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Indonesian farmers reaping social media rewards

By Karishma Vaswani BBC News, Kadaka Jaya, Indonesia

 

The BBC's Karishma Vaswani meets the Indonesian farmers using social networking to make the most of their produce.

Indonesia is an economy on the move these days - and fast becoming one of the most technology-savvy countries in Asia.

Just look at the facts - Indonesia is one of the world's biggest users of Twitter. It is also home to the world's third-largest group of Facebook users.

Blackberry maker Research in Motion counts Indonesia as one of its most lucrative markets - and other gadget-makers are eagerly eyeing the upwardly mobile Indonesian consumer.

There's even talk of a Silicon Valley-style boom taking place in Jakarta's suburbs, with the likes of US tech giant Yahoo snapping up an Indonesian start-up.

But while urban Indonesians are considered to be as plugged-in as their counterparts in Singapore or Seoul, out in the countryside, it's a different story.

Challenging existence

Just venture a few hours outside Jakarta, the capital, to the village of Kadaka Jaya, and it is easy to see the digital divide.

The further you drive up winding roads, the worse your mobile phone signal gets.

It's hard to spot a telephone tower anywhere, but for miles on end you can see emerald green paddy fields peppering the hills.

It is peacefully quiet - a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Jakarta.

From a distance, I saw a lone Javanese farmer sitting in the middle of his field, presumably for a leisurely afternoon snooze.

 

Ade, 24, uses technology to monitor demand for his chilli crop

It's thought that almost half of Indonesia's population of 230 million make their living from the land - often a challenging existence that depends on the whims of the weather and the prices of the markets.

It is in Kadaka Jaya that I meet Ade, a dynamic and bright 24-year-old farmer.

Ade has followed in the footsteps of his family, tilling the land the way so many before him have done.

Crop prices

Now though, change is coming to Kadaka Jaya.

"As farmers we constantly need new technology to improve our livelihoods," Ade tells me, as he takes a break from picking ripe chillis.

"There's no way for us to tell what consumers in the cities need, or when the products we want have arrived at the stores in town. We have to keep calling the shopkeepers to find out, and phone networks in this area are patchy."

 

Mathieu Le Bras is the founder of 8villages, a social network for farmers

This gap between the rural and the urban is where technology start-up 8villages saw an opportunity, using mobile phones.

"8villages is a business social network for farmers," says founder and chief executive Mathieu Le Bras. "It provides them with a link to local buyers, their local sellers - and other farmers who are growing the same crop as them."

Ade is one of 900 Indonesian farmers testing the product free.

"It allows me to access information about fertilisers, pesticides and the prices of crops," he says. "So now when I need information, all I have to do is wait for an SMS from 8villages."

The plan, according to Mr Le Bras, is to take this nationwide within the next six months - and even further, to farmers in Vietnam and the Philippines.

Close interaction

Mr Le Bras acknowledges he has drawn from his experience with social networks in urban markets - but insists there are already established networks in the countryside that his product is tapping into.

 

The peaceful Indonesian countryside - not your typical technology hotspot

"Social networks are paramount in the countryside," he says.

"People interact closely here, social status is very important - and the influence of a senior farmer plays a very important role in the community."

That's why 8villages has a service that allows farmers to enter a code on their mobile phones and access product reviews by senior farmers - taking the whole "like" concept offline.

Mr Le Bras says this is key to the success of the product, and why the farmers are now far more efficient.

"What we are doing with this is leveraging the social networks we know - like Wikipedia and eBay for example - and taking it online, so that the farmers have access to the knowledge."

New consumers

It's not just start-ups that are looking to tap the huge potential in the Indonesian countryside.

Global handset maker Nokia offers the Life Tools service, costing about five US cents a day.

For that, farmers with a Nokia handset get a text message about crop prices and weather patterns, a service the company says had more than 600,000 users in Indonesia in 2011.

But Nokia's country head Martin Chirotarrab says the plan is to keep expanding its reach in the countryside.

 

The 8villages system was tested by its eventual users - the Indonesian farmers

"We have over seven billion inhabitants in the world," Mr Chirotarrab tells me at the Nokia headquarters in Jakarta.

