
The African Startup Using Phones to Spot Counterfeit Drugs - chkuendig
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-31/the-african-startup-using-phones-to-spot-counterfeit-drugs
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azinman2
This is great. Local problems solved by local companies in an otherwise
underserved market, all aided by simple tech. Twilio should be using this as
an example app.

What I don't understand is why it took $10M of HP product to do this. Perhaps
I'm not understanding something here but it sounds like they generate random
12-digit numbers, have some metadata on what that's attached to, and have an
SMS-interface in? Granted they may need physical servers in the telcos, but
couldn't one $1-3k bare metal postgres instance handle most of this (500M
rows, majority of which have been used and won't be seen again), and some
separate $1-3k bare metal SMS gateway and REST api for static pages? Or what,
you scale both of those components 1-3x more? Still no where close to 100k
left alone 10M.

I shipped a server to Haiti to power a voice-based jobs board post-earthquake.
It was a single $2k Dell server with a $1.5k ISDN card -- that 1U went into
Digicel and handled 16 concurrent calls for thousands and thousands of people.
And that was voice!

