Combating food insecurity in Northern Kenya
infoasaid is a consortium of Internews and the BBC World Service Trust. The objective is to improve how aid agencies communicate with disaster-affected communities – the focus is on providing humanitarian information. The emphasis is on the need to deliver information, as aid itself, through the most appropriate channels. In this guest blog post first published on their website, infoasaid highlight some of the innovating approaches they... Read More
From Russia with Love
In the twenty-second in our series of FrontlineSMS Guest Posts, a bit of a departure from the norm. Aleksei is our star software tester, and as part of the testing he’s been trying it out in his wife’s “live environment”. His story provides some interesting insights into how small enterprises of any stripe can make use of FrontlineSMS for staff coordination and management. His wife Elena Ovsiannikova, leader of a beauty consulting... Read More
Students to debut FrontlineSMS on Android?
CS210 is a project-based Computer Science Innovation & Development course at Stanford University where students work with faculty and staff to build on the spirit of innovation and excellence at Stanford and the larger Silicon Valley area. As part of the course this year, Karina Qian and David Gobaud are working with the Computer Science Department and the Haas Center for Public Service to create Masters and Senior project classes. Here,... Read More
Social mobile: Doing what it says on the tin
About a year ago I was asked to give an interview to the Africa Journal. They were looking at ICT innovators and entrepreneurs in Africa and I agreed, despite being mildly uncomfortable being labelled an ICT innovator or an entrepreneur (and an African one, at that). At the end of the interview, however, they captured a brief moment which beautifully encapsulated what FrontlineSMS is all about. The interview ended: FrontlineSMS provides the... Read More
Cometh the hour. Cometh the technology.
For NGOs and developers alike, the ICT4D space can be a tough nut to crack. While NGOs generally struggle to find the tools they need to meet their particular needs, developers face the opposite problem – getting their tools into the hands of those who need them the most. Attempts to connect the NGO and developer communities – physically and virtually – continue to this day with varying degrees of success. There is no magic... Read More
Future FrontlineSMS
Today has turned out to be rather significant for FrontlineSMS. Two months and two days since we released the new version we’ve hit our 500th download request. Although I didn’t set any targets back on launch day, by all accounts we’ve done incredibly well and FrontlineSMS is now likely the most widely adopted non-profit text messaging platform around. Of course, many of those 500 users will probably never do anything significant... Read More
Three is not the magic number…
It’s 1.4.7… One month ago the new version of FrontlineSMS was released. Well over three hundred NGOs responded and downloaded the software, and over a hundred of them have joined the new online community. Apart from the excitement surrounding the software itself, the new community is already proving its worth. I’d easily have settled for a hundred members after one month – hopefully the other two hundred will also see... Read More
The Social Mobile Long Tail 2.0
A few months ago I finally got round to diagramming what I thought mobile applications development in the not-for-profit space looked like. I came up with this, and called it “Social Mobile’s Long Tail“. It was based on the original Long Tail concept, first talked about by Chris Anderson in a Wired Magazine article, when he used it to describe consumer demographics in business (something quite different). (A larger image is... Read More
Three years on, but still some way to go…
I’m writing this from seat 7D at exactly 38,000 feet somewhere between Forssa and Cambridge. Normally seat 7D would be in first- or business-class, but unfortunately for me I’m on a Ryanair (low cost airline) flight. Nothing fancy here. I’m returning from a short combined work and pleasure trip to Finland, where exactly three years ago I was knee-deep writing the first version of FrontlineSMS. It was ’seat of the pants’... Read More
FrontlineSMS gets active
FrontlineSMS has so far managed to achieve quite a lot with really very little, but that’s about to change. After two-and-a-half years of promise, it’s finally beginning to look like the software I dreamt of that wet Saturday evening in Cambridge back in early 2005. I’ve spent the past week putting six months of development through its paces, whilst writing the new User Guide, and am as excited as ever about what this thing... Read More
