ICT for the Next Billion

Same as SAP TV spot but much better quality

Jörg — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:12:19 +0000

Youtube video on our African Cashew Initiative project in Ghana:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k32D7UrgkCw

SAP TV spot on the Cashew project in Ghana

Jörg — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:21:43 +0000

The SAP TV spot on our African Cashew Alliances project (ACi) is available now. It provides a nice overview of our current research work in Ghana.

http://www.sap-tv.com/7313

ACi Project on Deutsche Welle TV

Jörg — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:52:04 +0000

Recently we’ve had two TV teams (Deutsche Welle and SAP TV) at our project site in Ghana shooting the current status of our research work. Here is the first public available result of the Deutsche Welle shootings. Unfortunately currently only in german, the english translation will follow shortly.
http://mediacenter.dw-world.de/german/video/#!/149800/High_Tech_in_der_Landwirtschaft

African Cashew Initiative – Project Website went online

Jörg — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:34:38 +0000

The official website of the African Cashew Initiative (ACi) project went online yesterday. Information specific to what we are doing in the project is available here: http://www.africancashewinitiative.org/index.php?access=learning_and_innovation&page=26&mpage=8

Go-Live with out Prototype in Ghana

Jörg — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:22:09 +0000

One month ago we went live with our new prototype in a cashew nut business process in Ghana. This prototype is part of the ACi (Africa Cashew Initiative) project which “purpose is to strenghten the global competitiveness of cashew production and processing in Africa and to assist small scale cashew farmers to increase their productivity and thus gain additional income. It concentrates on ten countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, and The Gambia.” (see “Competitiveness of the African Cashew Sector” published by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ)).

Our research team is active in Ghana only for the first deployment. Our current prototype setup involves about 400 cashew farmers that are organized in several zones. Our prototype consists of a mobile application that supports the cashew buying at the individual buyingstations where farmers sell their cashew nuts, an offline desktop application where the farmer master data is managed and transactions are analyzed using a GIS (geographical information system) interface, and a server where all information is centralized and processed for synchronization to the individual nodes.

Spezific to the mobile application (which is by the way an Android application) is that the synchronization protocol is basic SMS. Since there is no reliable GPRS coverage available SMS is the only reliable protocol to use. To make it efficient and to lower the costs for sending SMS messages we’ve developed an advanced synchronization mechanismn to synchronize master data and transaction data. To realize this and to enable the entire application to run offline but still provide access and functionality using the complete farmer master data and transaction information of almost 400 farmers we use the built in SQLite DB of Android.

Anoter specific feature of the Android mobile application is that we use a barcode scanner to improve the Cashew Buying Process. The mobile is able to scan barcodes we’ve attached to the cashew sacks and barcodes to identify the farmer (barcodes in their ID booklet). Thus we are now able to trace every single cashew sack back to the individual farmer and follow the sack from the farmer to the buyer – Traceability is a key enabler for more advanced Cashew Nut processing chain. Currently we are monitoring the ongoing transaction activities of the cashew season and work on improvements on application usability side. The next cycle of the incremental roll-out will be mid of May.

Poster Paper at ICTD 2010

Jörg — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:50:14 +0000

I’ve got a poster paper accepted at the ICTD 2010 (http://www.ictd2010.org/) conference in London, UK with the title “Bottom Billion Architecture: An Extensible Software Architecture for ICT Access in the Rural Developing World”.

The ICTD conference is one of the major conferences on the ICTD research topic. Many important researchers of the ICTD field will be present and present papers, workshops or tutorials. Would be nice to meet with you there if you are around.

Mobile HCI 2010 Workshop Program available now

Jörg — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:29:01 +0000

The program for the workshop “Mobile HCI and Technical ICTD: A Methodological Perspective” is available now. We have received 5 high quality paper that will be presented during the workshop.

http://www.uctictd2010.org/program.html

Come and join us discussing the applicability of Mobile HCI research methods in the technical ICTD research field. Please remember the registration deadline 31. August.

New short 2min Video of the C@R Project

Jörg — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:21:19 +0000

There is a new short video available on the C@R project we did in South Africa.

http://www.careersatsap.com/TheSapDifference/
MakingAnImpact.aspx#/MerchantsGoMobile

Workshop at Mobile HCI 2010 Conference

Jörg — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:35:51 +0000

Deadline Extended for Workshop submissions until 14th May 2010.

On 7th September 2010 I’m hosting a workshop at the Mobile HCI 2010 conference (http://mobilehci2010.di.fc.ul.pt/Program/workshops.html) in Lisbon, Portugal.

The title of the half-day workshop is “Mobile HCI and Technical ICTD: A Methodological Perspective”.

The aim of this workshop is to elaborate on the application of Mobile HCI methods for technical ICTD research and to come up with a set of appropriate research methodologies for technical ICTD and a roadmap of action items of how to improve current technical ICTD research. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area and encourage discussions about future topics concerning technical ICTD research.

I’m happy to have a great people in the organization team that will help me during workshop organization and execution. I would appreciate if you consider to participate in the workshop and take the chance to meet with people interested in the ICTD research field.

For more information please visit the workshop website at: http://www.uctictd2010.org

Part of CeBIT Opening Ceremony

Jörg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:28:39 +0000

Last week our project formed part of the CeBIT (world’s foremost tradeshow for the digital industry, took place in Hannover, Germany) opening ceremony. During this opening ceremony the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spanish Prime Minister, gave a short speech. Bill McDermott (Co-Chief Executive Officer SAP) was on stage and presented our project as part of the CeBIT topic “Connected Worlds”. He presented our use case and showed a small video about our work. The result have been many articles writing about our project and especially the Spaza Shop during the opening ceremony (e.g. IT Web).

You can have a look at the opening ceremony here. The 2 sections of interest of the opening ceremony are at 26:00 to 29:00 and 1:15:00 to 1:21:30

CeBIT Opening Ceremony with Christina from Kgautswane

During the CeBIT week we’ve had four people of the Kgautswane community visiting us. Most prominent was Christina who was on stage during the openind ceremony and thus became quite famous due to the often used picture with Merkel, Zapatero and McDermot touching a globe with their hands. The four people had meetings with various organizations here in Germany and thus we’ve travelled quite a lot. This was a very interesting trip for them since most of them have never been to europe before, never been flying in a plane and many more “first time experiences”.