Tools for Life
Posted: November 4th, 2008 | Author: (author unknown) | Filed under: Syndicated | Comments Off
Related to yesterday’s Human Development Forum session at the World Bank: my employer is now offering Life Tools targeted at non-urban/rural consumers in emerging markets – it offers consumers price and availability data on seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, and education services encompassing language lessons and general knowledge questions (would have mentioned it directly, but it was freshly launched in India today). To some extent it overlaps/competes with the Tradenet service in Africa - both are driven by SMS, although Life Tools includes a pre-installed Java application on the phone. Ultimately the success or failure of the market-prices service will depend on collecting timely and reliable information from the field, a non-trivial task.
Photo above of the application in action, being demoed by Jawahar Kanjilal the global head of emerging market services on a recent trip to Espoo.
Spent the last few hours wandering around a pre-dawn election day DC. The streets are quiet and the snipers (on the Whitehouse rooftop) seem relaxed. Ah, democracy in action.