Text a Farmer, Support a Farmer, Alert a Farmer with CellAlert.net

Challenges Entered:

We would like to offer a site that offers our text alert services in Rwanda and/or Uganda where the Grameen Foundation has made inroads with Village Phone and offer them a text-based marketplace alert system. We want to send marketplace and micro-loan opportunity-alerts to cell phone users across Bangladesh, Uganda and Rwanda.We want to couple our opportunity alert service with Fair Tracing; creating a Fair Trade Alert mashup to ensure international business accountability.Done correctly, CellAlert.net could notify thousands of people oversees about requests for proposals and goods needed. For instance, oil-based agricultural crops essential to biodiesel production appear to be a potential world-changer for Africa, which is poised to become the #1 producer of biodiesel worldwide.CellAlert.net could create connections for vegetable oil buys directly between socially responsible companies and farmers in developing countries for their fuel needs. For instance, the Safeway Corporation recently switched their entire trucking fleet to biodiesel. We want to connect the developing world farmer to the Safeway type corporations ready to buy from developing markets for a fair price.Once the project is complete, we have plans to expand CellAlert.net as follows: EMERGENCY ALERTS, MEDICAL SUPPLY ALERTS, FREE ITEM ALERTS, LOAN ALERTS, LOCAL INNOVATION ALERTS, ENTREPRENEUR NETWORK ALERTS, REGIONAL NEWS ALERTS VOLUNTEER ALERTS

What else have you done in this area of work?

Since 1997, I have focused heavily on the South Sudan, Darfur and the Congo areas on my web site compassionateaction.org. I have also participated in numerous peace marches on Washington and held the first Compassionate Action Briefing on Sudan in July 2005. I am currently researching a potential partnership between Arlington, Virginia novabiodiesel.org to research the feasibility of importing oil from sustainable agriculture projects that are growing Jatropha plants in Sierra Leone and Mexico for biodiesel production. I am also providing Winrock International's software in El Salvador for cell phone distribution of current crop and commodity prices to farmers allowing them to by pass the middle men who have been cheating them by withholding commodity trading prices from them.

Project Details

Project url:

http://www.CellAlert.net

Project video:

Project RSS:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/freealert/bNhW

Project Assessment

Financial support:

Project has financial support

Project goals:

We have found 2 major problems that the Internet presents for both the western world and the 3 billion people living on less than $2/day (see http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp): 1) Those without Internet have comparatively no information2) Those with the Internet have information overloadWhat if we were to solve 2 problems at one time? What if we delivered information to people without Internet access via the quickly expanding 2 billion cellular phone users worldwide? And what if we did it all through keyword-filtering of RSS feeds of their favorite sites and information? What if we created a partnership of CellAlert.net with non-profits that can apply to use a CellAlert Open API which allows them a completely customized mashup of their own design (within the CellAlert Open API rules)? In short, we have so many mashup possibilities, we hope you'll want to mash CellAlert.net and FreeAlert.org with non-profit organizations anywhere they need to distribute urgent content to the 2 billion cell phones in the world. So why not go with the approach of an "API mashup"? I am the co-founder and CEO of FreeAlert.org and of CellAlert.net. My applications are RSS search technologies that instantly notify subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the items that the subscribers are seeking when the item appears in any RSS feed they search worldwide. The flagship application we started with is called FreeAlert.org. Since that time, we've expanded to include http://www.cellalert.net and expanding soon to http://www.Africalert.org, http://www.Asialert.org and http://www.Americasalert.orgFreeAlert.org is an RSS search technology that instantly notifies subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the *free* items that they are seeking on Craigslist whenever the item appears in any Craigslist RSS feed they search worldwide.We hope that one of our mashup ideas will be something that you will facilitate. Currently we are focused on El Salvador, but we see tremendous potential for good purposes being served and facilitated by text alerts in developing nations worldwide!

Identified Obstacles:

2 dedicated programmers with experience in Drupal, PHP, Python, RSS, XML and REST and/or Google API skills and kannel.org/SMS knowledge is a plus.1 Web 2.0-experienced Graphic Designer1 User Interface Designer (CSS, HTML, with some JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, Drupal and RSS helpful)1 dedicated hosting environment with the following: At least 1,500 Gigabytes of Hosting Space with *no* CPU Quota Host unlimited Domains Unlimited Pop/Imap Email Accounts SSH Access (Secure Shell) 15,000 Gigs of Transfer SSL, FTP, Stats Perl, PHP, MYSQL, Python 24 Hour Support and no downtime