Great thread! I run a nonprofit called New Incentives (newincentives.org) that provides behavior-based cash incentives, known as conditional cash transfers, directly to individuals living on less than $0.30/day in five developing countries. My team is building a geolocation-based monitoring system to determine whether or not the conditions behind our cash incentives are met. We plan to license this technology to large-scale government-run cash incentive programs that cover anywhere from 5-15 millions individuals. Does anyone know if can get a person's feature phone (not a smartphone) to auto check-in and/or receive push notifications? In case it’s helpful, you might think of an application of what we are hoping to build as a child laborer in rural India checking in to school and receiving compensation for every check in to support his/her family. Our goal is for this monitoring system to operate in low infrastructure settings and not have to deal directly with the telecommunication networks in the countries we work in; and if possible, not be dependent upon SMS. Any advice would be very much appreciated!
Yes it will be possible to have a user with a feature phone to auto check-in but that will be from an application level. My company http://www.saya.im has a chat application tailored to feature phone and one of the features is a geo-location chatroom. We are able to do this using cell-tower id's and triangulations and augment that with the phones IP address. There are open-source cell-tower id databases like http://www.opencellid.org/ which can be of help. Also you may want to think of a Java ME app to implement this.
Wow, cool idea! From what I understand, you guys use cash incentives after a particular job/work/behavior is done or result achieved.
Building a technolog like yours (sort of a foursquare for developing countries) could have awesome implications for these countries. Keep us updated on HN please. This is great!
