HMS Wireless

TIER power

admin — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 21:58:09 +0000

The TIER group at UC Berkeley has been investigating/designing/building inovative technologies for quite a while focused on rural community development. One of the key issues with most rural environments is how to monitor and maintain remotely powered devices, which are often run by solar or wind power and batteries. While a wireless link can give you some idea (if it’s there, then there’s clearly power ), it is often not clear what the actual power system status is, how full are the batteries, how well is the system charging, etc. Well, the tier team has released their 3rd generation, and is working on a 4th generation power manager for solar applications that includes Maxmium Power Point Tracking capabilities. Check out their latest (including the microcontroller code, schematic, and documentation!):

http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/power

We’re Back!

robert — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:10:24 +0000

Yes, it’s been a little while, but we’re back at it, re-evaluating the technologies that will change the world at the base of the economic pyramid. Our interest may have changed slightly, but that doesn’t change the goal of this site or others like it: find and discuss technologies that can enable a rich future for the world at large.

Robert

Emerging Markets, Emerging Models

Loretta — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:43:46 +0000

The Monitor Group, a consulting firm, has just issued a very interesting report entitled “Emerging Markets, Emerging Models: Market-Based Solutions to the Challenges of Global Poverty.” As they point out in the Exec Summary, ”market-based solutions have recently attracted strong interest in the campaign against global poverty, in part due to the remarkable success of microﬁnance. They are relatively new, with an uneven performance record, and there is much yet to learn about what causes them to succeed or fail. The most successful pass two tests: they are self-funding, and they operate at sufﬁcient scale to make a difference to masses of poor people. They also have one salient feature in common: a business model tailored to the special circumstances of markets at the base of the income pyramid.”

The report looks at data from a number of sources and field studies, with a particular focus on India, and comes up with lessons learned as well as 7 business models, tailored to the circumstances of low-income groups, that they believe have the best chance of success. Definitely required reading for those of us interested in market-based solutions for the bottom of the pyramid.

Latest Vodafone Policy Paper

Loretta — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:41:21 +0000

Vodafone recently released another set of reports as part of its Policy Paper series, this one focusing on mobiles in India, particularly their economic impacts. This is the latest in the series of reports they’ve done on mobile telephony, with a couple of the earlier ones focusing on Africa and Mobile Transactions. All the reports in this series are well worth reading.

Latest reports from HMS

Loretta — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:06:04 +0000

Here are links to a couple of our latest reports. The first one is a “Top 20″ list of the latest research into mobile phones’ social and economic impact in the developing world, done on behalf of the GSM Association in London. The second is a look at the use of biometric technologies and their use in mobile banking in the developing world, done for the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC.

Welcome!

robert — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:14:51 +0000

Welcome to the HMS Wireless blog. We’ve all been so busy on the road that we’re only now getting this section going, so please bear with us. We’ll be posting news and other interesting articles that we find, in addition to documents that we publish.

Add us to your rss reader if you’d like to know when we update this site!

Thanks,

Robert