A locally developed governance and polling solution has taken the prize in the mobile telecom applications category at this year's SIMagine developer contest.
The international contest awards innovative SIM-based projects and applications, and the final awards ceremony was held in Rome, on Wednesday night.
The winning application, dubbed mKratos, was developed by Dr Hannah Thinyane, a computer science lecturer at Rhodes University; and Dr Mamello Thinyane, a research co-ordinator at the Telkom Centre of Excellence, at the University of Fort Hare. Their entry was selected from 103 projects in 35 countries, and they also won the Telecom Italia Operator's Award last year.
According to the researchers, mKratos is a voting and polling service that allows users to influence the decisions that affect their lives and increase their collective bargaining.
“mKratos is a polling application that enables individuals to use their cellphones to voice their opinion in any number of polls they're interested in, from government policies to service delivery evaluation,” explains Mamello.
“From within mKratos, users are able to browse the available polls, select the one they want to participate in, and post their response.” The polls are then aggregated and made available through a Web interface accessible to users based on the polls they have subscribed to.”
The researchers say they hope the application makes it easier for everyone to participate and contribute in decision-making processes that affect them.
“Within the governance domain, the application allows for people's views and opinions to be voiced and heard. In other domains, it allows for increased collective bargaining, effective feedback and opinion elicitation, and increased participation by the people,” they explain.
“The judges said they were impressed that our application could be deployed and help people right now – it does not depend on any advances in technology for it to work,” explains Hannah, who attended the gala ceremony in Rome.
According to the team, the award includes two components: 5 000 euros of funding, as well as 12 months' business incubation for the project at a telecom-specialised incubator in Sophia Antipolis, France.
There are no timelines for deployment yet, says Mamello, as they first have to set up the business, which will then provide support and lead the rollout of the application.
According to the researchers, mobile applications have massive potential simply because of the proliferation of mobile devices. “These devices have penetrated to the remotest and most rural of places, enabling the provisioning of services to communities who would have otherwise been excluded due to constraints such as geographical remoteness.”
They add that mobile phones allow for ubiquitous access to services and applications, because people carry their cellphones with them everywhere they go. “Beyond just mobile applications, SIM-based applications provide the extra advantage of being able to be deployed on pretty much any cellphone, without limitations of hardware capabilities and features,” the team explains.
In future, they plan to design more applications for the so-called 'bottom of the pyramid' market. “We are passionate about community development and improving quality of life, and that's always the motivation for most of what we do.
By Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb copy editor and journalist
Johannesburg, 2 Jul 2010