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Widget for using cell phones as remote data entry devices
Describe your idea:
Whether for emergency preparedness, school system communication or other community organizations, it's sometimes easier for people to get to a cell phone than something connected to the internet. A method for broadcasting information from a central database and receiving it on a cell phone for non-profits, and for sending in from the cell phone to the database would be a tremendously helpful structure for broad-reach programs.
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this is exactly what we've been thinking about...
Great idea and something we'd be very interested in, although coming at it from a slightly different angle.
As part of our Greenpeace campaigns, we have a few consumer databases such as the Garden Furniture Guide to give people the option to choose good green stuff. What would be so good would be to have an SMS facility linked into that database, so you could text in the name or barcode of the product you're interested in and in return you'd receive about whether it was deemed a good or bad buy in environmental terms. This would be particularly useful for stuff which has no recognised industry standards (eg FSC for timber) that can be marked onto the goods.
If we find the right project (and the time to do it) we might instigate this but if anyone does any development work around this, I'd love to hear about it.