"Roughly half of them have a device in their pockets. But only a billion of these consumers are on the web. Nokia's plan is to connect the following billion consumers to the web."

Both big businesses like Nokia and start-ups like 8villages want many of those new consumers to come from the Indonesian countryside, but this is unlikely to happen overnight.

Phone networks in many districts remain patchy, and telecom providers have yet to make it a priority to extend them.

But this is changing - although very slowly - because of the vast untapped potential that companies are now beginning to see in the Indonesian farmer.

 

Nokia, Apple, Obama, Ubisoft, ETSI: Intellectual Property

Nokia Oyj’s claim of patent infringement on electronics, including mobile phones and tablet computers from Taiwan’s HTC Corp. (2498), will be reviewed by a U.S. agency that has the power to block imports of the goods.

The International Trade Commission agreed to investigate Nokia’s complaint, filed with the agency last month, according to a statement yesterday. No date has been set for a decision.
Nokia said on May 2 it filed lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany over inventions for mobile devices, naming HTC among several manufacturers. The company, which lost its 14-year title as the world’s biggest seller of mobile phones last year to Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), is seeking to expand revenue from its patent holdings.
HTC is using proprietary technology of Espoo, Finland-based Nokia to improve hardware and software functions in its devices, the company said in a statement when it filed the suits.
Nokia has joined Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to make Lumia smartphones that run using Windows Phone software, which competes with Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system. HTC makes phones for both Android and Windows Phone.
A final decision in the trade commission’s investigation will be made “at the earliest practicable time,” according to the statement. A hearing will be held and then a commission judge will issue findings in the case. If a violation is found, the six-member commission will then vote on whether to block HTC phones from entering the U.S. market.
A spokesman for HTC wasn’t available to comment. Nokia and HTC have been partners in fighting patent-infringement claims by IPCom GmbH, a licensing company that obtained mobile-phone patents from Robert Bosch GmbH in 2007.
About 10 companies, including Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Research in Motion Ltd., dominate the global industry. There was about $312 billion in worldwide sales of handsets in 2011, a 19 percent increase from 2010, according to Bloomberg Industries.

Apple Copied Samsung Inventions for IPhone Use, U.S. Judge Told

Apple Inc. introduced its iPhone in 2007 using Samsung Electronics Co. technology that it didn’t want to pay for, a lawyer representing the Korean electronics company told a U.S. trade judge yesterday.
Samsung contends Apple’s devices, including the iPhone, iPad tablet computer and iPod touch media player have infringed as many as four patents. All came from two decades of work Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung spent improving mobile phones, the attorney for the company said.
“All of these things that Samsung built up, Apple was using when it entered the market,” Samsung lawyer Charles Verhoeven of Los Angeles-based Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP said at the beginning of the trial yesterday at the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington.
The case before ITC Judge James Gildea, and another patent case by Apple against Samsung that’s in the midst of trial before a different trade judge, are part of a global battle between the two companies for increased share of a market that Bloomberg Industries said was $312 billion last year.
Apple denies infringing the Samsung patents and is challenging their validity, just as Samsung is doing in regard to Apple’s allegations.
Samsung’s case against Apple is In the Matter of Electronic Devices, Including Wireless Communication Devices, 337-794, and Apple’s case against Samsung is In the Matter of Electronic Digital Media Devices, 337-796, both U.S. International Trade Commission (Washington).
For more patent news, click here.

Trademark

Obama Campaign Sues Seller of Election Materials

The Obama presidential campaign filed a trademark- infringement suit against a website that sells election-related materials.
It is the second similar complaint the campaign has filed against Washington-based Demstore.com since October 2011. According to the complaint filed June 1 in federal court in Washington, the campaign objects to what it says is unauthorized use of the “rising sun” trademark.
The campaign said it’s damaged because it depends on its sale of authorized merchandise as a fundraising technique for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Also, when people make even a “relatively small” purchase of trademarked merchandise through the official website, the campaign obtains the buyer’s contact information and uses it “to reach out to that individual repeatedly to seek further donations and further opportunities to promote the campaign.”
The earlier trademark suit against Demstore.com was dismissed following a Jan. 25 court filing from the campaign requesting termination of the case. No details of a settlement were available in the court file.
In the new case, the campaign asked the court to bar further unauthorized use of its “rising sun” and other trademarks, and to order the seizure of all unauthorized merchandise. Additionally, the campaign seeks money damages, including extra damages to punish the website for what it says is deliberate infringement.
Demstore.com didn’t respond immediately to an e-mailed request for comment.
The Obama campaign is represented by Barry J. Reingold, William C. Rava and Jeremy L. Buxbaum of Seattle’s Perkins Coie LLP.
The new case is Obama for America v. Demstore.com, 1:12-cv- 00889, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington). The earlier case is Obama for America v. Demstore.com, 1:11-cv- 07646, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago).
For more trademark news, click here.

