Most of the pitches at this week’s MIT’s Emtech 2011 focused on elevating high technology for markets that are pretty saturated already. Folks talked about smart vehicular networks and laundry-folding robots.
Two entrepreneurs went the other way. Both are working on ways to bring technology to developing countries underserved by the Internet, mobile devices, and other technologies that people in the U.S. take for granted.
Umar Saif, founder of Pakistan-based SMSall, made his pitch, but not in the flesh: The United States State Department denied his visa application. Saif developed BitMate, a BitTorrent client that GigaOM’s Janko Roettgers covered recently.
At Emtech, Saif said (via tape) that the use of his company’s software lets users without good Internet connections pool whatever connectivity they already have to speed up downloads and communications.
SMSall, which he calls an “SMS social network,” claims 30,000 users in 174 countries.
Tech companies “assume the affordability of high-end devices, broadband communications, uninterrupted power, savvy users. None of that is true in the developing world.” SMSall concentrates on improving peer-to-peer connectivity of “aggressively shared” devices, inexpensive SMS messaging and “social computing without the Internet.”
Another presenter, Aishwarya Ratan, director of Yale University’s Microsavings and Payments Initiative, showed off a “hybrid” slate that converts handwritten paper data entry into a digital format. The goal is to let people keep using existing manual accounting methods while reducing errors and making the data transportable.
“The problem is the inaccuracy, incompleteness and inefficiency of paper copy,” said Ratan, who formerly worked at Microsoft Research India.
To prove out the concept, a group in the Indian state of Andra Pradesh used prototype digital slates overlayed with their paper ledgers. The slates take handwritten entries on ordinary paper, and digitize and process them, she said. The system also cues the user with audio feedback if the document is incomplete or illegible.
In the pilot program the error rate was cut more than 50 percent and virtually 100 percent of all forms were completed, Ratan said.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the fact that there is less technology in developing countries, means those countries may leapfrog more developed countries that rely on what legacy technology they already have. Anne Marie Sastry, founder of Sakti3, a startup focused on solid-state, rechargeable lithium-ion car batteries, said it’s booming cell phone adoption in the developing world–not in the west– that’s driving lithium-ion battery demand.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user DonkeyHotey
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