciting, since I’ve previously published at this conference myself. It’s really about time that ICT4D establishes its place in this community.
In summer 2009, Daniela Wolf and I will offer a comprehensive IT course (Zanzibits Support) in cooperation with Zanzibits in Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania. In preparation for the course and the stay in Zanzibar we attend a weekly, private Swahili course lead by Elisabeth Zenz who has lived there for over 1 year.
The course is mainly intended to teach us the neccessary skills to be able to get along in everyday life, do small talk, go shopping, etc. Also, Elisabeth has set herself a target to teach us as many cool slang words as possible so we can impress locals
In the first lesson on March 4th we were taught pronounciation, how to greet and say goodbye, how to do basic smalltalk (habari za …), the numbers from 1 - 1000 and the most important persons (mimi = i, wewe = you, kaka = brother, dada = sister, mama = mother, papa = father). During the course we read some small talk conversations in groups of two to improve our articulation.
In the second lesson on March 12th we read some more advanced dialogues in groups of 2 and afterwards analyzed the vocabulary and tenses used. We learned the three most important tenses (present tense, past tense, future tense) which should suffice. After we had learned some more places you can go to (njumbani = home, kazini = to work, shuleni = to school, sokoni = to the marketplace) we simulated shopping at the marketplace:
how to order food (mchate = food, mkate = bread, yai = egg, matunda = fruits, ndizi = bananas), ask for the price, complain that the price is too high (which we were told to do always) and how to bargain.
As soon as we are satisfied with our articulation we are going to record complete dialogues in groups of two and offer these audio files under a Creative Commons licence online. Also, Daniela and I are collaboratively keeping course notes and a vocabulary on Google Docs which we will publish as well at the end of our course in June.
From now on, there will be a blog post about our progress every week.
In this week’s video interview Werner van Staden from MeWe OpenSource talks about his work and his thoughts on current trends of the mobile market in developing countries. He explains how open source software has moved from the desktop computer to the mobile platform. As Werner puts it, “[we need to] push forward the efforts of mobile connectivity and grassroots action in africa today.” Watch the video below to find out how this movement can help to empower the poorest of the poor.
Werner van Staden currently lives in Johannesburg and works for MeWe OpenSource, which is a trading subsidiary of the social enterprise MeWe Art & Education. Both organizations do work in London and South Africa with the aim to improve the lives of children and young people in those countries.
This is the 16th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
As our interview project is quite a success and we plan to extend it further on upcoming events such as e-Stas and Africa Gathering, we decided to create a repository of these videos in our wiki.
Additionally to the interviews we are trying to add a short CV to every person, to get the context right. Carrying this idea further a bit, we are creating an Open repository of interesting people in ICT4D - every person gets a wiki page.
Ideally this should become an overview as complete as possible - so help is welcome, just mail us if you want to add information. Of course if somebody doesn’t want to appear in this repository - again, just mail us.
Currently the wiki page is far from complete - but we will continuously work on it - make sure you check it out from time to time - http://wiki.ict4d.at/People.
We went to SocialBar Wien and AfrikaCamp in Vienna, which we supported with money and own contributions. We were present at AfrikaCamp with 7 people, made interviews for our video podcast and socialized with other attendees.
Later - in February - we went to Spain to attend Coop 2.0, a meeting dedicated to innovation in ICT4D. Anders Bolin, Florian Sturm and me (Martin Konzett) created good connections to several people in the international ICT4D scene and again shot interviews for our video podcast. We talked to Oleg Petrov from the e-Development Thematic Group (e-TG) of the World Bank about a possible partnership and had an own presentation about Web 2.0 in ICT4D organizations.
Since ICT4D.at founding member Martin Tomitsch now started lecturing down under, we are now offically partnering with University of Sydney. This is the second university partnering with us - the first one is Vienna University of Technology.
We already rolled out our first cooperative article (ICTs for the empowerment of citizens) which is going to be printed for the meeting e-STAS in Malaga, where I will be going to by the end of this month.
We also fixed our contribution for Africa Gathering in London the end of April.
Out movie project UZI Africa has rolled out a second trailer for scientific use.
We are proud to welcome Joanna Knueppel in our team. She will take care of the upcoming applications for funding together with Petra Busswald. We have three to five grants in the pipeline to which we will aplly by the end of April. As Joanna is an English native speaker, she will also do quality engineering on our blog and wiki.
2 of our members are starting the Swahili Course with Elisabeth Zenz this week to be prepared for Zanzibar this summer where they will carry out the Zanzibits Support project. The Swahili Course will also be documented and there will be a weekly blog post about it.
So far so good - we hope everything will continue this smooth and are looking forward to the next exciting events.
After last week’s interview with Evan Henshaw-Plath, we want to introduce Blaine Cook today, who worked on Fire Eagle together with Evan. We were excited to meet Blaine at the MobileActive08 conference in Johannesburg, since he used to be the chief architect at Twitter, before he joined Yahoo. Currently he works as open source developer for BT group.
Blaine has received quite some attention in media due to his role at Twitter. He also has a big name in the open source developer community, not only for writing an open protocol for secure API authorization for desktop, mobile and web applications (OAuth).
Find out in the interview below what his views on mobile technologies for development are and why he thinks that current trends of the mobile market in Africa will change how this technology is viewed.
This is the 15th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
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