Copyright

Ubisoft Asks Court to Declare It Didn’t Infringe Beiswenger Book
Ubisoft Entertainment SA (UBI) filed a copyright suit against author John L. Beiswenger two weeks after he dismissed a copyright suit he filed against the French maker of computer games.
On May 15 Beiswenger and Ubisoft jointly filed a court document asking that the case he filed in April be dismissed. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the parties said they reached a settlement in the dispute.
Beiswenger, a Pennsylvania resident, had claimed that Ubisoft’s 2007 “Assassin’s Creed” games infringed the copyright for his 2002 work “Link: A Novel.”
In the new suit, Ubisoft asked the court to declare that the game doesn’t infringe Beiswenger’s copyrights. His claims are “entirely meritless and were based on patently non- copyrightable elements” contained in the two works, Ubisoft said.
Montreuil, France-based Ubisoft said it filed the new case despite Beiswenger’s dismissal of the infringement suit because “his claim could be refiled at any time.” The company wants to establish “once and for all” that its “Assassin’s Creed” doesn’t infringe Beiswenger’s copyrights directly or indirectly.
Ubisoft argued that the “ancestral memories” element Beiswenger claimed was infringed “has existed in the cultural consciousness for decades -- long before the publication of either ‘Link’ or ‘Assassin’s Creed.’”
In addition to a declaration of non-infringement, Ubisoft asked the court for an award of attorney fees and litigation costs.
The French games company is represented by Stephen S. Smith of Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Machitinger LLP of Los Angeles.
The new case is Ubisoft Entertainment SA v. Beiswenger, 3:12-cv-02754-NC, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The original case is Beiswenger v. Ubisoft Entertainment, 1:12-cv-00717-CCC, U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg).
For more copyright news, click here.

Trade Secrets/Industrial Espionage

Saab CEO Claims He Was Target of Industrial Espionage Attempt

The chief executive officer of Saab AB (SAABB)’s defense group said his phone was bugged when he was in negotiations with Switzerland over the sale of 22 of his company’s fighter jets, Agence France-Presse reported.
Hakan Buskhe claimed he was the target of industrial espionage and didn’t identify the person or company behind the action, according to AFP.
He said he had been “closely watched” and “monitored, one way or another,” AFP reported.
Switzerland said in November it would buy the planes, choosing them over aircraft produced by France’s Dassault Aviation SA (AM) and the European EADS (EAD) group, AFP reported.

Industry Standards

ETSI Chooses Apple Standard Over Nokia for Mobile-Phone SIM Card

Mobile-phone makers agreed on a new standard for smaller SIM cards, overcoming a deadlock in which Finland’s Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) and Apple Inc. had competing proposals.
The so-called “fourth form factor” will be 40 percent smaller than the current smallest SIM card design, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute said in a statement on its website, following a meeting held May 31 and June 1 in Osaka, Japan. “It can be packaged and distributed in a way that is backwards compatible with existing SIM card designs.”
ETSI agreed to pick Apple’s SIM card standard, beating a proposal from Nokia, MacWorld said on its website, citing cardmaker Giesecke & Devrient. Spokesmen for ETSI and Nokia couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
In March, a two-day meeting to adopt a format from competing proposals by Apple and Nokia finished without reaching a decision. The smartcards that identify wireless subscribers are standardized to reduce industry costs and give consumers freedom to switch handsets and networks. Smaller versions permit the design of thinner phones.

