

Sachs: Mobile devices "most transformative technology of economic development of our time" - lunchbox
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sachs144

======
aofstad
"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).

~~~
eugenejen
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.

