Interoperable Technologies in International Development: Access to FrontlineSMS
By Ashley Mannes FrontlineSMS was recently included in an academic paper, written by Ashley Mannes, of Georgetown University, USA, and titled ‘Interoperable Technologies in International Development: Access to FrontlineSMS.’ In the below guest post, Ashley introduces the main themes of her paper and what compelled her to write about FrontlineSMS: FrontlineSMS in use / Image:... Read More
Announcing the “Mobile Message”
Over the past year or so, it’s become increasingly clear to us that we need to take the “mobile message” out of its technology silo and make it more available – and accessible – to a wider audience. This was the thinking behind our regular series on PC World, and is the thinking behind a new series we’re launching today in collaboration with National... Read More
SMS inspiration: A view from the Central Independent States
Moldcell and Orange - the two main Moldovan networks I’m beginning this week in the small landlocked eastern European country of Moldova, talking to representatives of IREX-supported organisations running telecentres and internet access points across the region. We just had a short session on FrontlineSMS, explaining how it works, and starting to come up with ideas for how... Read More
CityCampLondon: thoughts on SMS and appropriate tech
This weekend has been spent at CityCampLondon, in a fog of coffee and beer, on Brick Lane and at the Kings Cross Hub, thinking and talking about using tech to make London better. I wanted to post a slightly more coherent version of my thoughts here. Mobile Phone chandelier, LBI on Brick Lane At the Mobile in the City panel, I reflected on the UK’s digital divide, which I’ve... Read More
Designing for the REAL 95%
As occasionally happens, Ken and I find ourselves on opposite sides of the world at conferences this week. Ken is at Mobile Web in Africa 2010, in Johannesburg, and I’m hereby asking him to tell you all about it here when he gets a minute. \o/ I’m at Design for Persuasion in Ghent, Belgium, with a room full of people who’ve never heard of FrontlineSMS – this... Read More
Social Change – to go, please
In our twenty-fifth guest post, the lovely Jon Camfield highlights his past work to get FrontlineSMS running on an OLPC laptop. Anyone else running \o/ on an OLPC? Let us know! The recent Technology Salons have been on local and sectoral implementations of mobile technology in development. Mobile is hardly “new” anymore, but we’re seeing increasing tools for... Read More
Mobile Design. Sans Frontieres.
Although I find myself intrigued by the convergence of computer science, human computer interaction (HCI) design and international development, it’s not often that I find myself in a room of experts. They’re just not places I tend to mix, most likely because I have no professional IT qualifications, let alone a computer science degree, and I’ve done most of my... Read More
Our "social mobile" line in the sand
The depth and range of discussion generated by my last post on “the cloud” and “appropriate technology” may have come as something of a surprise, but one thing is clear. There’s a great deal of misunderstanding around the topic, particularly with people who are either developing or promoting tools based on the very technology I was challenging. The... Read More
Build it, and they will come (if it's useful)
It’s incredible to think that exactly four years ago I was gearing up to write the early FrontlineSMS prototype. Although a lot was undecided, a central pillar of my early thinking was that a “platform approach” would be the most flexible and appropriate, and that it would be wrong and restrictive of me to try and build a specific, local solution to the communications... Read More
Chipping away at the SMS literacy barrier
With all the excitement surrounding Monday’s launch of FrontlineForms, we almost forgot the other improvements we’ve made to the FrontlineSMS software. As well as support for IntelliSMS – another Clickatell-style online aggregator – we finally got round to adding Unicode support which, to the non-technical, means you can now send and receive messages in foreign... Read More
