I am convinced that Frontline SMS or something similar should be part of an essential toolkit for rural radio stations within the footprint of a mobile telephone signal.
Frontline SMS is a text messaging system “conceived, designed and written firmly with the needs of the non-profit sector in mind”. Basically it is an SMS management and broadcast system that runs on a computer connected to a mobile phone with a data cable. All you need to do is insert a SIM card and you broadcast SMS messages to your listeners and classify and process messages received from them.
Continue reading ‘Frontline SMS’
Ben Grubb sent me an article he wrote about the eTUKTUK for an upcoming issue of the Telecentre Magazine, published by telecentre.org. I won’t steal anyone’s thunder by posting it here, but he also included some interesting links to online videos. A tuk-tuk is a motorised rickshaw or three-wheeled motorcycle, a popular form of transport in much of South and South East Asia. An eTUKTUK is (you guessed it) a tuktuk equipped with a computer and an internet connection, and Kothmale Community Radio’s eTUKTUK which is not only a mobile telecentre but also a mobile radio station (with it’s own low-power transmitter) and a remote broadcasting unit that send a signal via its CDMA connection back to Kotmale’s main transmitter for rebroadcast throughout the region.
Continue reading ‘eTUKTUK - taking Kothmale a little further’
MobileActive.org has written about a Reuters/Nokia collaboration to design and test a mobile phone equipped with a camera, video, a tripod, GPS, an external keyboard, an external microphone, a solar charger and software that turns it into a portable studio that a journalist can use to record, edit and transmit stories with audio, photos, video and text. This may be overkill for radio, but I don’t know of another phone that lets you record with a good quality external mic. According to a Reuters article on the toolkit, it required a special adapter plug made by Nokia.
Read the story from MobileActive.org: Reuters/Nokia Collaboration Has Potential for Citizen Journalists
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