Sachs: Mobile devices "most transformative technology of economic development of our time"

project-syndicate.org

3 points·lunchbox··2 comments

"On the fully commercial side, the mobile revolution is creating a logistics revolution in farm-to-retail marketing. Farmers and food retailers can connect directly through mobile phones and distribution hubs, enabling farmers to sell their crops at higher “farm-gate” prices and without delay, while buyers can move those crops to markets with minimum spoilage and lower prices for final consumers. "

They must leverage basic cellular technology in pretty creative ways. I can't imagine these farmers would have advanced smart phones with data plans. Is this all done through sms? Does anybody know more about this system?

Android could potentially have a large impact in developing countries. It could provide open source location based services on cheaper handsets. All it needs is a good distribution system (like app store).

It is really all based on SMS. You can treat SMS input as command lines on remote server and returns a very short list of the stuffs. The creative part here is how to train users to use it. But at one hand, they will learn it because they have to. So a formatted text input is pretty good for server side to parse.

I saw a video about how a Beijing company use voice and text for translation on cellular phone. A tourist type what he wants to say in English and send the sms to system. The system returns a Chinese text for taxi driver to see. Another system also leave a voice message for listening if it is inconvenient for reading.

At the other hand. unless data plan and smart phone becomes much cheaper in developing world. Android may not influence the current market in short term.

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