So you live in a fairly remote farming area where the good graces of the telco seldom if ever makes it presence known. What to do? well, TechTuesday says set up your own telco! MobileActive will show you how:

The Village Base Station is built around voice and low-bandwidth data transmissions. It is an economical solution for rural residents who are outside of typical network coverage or power access, or for people living in situations where network outages occur. In a white paper presenting the VBTS, Heimerl and co-author Eric Brewer describe the project as, “essentially an outdoor PC with a software-defined radio that implements a low-power low-capacity GSM base station. Long-distance WiFi provides ‘backhaul’ into the carrier.” Below are images of elements of the Village Base Station and screenshots from our ‘hackday’ in a large American city when we demo’ed VBTS with Heimerl. (Warning: If you try this at home, be aware of your local regulator’s potential licensing and other restrictions for setting up such network/connecting to it)

continue reading building your own GSM network….

“NGO-in-a-box is a collection of essential tools for running a small-to-medium sized NGO. You can use this toolkit to set up and coordinate your office, organise and manage projects, collaborate online and support your campaigns. The Box contains a set of peer-reviewed Free and Open Source Software tools, with associated guides and tutorials, giving you the technical foundations to build upon.”

Read more and download the NGO-in-a-box here…

“With all those millions of Facebook and iPhone users tending to virtual crops and sharing them with friends, have you ever wondered how their toils stack up against actual real-life farmers? How does our output of digital (and decidedly less tasty) tomatoes compare with our worldwide production of real tomatoes? And perhaps most importantly, who are these casual croppers, and are they anything like their plow-toting counterparts?”

Click the image for the full infographic.

South African teens were happy to give their thumbs a rest for a while and take a break between MXit chats to read the m-novel Kontax, on their cellphones. The m-novel (a novel written to be read on a cellphone) meant that there was finally something on their phones that would make their parents smile rather than frown

Continue reading Mobile literacies – bridging the gap between phone and book.  You can also download the ebook here….

SEND will develop an Open Source monitoring tool in cooperation with software developers to be used on handheld mobile devices to collect and share data. Due to the poor communication infrastructure, this will enable SEND to transmit data and share monitoring information with grassroots organisations and others. They are also developing and implementing a monitoring information management system that will help them track and analyze the data.

Continue reading about how Mobile Devices Help Monitor Access to Healthcare in Ghana….

Speed is often critical in an advocacy campaign and mobile phones allow the rapid dissemination of messages to a network of supporters with specific calls for action. In the developing world, where internet access can be slow or limited, mobile phone campaigns can reach a broad constituency of citizens.

This guide provides examples of successful advocacy campaigns in Argentina, UK, USA, and Africa where mobile phone communication among supporters has played an important part,

Continue reading how to use mobile phones in advocacy campaigns…

Can mobile telephony improve commercial supply-chains in developing countries? Informational challenges – absence, uncertainty, asymmetry – shape the working of markets and commerce in many developing countries. This paper is a case study of the impact of mobile telephony on SMEs in the clothweaving sector in Nigeria.

Continue reading about the Impact of mobile phones on SME supply chains in Nigeria…

Mobiles can be useful tools for collecting, planning, coordinating and recording activities of NGO staff and activists. But did you know that whenever your phone is on, your location is known to the network operator? Or that each phone and SIM card transmits a unique identifying code, which, unless you are very careful about how you acquire the phone and SIM, can be traced uniquely to you?

With cameras, GPS, mobile Internet come ever more dangerous surveillance possibilities, allowing an observer, once they have succeeded in gaining control of the phone, to turn it into a sophisticated recording device. However, even a simple phone can be tracked whenever it is on the network, and calls and text messages are far from private. Where surveillance is undertaken in collusion with the network operator, both the content of the communication and the identities of the parties involved is able to be discovered, sometimes even retrospectively. It is also possible to surreptitiously install software on phones on the network, potentially gaining access to any records stored on the phone.

This is understandably disquieting to activists involved in sensitive work.

continue reading about using your phone safely…

TechTuesday

continue reading about how videoconferencing is helping philippine farmers communicate with agri experts…