Mainstreaming ICT

It seems that the M4Change tag on delicious worked. So, following on from EngageJoes comments regarding the Mobile Ideas Factory - I have compiled a quick braindump of information that I have come across that would be of use to a mobile developer / person working with tech in the non-profit sector. There is much that I don’t cover here because the Mobile Ideas Factory already has it - This braindump is just a start at filling in a few of the gaps.

Starting with the Mobile Web (Through a microbrowser) - W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) have their initiative on the mobile web here - http://www.w3.org/Mobile/ - in particular they have http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ as a checker - http://ready.mobi is also a great checker for mobile web development.

One of W3C mobile web initiatives is Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D) which is an Interest Group which explores how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries. The homepage for this is at http://www.w3.org/2008/MW4D/ - There is lots of info there. The other part of W3C worth checking is Planet Mobile at http://www.w3.org/Mobile/planet which is a collection of some of the best blogs for mobile development.

Browser Firm Opera has a very popular Mobile Browser - Opera Mini - It is a J2ME app that is on more than 20 million mobile devices worldwide. The company gives out some great information on the state of the mobile web  http://www.opera.com/smw/ - it is of course based upon upon their own stats which gives a skewed report - however their reports make for excellent reading. They also do plenty of articles on designing for the mobile web - http://dev.opera.com/articles/mobile/

Admob are one of the leading mobile ad networks. They give out a lot of information about the state of the mobile ‘ecosystem’ as they see it - Their reports home page is at http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Sooner or later when designing mobile web sites you will come across problems related to mobile device screen sizes and capabilities. The 2 main projects that address this are WURFL (Open Source) and DeviceAtlas (Pay Per Server).

SMS - of course there are FrontlineSMS & RapidSMS which there are huge amounts of info on in development circles. Other worthwhile SMS resources are Clickatel and BulkSMS which are both worldwide Bulk SMS providers with decent APIs - http://www.clickatell.com/ &  http://bulksms.vsms.net/w/solutions_http_to_sms.htm - With clever usage Twitter can be used as a major SMS provider in the countries it still does SMS to - other countries could possibly use the twe2 service - http://www.twe2.com/ - Google India (India only) has SMS Channels which is a  way of broadcasting SMS to a group for free - see http://labs.google.co.in/smschannels/

USSD - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSD does not appear to be used widely in development (maybe because it seems to require the cooperation of mobile operators). The only case I know of is Cell-Lifes Mobilsr see http://www.cell-life.org/cellphones-4-hiv/mobilisr?1768f84c07a3a208150af5c12451b8b9=7d449c4e5ea2f055cb275d4f0947550f - aside from this http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=18&click_id=2992 shows a premium USSD service in South Africa. USSD is considered a potential solution for mobile banking - see http://mbanking.blogspot.com/2008/10/is-ussd-for-mobile-banking-cul-de-sac.html & http://www.mihswat.com/2008/10/09/sometimes-old-technologies-are-good-and-%E2%80%9Cnew%E2%80%9D-or-ussd-can-change-everything-for-mobile-banking/

Bluetooth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth) is widely used in some countries for file sharing and in shopping centres for advertising. It can be a bit problematic to use for sharing Java J2ME apps (see http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&q=sharing+jar+files+over+bluetooth) which is a pity because this is a great free viral method of sharing.  The best potential use of Bluetooth is the viral sharing of educational mobile optimised pictures, audio and video. Most Java phones with Bluetooth capabilites have JSR 82 - the core Bluetooth API and the Object Exchange (OBEX) API as explained http://developers.sun.com/mobility/midp/articles/bluetooth2/

There are examples of Bluetooth file transfer in the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit the http://java.sun.com/products/sjwtoolkit/download.html - If you know some Java this toolkit gives you lots of examples of building cross platform Mobile Java Aps. A good range of Java Aps are available at http://www.getjar.com/

MESH networks - A particular type of networking that is suppose to work well when part of the network is broken. This is the technology that the OLPC project is using. Basic details are here http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details - InSTEEDs Mesh4X (http://instedd.org/mesh4x)  is another development of note.

Voice can combine with many mobile applications. One of the better known voice projects in the development sector is Freedom Fone.
Aside from Skype (http://www.skype.com) - the biggest free VOIP provider, used by a lot of NGOs, here’s a few useful links

• http://gizmo5.com/pc/ - Gizmo - Another VOIP provider (SIP compatible - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol)
• http://www.asterisk.org/ - The world’s leading open source PBX, telephony engine, and telephony applications toolkit. Asterix can have IVR (Interactive Voice Response - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response )which often uses VoiceXML
• http://www.google.com/voice/about - Google Voice and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7982763.stm

Other Technologies/Tools which could be very useful to mobile applications include: -

• RSS
• APIs for major web sites or services e.g. Twitter (or Laconica), Facebook, Flickr, Youtube
• Sim Card, Java Card, Smart Cards
• Instant messaging - Mxit, Mig33, Jabber
• FFMPeg for converting files into appropriate types.

I think that is probably a Part 2 and anyway must go - I’ve got a release of Community Mobile Channels to get ready.

UPDATE - I have now added some of the stuff I had left out - so to continue go here - http://mainstreamingict.org/2009/05/quick-brain-dump-of-great-resources-for-the-mobile-developer-that-i-had-previously-left-out/