Technology for the greater good

These Computerworld Honors laureates benefit society by using low-tech gadgets for high impact.

Computerworld - A mother in Tanzania walks for three days with a sick child on her hip, only to arrive at a rural clinic whose inventory of malaria medicine is depleted.

It's a matter of life and death for the mother and child. But from a business standpoint, it's a straightforward supply chain issue. Antimalarial medicines -- with a 96% cure rate -- are available. Yet far-flung clinics have a hard time keeping them in stock. Having adequate supplies when and where they are needed is critical, because the medication isn't fully effective unless patients take it within 24 hours of contracting malaria.
Novartis -- a company whose innovations include micro-chipped pills that can track whether patients take their medication on schedule -- resolved the crisis in Tanzania by relying on, of all things, SMS text messaging.

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Similarly, OhioHealth in Dublin, Ohio, is using text messaging to deliver health and wellness information to patients subscribing to its OH Mobile app. The app can alert obstetric patients of upcoming tests and procedures or remind pre-operative patients to refrain from eating and drinking after midnight the day before their surgery.
"A very important component of patient care delivery is dependent on patient engagement. That idea and the fact that the vast majority of patients had smartphones gave us the idea for the app," says Dr. Mrunal Shah, vice president of physician IT services at OhioHealth. "We wanted something easily deployable and easily updatable," he notes. The result: "Patients are leaving wonderful feedback. They're just hungry for more information, which is a fantastic problem to have," says Shah.
Novartis and OhioHealth are among dozens of 2012 Computerworld Honors laureates that are leveraging low-cost, consumer-oriented technologies to create and deploy systems and applications designed to greatly benefit society, especially in the areas of education and healthcare.
The Computerworld Honors program, now in its 24th year, recognizes organizations that create and use IT to promote and advance public welfare. Award winners will gather at an event in Washington on June 4 to celebrate their achievements.

Necessity Drives Innovation

Usability and affordability are the heart and soul of these innovations, many of which are being deployed in poverty-stricken and remote areas of developing nations where life's basic necessities -- much less state-of-the-art IT and ubiquitous Internet access -- are not readily available.
But what is available is SMS, which in remote areas performs more efficiently than costlier, more complex options, according to Rob James, CIO at Novartis. Working with IBM and Vodaphone, Novartis IT came up with a simple idea: Have each remote clinic text four numbers, representing the inventory levels of four different medicines, to distribution facilities in major cities that ship supplies. The application is known as SMS for Life.
"The idea was to take that information centrally and look at inventory levels overall so we could do a better job of forecasting stock-outs," says James.
Initial results of a pilot test at 20 sites across Tanzania were daunting: More than 25% of remote facilities were totally out of stock on all medications.
"The good news is that once we had that data, we could reduce stock-outs to less than 1% in a very short time," James says. "That led to a rollout across Tanzania, then through Kenya, and we're now in the planning stages for Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo," he adds. Over the past decade, Novartis has provided more than 500 million malaria treatments for adults and children.

Developed by an IT team at Novartis, the SMS system comprises an SMS management tool and a Web-based reporting tool. The SMS app stores a single registered mobile phone number for one healthcare worker at each facility. Once a week, the system automatically sends a text message to each of these phone numbers asking for the current stock of medicines at their facility. Stock data is then returned using a short code number at no cost to the healthcare worker.
"This is one of those unique programs and one of our favorite programs in IT," James says, adding that everyone who worked on the project did so as a volunteer.

