Nokia life tools
November 4th, 2008
Agriculture, India, hybrid media, m-learning, text messaging
Nokia announced its intentions to provide agricultural information and education content to lower-end feature handsets in India. The service, called Nokia Life Tools, will wrap an SMS data channel with a graphic-rich interface. Reuters Marketlight is the content partner for the agriculture side. Idea Cellular is the first operator to sign up. OnMobile, another Indian mobile content provider, is also on-board, contributing astrology and ringtone services.
Over time, it will be interesting to see the relative take-up of the various instrumental and expressive services on offer. In the meantime, think the fusion of a graphic interface and the SMS channel is particularly notable for developing-world contexts. (Also see the mobile-XL browser). These forms bypass the need for a GPRS-enabled handset or data plan, and stretch the capabilities of the ‘humble’ SMS.
Ken Banks at kiwanja.net has a longer write-up.
2 Responses
-
Srinivas Y November 5, 2008 at 1:32 am
-
[...] paper presents the results of interviews and focus groups with the users of Reuters Market Light (RML) and another market information system, IKSL, run by the Indian Farmers Cooperative Limited. It is [...]
Another interesting tool from Nokia are the sms based data gathering tools (http://www.nokia.com/A41269024) which can potentially be used to gather data from field staff. I guess the use of such interactive tools is dependent on the sms tariffs. Wish there was some way to overcome that too!