Eko Financial Service Private Limited is a young Indian start-up that uses mobile technology for bringing banking to the bottom of the pyramid market. Eko leverages the Banking Correspondent model propagated by the Reserve Bank of India, to provide bank accounts and remittance services for those...

Ad-hoc networks consisting entirely of simple mobile phones can be used to deploy village level telephony. We investigate a novel application for such networks – a peer-to peer community radio service. We envision a system, where any user in the network is equally empowered to generate and...

Ad hoc peer-to-peer mobile phone networks (phone MANETs) enable cheap village level telephony for cash-strapped, off-the-grid communities. Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in such manets and is used for route discovery. This paper proposed a new broadcast technique that is lightweight,...

The social innovation space that tries to marry the pursuit of profits and social impact is at interesting cross-roads in developing countries like India. Among other things, the euphoria and subsequent deflation around microfinance, points to the need for a continuous critical examination of...

We propose a new application for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) – community radio. We argue how MANETS help overcome important limitations in how community radio is currently operationalized. We identify critical design elements for a MANET based community radio service and propose a broad...

This paper proposes a rating based scheme for encouraging user participation in ad-hoc mobile phone mesh networks. These networks are particularly attractive for remote/rural areas in developing countries as they do not depend on costly infrastructure and telecom operators. We evaluate our...

This paper investigates deploying a village level community-radio application on top of a MANET comprising completely of basic mobile phones. We envision a system, where any user in the network is equally empowered to generate and distribute audio content to the entire network, using his or her...