Internet calling
19 November 2004
There is a poster in the third floor bathroom of Tutto Bene, one of those kitsch Mao-era jobs. It encourages people to support the modernisation and industrialisation of agriculture. I read it every time I go in there to pee. For some reason, the exhortation and the lady’s cheery face catches and holds my attention every time. I must have read the poster fifty times.
SciDev.Net reports on researchers who’ve built a system where farmers can access the Internet via key presses on their normal telephones.
For example, a farmer wanting to know the market price for wheat would press 1 on their keypad for grain, then press 2 for wheat, and then press 1 again to access the Ministry of Agriculture’s national agricultural exchange website. By pressing 1 again, the farmer would be able to find out the current price of wheat.
The challenge is to get farmers to install telephone lines; “The telecom company, for which the fact that rural telephones are rarely used is a problem, offered a discount on telephone lines.”
What a capital idea.
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