interessanter und sehr ausführlicher Bericht auf O’Reilly

Sean Blagsvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan of Microsoft Research India (blog) presented at ETel last week. They told us about some amazing work they have been doing with mobile phones and SMS servers. The SMS servers are being used to power an MSR project designed to test replacing PCs with SMS servers in the village of Warana (map). Mobile phones are used by farmers to access their data. In their system mobile phones become the client and SMS is used to communicate with the server. The project is named Warana Unwired. Since the project has gone live it has processed 6000 SMS from 1238 different farmers (80% were data requests about sugarcane output). The time for farmers to get their data has dropped from 15 days originally, 2 days with a PC to immediate.