Lowering barriers to adoption isn’t just one approach – it’s critical to real ‘scale’
This post is a write-up of a talk I gave at the recent Mobile Web East Africa conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Thanks to the team for inviting us to speak! Technology companies are in the business of changing habits. Creating a new tool, and getting people to use it consistently, means trying to change something about the way people get things done – moving from analogue to digital, from manual to automated, from one app to another, from WordPress... Read More
Kenya: From the ‘phone booth’ to widespread mobile adoption in Silicon Savannah
Motorola M3888 I had my first mobile phone in 1999, a metallic blue Motorola M3888. Its street name was “phone booth” because it was the cheapest mobile phone available, even though it was a luxury. It cost 14,000KES ($160) – a gift from my father bought during a Safaricom Valentine’s Day special. I could make calls – for 40KES (50 cents) per minute, and send SMS, and that was it; I loved that phone! Today, you can buy a phone for as... Read More
Don’t Call It A Comeback: 5 Reasons SMS Is Here To Stay
‘Unsafe day’ message received on phone. Photo credit: Georgetown University’s Institute for Reproductive Health (IRH) SMS remains the most popular two-way communications platform on the planet. In most cases, it’s inexpensive, casual, and discreet for users. It also represents one of the more profitable features offered by mobile network operators. And while SMS does face an increasingly fractured market, largely from the growth... Read More
FrontlineSMS at 7: ActionAid in Kenya, Nepal and London
In the seventh and final post in our FrontlineSMSat7 series, our CEO Laura Walker Hudson highlights a FrontlineSMS use case that makes her happy – ActionAid’s award-winning, bi-continental pilots of FrontlineSMS in Africa and Europe. In 2010, one of the first meetings I took after I joined FrontlineSMS was with a new initiative called Infoasaid (at gorgeous, Art Deco Bush House in London, now sadly closed). A small team of media and humanitarian... Read More
Cooking up a menu of services: Responding to user needs for mobile engagement support
Training members of staff at SWAP in Kisumu, Kenya (photo credit: RickRoxburgh.com) The FrontlineSMS team is pleased to announce a new level of premium support and consultancy services to help users design mobile engagement strategies, build capacity for professional adoption and automate communication workflows. Engaging people on new platforms can be a complex process and it can be a challenge to find a recipe for success. New technologies... Read More
Low tech adaptations for a community communications system
FrontlineSMS was recently featured on the ‘Lets Them Talk‘ blog. In the post, Helena Puig Larrauri (@helenapuigl) highlights how the SUDIA community are using technology to bridge the information gap for communities living along the Blue Nile in Sudan. They are using FrontlineSMS to disseminate information about livelihoods and sustainability directly to communities. Thanks Helena for allowing us to repost! During a FrontlineSMS training... Read More
News Participation Starts at ‘Home’
Man standing on what was a boardwalk. Photo credits: Instagram, ncoronges Seemingly every major news event worldwide is heightening participation in news. People are eager to share updates and photos of an unfolding news event, ask questions of media outlets, and share important information. But there are two important aspects to this type of participation: (1) people are most interested in sharing news about the community around them, specifically... Read More
FrontlineSMS case study featured in new Rockefeller Foundation report: Learning from experimentation
The Rockefeller Foundation recently launched a new website, Capacity to Innovate.org, which examines lessons from a number of organizations including Ushahidi and Internews, and encapsulates them in three short reports which are well worth a read. FrontlineSMS is featured in the ‘Learning From Experimentation’ report, available from the website. Here’s an excerpt, but we really recommend the whole report as a very readable and thought-provoking... Read More
Guardian: Africa’s apps: Farming to Gaming
FrontlineSMS was featured in the Guardian on 30th October 2012 as one Africa’s progressive apps, user-friendly programs doing everything from instant messaging to ‘the first mobile cow calendar’. We’re proud that version 2 of FrontlineSMS is 100% made in Kenya! Read More
Designing Behavior and the Importance of Being Multi-Channel
GSMA website We spend a lot of time talking about the ubiquity of the mobile phone at FrontlineSMS. So much time, in fact, that we’ve now forbidden the use of the word in the office. It’s not the word’s fault, though, that it’s been so difficult to get an accurate idea of exactly how many people, how many unique entities, have mobile phones. Mobile network operators hold on to that data pretty tightly, so we go with the... Read More
