[GKD] Simputer Helps Close Digital Divide

From mgurst@vcn.bc.ca Sun Sep 29 12:26:09 2002
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 13:47:05 -0400
From: Michael Gurstein 
Reply-To: gkd@phoenix.edc.org
To: gkd@phoenix.edc.org
Subject: [GKD] Simputer Helps Close Digital Divide

Forwarded from Solaris: Critical Perspectives on ICT for Development.

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-----Original Message-----
From: solaris-admin@sarai.net On Behalf Of Steve Cisler
Sent: August 15, 2002 10:55 AM

<http://www.bayarea.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/mike_langberg/
3866243.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp>

>From the San Jose Mercury News.  At LinuxWorld in San Francisco a number
of interesting projects were presented yesterday including Open
Knowledge Network, the Brazilian volkscomputers, and  the following
one--the Simputer.

Langberg is a critical enthusiast when it comes to consumer items. He's
not a development expert. A good opening line to keep local high tech
folks reading this piece!

Steve

Posted on Wed, Aug. 14, 2002

Simple computer helps close digital divide
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News

I've always been a digital-divide cynic, suspecting all the talk about
transforming the lives of poor people through Internet access to be
self-serving narcissism from Silicon Valley technologists seeking a
justification for making themselves rich.

Vinay L. Deshpande has changed my mind.

Deshpande, a Stanford-educated software entrepreneur in Bangalore,
India, is the driving force behind the Simputer, a handheld device that
resembles a Palm personal digital assistant.

The Simputer , which costs from $175 to $375 depending
on features, is designed for impoverished rural villages in India and
other under-developed parts of the world. This isn't a cure for hunger
or disease, but Deshpande makes a convincing argument for how the
Simputer could make life better for people living far from the
technology fast lane.

If you're struggling to feed your family on an income equal to a few
dollars a day, you don't need access to Amazon.com or eBay. What you do
need are the latest commodity prices for your crops if you're a farmer,
or accurate weather reports if you fish from a small boat, or a reliable
way to gather medical data if you're a rural health worker.

These are things the sturdy Simputer can do at a far lower cost than
temperamental and fragile laptop computers. Deshpande, who spoke
Wednesday at the LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco, got the idea
for the Simputer at a family wedding near Mumbai in November 1998, where
he met the owner of a small community bank.

The banker had a problem: He operates what is called a "pygmy deposit
scheme," where independent agents travel to isolated villages to
collect deposits and make payments as small as one rupee, or about two
cents. The agents give paper receipts, and sometimes cheat the bank by
turning in altered copies of the deposit slips listing smaller amounts.
Catching such cheaters often takes days or weeks.

The banker wanted a handheld device costing no more than $200 with an
attached receipt printer that agents could use to collect deposit data,
downloading the information by phone to the bank's computers at the end
of the day. This device wouldn't eliminate theft by the agents, but
they'd have a hard time disappearing with more than one day's worth of
funds.

Deshpande, 55, assembled a team of academics from the Indian Institute
of Science and engineers from his company, Encore Software
, both based in Bangalore. The group quickly realized
any device created for the banker could solve many other problems in
many countries.

The Simputer is designed to be easy to operate, reliable, rugged and to
run on easily obtained AA batteries. There's a slot for sliding in smart
cards, which cost less than $1 and can be given to every person in a
village for storing their personal information. A built-in modem makes
it possible to collect information and send out messages through the
Internet. Villages beyond the reach of phone lines can send and receive
data through the smart cards.

To hold down costs, the Simputer runs a slimmed-down version of the free
Linux operating system -- eliminating royalty payments that would be
required for the Palm or Microsoft PocketPC operating systems used in
today's PDAs. Deshpande and his colleagues also developed visual icons
and text-to-speech feedback so that even illiterate users could benefit
from the Simputer.

Encore Software began producing the first run of Simputers this month at
a contract manufacturing plant in Bangalore; another production line is
due to start up next month in Singapore. The Simputer isn't available
yet in the United States, but Deshpande is talking with several
potential distributors and expects to have a deal in place by year-end.

Meanwhile, the Simputer Trust is willing to license its hardware and
software designs to any interested manufacturer for a one-time fee of
$25,000 to companies in the developing world and $250,000 to companies
in the developed world.

As word of the Simputer has spread, Deshpande is hearing more ideas for
how his creation could be used.

The post office in India, for example, is considering giving the
Simputer to mail carriers who handle money orders. A villager could send
money through a smart card, plugged into the mail carrier's Simputer,
for delivery to a relative on the other side of the country, downloaded
to the recipient's smart card. This would eliminate sending money orders
through the mail, where they are often lost or stolen.

Health care agencies in South Africa want to develop a small ultrasound
monitor that could be plugged into the Simputer for tracking fetal
development among pregnant women in rural settlements.

The Indian government is also interested in the Simputer for collecting
reliable and timely information on agricultural production, a process
now bogged down by inaccurate and slowly gathered paper documents.

Asked to summarize his hopes for the Simputer, Deshpande spins around
and points to a logo printed on the back of his official Simputer Trust
T-shirt: "Radical simplicity for universal access."

There's no guarantee, of course, the Simputer will succeed. Even if it
does, technology alone can't fix all the problems causing poverty. But I
found Deshpande to be uplifting. The technology revolution, in the end,
really could help everyone on Earth make better lives for themselves.

Steve Cisler
4415 Tilbury Drive
San Jose, Callifornia 95130
http: home.inreach.com/cisler
1-408-379-9076
cisler@pobox.com

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