Brady Forrest has posted an inspiring article about ‘Warana Unwired’ – a Microsoft Research India (MSRIndia) Project.
The project enables Sugarcane farmer’s in Warana to to buy fertilizer, check their payment history, register their land, etc. via SMS and with significant costs savings versus their existing PC kiosk based system.
The growth and usage of SMS on mobiles worldwide is phenomenal; over 40% of the world’s people have an SMS capable phone. Almost a trillion SMS messages were sent in 2006 and the expected revenue from SMS in 2012 is $67 billion Interestingly, even among the 85% of Indian users who are prepaid – with average monthly mobile bills of only $3 (151R) – users on average sent 21 SMSs per month.
(source: Portio Research, TRAI Report through Sept 2006).
MSRIndia has replaced the PC based clients with Mobile Clients. The existing backoffice was re-equipped with an SMS Gateway. So SMS is the basic protocol to interact with the Server.
Whats more significant is that, MSRIndia has developed a SMS Toolkit which is I think the first SDK targeted at the layman! . MSRIndia claims the non-developers (Farmers in this case) can use Excel to send bulk SMSs and build simple information lookup applications.
Visual Studio 2005 (Free version available) based code wizards would create small applets which does the small tasks required by the farmers like database lookup. This SDK is great for scenarios where there is a need to send Bulk SMS based on database lookups. Many more such SMS based applications can be developed for Schools, Societies and even government agencies. Microsoft has given the rural India an effective and ubiquitous way to develop and deploy applications for the mass.
Now its really a ‘Sugarcane SDK’ from Microsoft which I wish never finds its way to prospective spammers (btw, this solution is expensive at scale as per MSRIndia) !
Related Links:
Microsoft Research aims to ease development
MSR India Blog
The Warana experiment
Warana
Technorati tags: Warana, ‘warana unwired’, MSRIndia, “Microsoft Research”, SMS, SDK, ‘SMS Toolkit’
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