India’s Aadhar Bhalinge is the winner of m2Work, a World Bank-sponsored online challenge seeking the best ideas for spurring the job-creation potential of mobile phones. The competition organized by Nokia and infoDev, a World Bank innovation and technology entrepreneurship program, drew a total of 939 ideas, 96% of which came from developing and emerging economies. [...]
Text messaging is a surprisingly good way to get candid responses to sensitive questions, according to a new study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. “The preliminary results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages [...]
With recent statistics showing Kenya’s maternal mortality ratio at 488 per 100,000 live births, a new monitoring system for expectant mothers is set to ease the number of deaths during childbirth. The app ensures the health workers, midwives and the pregnant mothers share health information and care tips using SMS and prepaid calls. The system, which offers [...]
As smartphone users have grown more comfortable forking over information about their bank accounts and physical whereabouts to mobile applications, a growing group of app developers are betting health-related data will be next. Consider Bethesda-based M3 Information. The company has created an app that asks patients a series of nearly 30 questions designed to assess [...]
Imagine a vaccine box that sends you an SMS everytime the temperature in it rises, threatening the quality of vaccines in it. Indian scientists are calling it “a thermometer with a SIMCARD in it” . In what will greatly reduce vaccines going bad due to temperature fluctuations – a phenomenon that could endanger the life [...]
Marion Underwood calls her academic study, “The Blackberry Project.” A title that would work equally well is “Panopticon, Jr.” For the past four years, the University of Texas-Dallas developmental psychology professor has essentially wire-tapped 175 Texas teens, capturing every text message, email, photo, and IM sent on Blackberries that she provided to them, creating a [...]
In news that probably won’t surprise parents of text-obsessed teenagers, Canadians sent an average of almost 2,500 SMS messages every second last year, for a total of about 78 billion. That figure was up almost 40 per cent from 2010, when the texting tally hit 56.4 billion messages. Read the story at ctv.ca
Intuit has set up a pilot program that allows farmers in India to find the best prices for their crops, simply by exchanging a few SMS messages on their cell phones. “We’re making a difference in farmers’ financial lives and saving them time too,” said Intuit Chief Technology Officer Tayloe Stansbury. Intuit demonstrated the service [...]
This year marks its twentieth anniversary, and unlike practically every other technology, it’s hardly changed at all in two decades. To celebrate its astonishing impact upon the world, at Nokia Connects, has unearthed 10 astounding facts about the humble SMS. ONE. The father of SMS is Matti Makkonen, a Finnish engineer. He came up with the [...]
A smart collar which closely monitors the health of cows and sends the results back to farmers using mobile phone technology is being developed as part of a three-year-project co-funded by the Technology Strategy Board. The Technology Strategy Board has given a substantial grant towards the £1.4 million project to develop the technology, which could [...]
