An interesting article on MIT’s website discusses how several business ventured started by its students spawned by class projects or independent work are exploring news ways of using the mobile phones for improving the day-to-day lives of people, particularly in the developing world. Applications range from mobile health-care services to agricultural and mobile payment services as well. Many were developed as entries for business competitions, or as part of the MIT Media Lab’s NextLab program to develop mobile phone applications geared toward the developing world. Read the full article here. *** LIRNEasia’s Mobile 2.
The design of the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program pilot (termed as the m-Health project) and findings from the Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination pilot (termed as the HazInfo projects) involvoing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) were presented, yesterday, at the CAP Implementers Workshop organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). First Talk – The m-Health RTBP will be evaluating CAP or EDXL (Emergency Data Exchange Language) as means for disseminating health risk information to local health officials and community health care workers. Currently, the National Epidemiology Unit, in Sri Lanka, publishes a “Weekly Epidemiological Report” on the world wide web, a pdf file that can only be viewed on a personal computer. Paper copies of the same are delivered via postal mail to the relevant health officials. The latency in gathering the epidemiological data, analyzing, publishing, and disseminating is delayed as much as up to 3 weeks.
LIRNEasia has come up with startling evidence on how transaction costs in agriculture could be reduced by simple mobile phone applications. The organization’s Lead Economist, Dr. Harsha de Silva called for a multi-stakeholder action plan to implement a series of actions that would help poor farmers as well as consumers by reducing information costs in agricultural markets and value chains. He was speaking at a panel following a public lecture by Indian Institute of Management Professor, Subhash C. Bhatnagar, who spoke on the benefits of ICT applications to farmers, taking India as an example.