Low-Cost Literacy Tools

Keeping user costs low was also a major driver in the development of an application known as Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies, or MILLEE for short. Designed as a series of English literacy games that are played on cellphones, the application aims to improve English as a second language among poor children living in rural villages and urban slums in the developing world.
Matthew Kam started the project in 2004, when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. When Kam moved to Carnegie Mellon University to become an assistant professor in human-computer interaction, he expanded the project with the idea of having students rewrite the software from scratch so that it would operate on very low-end cellphones.
"Before CMU, the application was running on higher-end phones," Kam explains. "What we were really trying to do with the expansion is to target the most affordable phones out there, so as to perform research pilots that reflect more realistic cost conditions. We were looking for the lowest common denominator," he says.
Specifically, Kam and his team were targeting Java Micro edition (J2ME) phones, which are significantly cheaper than high-end smartphones. Technical barriers included optimizing the application for use on low-resource devices with limited memory and organizing the English-language learning content, including graphics and voiceover files, on the phone's storage system so that file input and output remained efficient.
There were cultural challenges as well. The earliest game designs weren't intuitive to children in rural India.
"This forced us to take a step back and study 28 of their traditional village games and contemporary Western video games," Kam says. The analysis provided the team with a set of guidelines on how to design educational games for non-Westerners.
MILLEE team member Ashton Thomas, who graduated from CMU in May 2011, developed a game called Word Catch, in which a player is presented with an English word and four images, one of which corresponds to the meaning of the word. "You had to stop a ball over the correct image, and the speed of the ball would change. As the words got harder, the speed of the ball got faster," he recalls.
Thomas, who has since launched a fitness software company called Acrinta, recalls that one of the challenges for his MILLEE team was that it was geographically dispersed, with some members in India and others at CMU's campus in Pittsburgh.
"The time zone difference, the physical distance and the communication barriers were all challenges," he says. "The students in India would help maintain the code base and do some development. They would also take the phones and install the games and go to the learners to get feedback and relay all of that information back to us."
As Thomas sees it, one key to the value of the MILLEE project is that "it's a game, and as the students are playing, they're having fun." But he points out that the students are also learning, "and that is creating opportunities that could lead to serious social change" -- an observation confirmed in a recent report from the British Council, which estimates that the salary gap between professionals with and without English skills in some developing countries is as high as 20% to 30%.

Enabling a Livelihood

Improving the economic prospects of villagers in India is the goal of MicroGraam, a project that taps mobile and Internet technologies to enable urban professionals to find, select and provide microcredit to underprivileged borrowers in rural India.
MicroGraam co-founder Sekhar Sarukkai notes that the concept of microfinance isn't new. But as he and co-founder Rangan Varadan saw it, it could be improved.

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"A few years ago, Rangan went back to India to run the banking and finance practice for Infosys, and he saw that microfinance was a great model, but borrowers were struggling," he recalls. "They had to start repaying the next month after they borrowed the money," he explains. But it could take several months before a newly launched venture paid enough to begin repaying the original loan.
The two men decided to apply the principles of venture capital to the microfinance market. Rather than having borrowers start to pay back their loans immediately, lenders would begin to receive payments -- plus an agreed-upon amount of interest -- when the new venture became more solvent.
The model required transparency between lender and borrower, which MicroGraam addressed by developing a marketplace platform using open-source technology, including integration with online payment gateways. A key feature of the system is that micro-fund transfer costs are less than 0.5%, compared to the industry-standard 5%.
"Complete transparency is one of the most important ways technology can help these low-cost transactions. But you need to do it in a very low-cost manner," Sarukkai notes. "Open source helps a lot. This is a fully open-source application."
MicroGraam lenders can search through a database that includes descriptions of borrowers, photographs, and information about the purpose of and terms of the loan. Lenders also receive updates about the progress of the businesses they fund. In addition, the system provides scheduled reminders to MicroGraam's nongovernmental organization (NGO) partners that administer the loans on the company's behalf.
"MicroGraam doesn't have any field offices, so we go to select NGOs who are already working in villages and partner with them so we don't have any overhead on our end," explains Sarukkai. "It's the NGOs that go and collect the money, so it's very important for us to have visibility into that."
What has become equally important is providing transparency to the borrowers. This is done via SMS technology.
"Borrowers are very interested in visibility into their progress, and almost all of these people have phones, because they are very low cost," he explains.
In the past two years, MicroGraam has facilitated 836 loans totaling about $230,000. The repayment rate is 98%. A woman in the province of Trichy in India, who borrowed 1,500 rupees (about $50) to buy a mixer to grind flour, is typical of MicroGraam's borrowers, who are mostly women.
"She started making batter and selling the batter to others in the slum," Sarukkai says. "You could think it's not a big deal, but by selling batter she was able to share in profits. It took her a year and a half, but now she gets more than 1,000 rupees a month from selling batter."
"It's amazing how $100 can change lives so substantially."