Slashdot Mirror
Get Ready For The Simputer
EccentricAnomaly writes: "CNN is reporting that the Simputer will roll out next month. The Simputer is a handheld computer running GNU/Linux starting at around $214 and is aiming to be an affordable computer for the third world that can be used even by the illiterate with its text-to-speech features. From the Simputer website: "The Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the benefits of IT can reach the common man." Slashdot ran a story in May 2001 reporting the launch of the Simputer project." The same Reuters story is also found at the Hindustan Times.
India is one of the regions where microloans were pioneered. These are small loans of $5-$10 at a time, mostly to women in small villages, to create small businesses. It sounds crazy, but it really works. Among the businesses you would expect this to foster in such places (like farming, weaving, pottery, etc.), one of the more successful sectors is cellular phones. A family will take out these microloans to help finance their purchase of a cell phone, and then sell phone-time to everyone in the neighboring villages. This not only brings money to the family that owns the phone, but by being able to communicate with their friends/relatives in the city, the local residents are better able to operate their own businesses.
It appears to me that this is the model the Simputer people are looking toward. They sell these gadgets (probably with financing) to one family per village, and it lets your whole village communicate with the village 100 miles up the road, probably more cheaply than the cell phone (you don't have to wait for the guy who owns the phone to ride his goat over out to the farm you are calling to talk to your business partner).
So, the price isn't that different from the costs associated with a citizen of the US starting his/her own business. It could cost $30,000-100,000 to start up a bar or restaurant, or car repair shop, a small farm, or many other retail businesses.
Of course, I've never been to India, so maybe someone from there can fill in the details.
- Management of microcredit loan systems
- Medical expert systems
- Useful Science Education
- Email
- Trade
- Mapping
Microelectonics is the only thing I know of which has a sustainable exponential curve anywhere in it's makeup. If we can figure out how to make our current computer technology help the poor a little, as prices drop and the gear gets better, it will help a lot more. Fifteen years down the line, it helps hundreds of times as much, if the mapping from (price per transistor) to (human benefit) holds.Microcredit loans (of a few tens of dollars, repayable by a group rather than an individual) are rapidly turning into a key aid strategy, but finding people to run the schemes and do evaluations for who should get the loans is difficult. A simputer application could help with data and loan application gathering, and keeping track of repayments. You'd essentially run the local microcredit loan office on one, or perhaps have a traveling bank officer.
Have been proven to improve medical diagnosis in trained doctors by respectable margins. Even a simple database with appropriate treatment instructions for, say, the 100 most common ailments in the region the machine is in, plus some first aid, could really make a difference. Particularly if it had a preventative medicine bias.
People do not know what they do not know. A simputer app which contained a basic science and appropriate technology education (concepts like germ theory, designs for things like fuel efficient cooking stoves), which people could query easilly, could be very useful.
Dumb as it may sound. Just wait for the "Help, I'm 9 years old, live in Andhar Pradesh, and my family is starving because the harvest failed again. Please do something" emails to begin.
More seriously, with email, and a little time, we could see things like pairing of western high-schools with third world villages - they have a question, the highschoolers find the answer for them and email it back.
Similarly, trade becomes possible once you have information, financial structures and transport of goods (and, perhaps, rule of law). There are a lot of skilled crafts people in India - wouldn't you like to be able to order custom-made clothes or furniture for a fraction of what it would cost for generica at the Gap or Ikea?
Just amortize the shipping costs (by the container, of course) across a large enough set of trades and this begins to make sense.
One problem in governing places like India, even in the most basic distribution of help to the poor, is inaccurate or incomplete data about what is going on in the field. If we do end up with a simputer per village at some point in the future, and people log events on the box, mining that data stream may tell us how to help ten times more effectively than before.
It may also help the poor organize: PeasantDot.Org - where the rural poor get together to help each other out.
Even if it doesn't, making what we're really good at help the people with nothing makes a lot of sense.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Yup, not just that, there's another very essential point.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a very very significant tech-savvy population of farmers and others in India.
I think it would be great if they could get information regarding the weather, crops, harvest and the like in a much more accessible forms. Right now, there are counters and phone centers who answer such queries for them, if the simputer could make their task easier, then what's the problem? The returns would be way higher.
And some poster had commented about illiteracy, that an illterate populace does not need such stuff. You know, you do not weed out illiteracy by saying, "Hey! You don't deserve this coz you don't read." You try and motivate people. And by the way, who the hell gave you this crap that most Indians are illiterate? In the southern state of Kerala, there's more than 99% literacy. There are a lot of states and union territories which boast of 90%+ literacy.
And literacy for us is a very different thing altogether, a lot of the so called illiterate people do math, but can't write and read. Why? Because that's the way the culture and the society is. A guy running a family businesss here just knows what he needs to, nothing more nothing less. Just that they've not had the opportunity to exploit their capabilities does not mean that they should not be.
And besides, I'm sure that the govt. would introduce subsidies and banks would gladly give loans to the needy. Already a lot of subsidies with really reduced interest rates exist for small scale industries by banks with both public and private holdings. With enough help from the govt. Simputer could be really made available to the masses. More than a geek or hacker to fiddle with, this could mean a whole lot more to a farmer or a fisherman to know the status of the weather and the crop. Think about it.