Back to the bush

Jon and I had been waiting for the day when we could get back out to the bush with David from WEEC in Kenya and test the MMS with him. He was the test case for journal updating from the field. More than just being the credit officer operating in the most remote location he was also one of the least familiar with the digital camera and the computer. His two room office in Isinya has no technology.

He advised against a trip back out to the same clients that we had visited on our first trip because of the distance and cost of a cab and instead we went only as far as what might be considered peri-rural.

Beyond a few interface questions that whole process was very easy for him to complete and the time to find coverage was around 10 minutes in some cases. What is nice is that once he had pressed send we could leave to the visit the next client while the phone searched for coverage.

By the third visit to one of his clients he had sent a journal successfully without even notifying us so that we could capture it on video. We have some excellent video of the post in action. Between sentences he is batting away a pesky cow trying to get to the water faucet that he is seated on. All this under a vast Kenyan sky. Our access to the internet was once again poor in Kenya and we will try to post that video soon to the website.

As far as the ease of use and the coverage are concerned David was a milestone.

We celebrated a successful testing phase with few days in Mombasa.

5 in one blow

Yesterday was a bit like Christmas, gifts for all. Jon and I got confirmation that the MMS can indeed deliver journal updates to the Kiva site directly. So that means its all downhill from here. Kiva got lots of journal updates from the LiA credit officers and the lenders received those updates as well.

During the entire 7 weeks that we spent during our previous visits to the organizations that we have been working with there was not a single instance where we were able to witness the entire process of updating a journal entry from beginning to end. No matter how hard we pushed to see the entire sequence uninterrupted there was always some complication that stood in our way. Power and connectivity were by far the biggest impediments. Yesterday we saw the entire process five times in two hours.

I gotta say it was a good day.

intocontext invites you to join their new 'hotblog'

So in the same way that the multi-media message service (MMS) is supposed to help the Kiva partners post journals to the Kiva site without power and connectivity issues, we are going to try it ourselves with this blog. We will continue to post when the conditions are favorable but when they aren't we have created a new blog format. Blogger is allowing posts to be made via MMS but the service doesnt extend outside of the US so I established a new hotmail account and access to the account is listed below. We will be sending blog entries to this email where you will be able to read them.

username: intocontext
password: hotblog

When we left East Africa at the end of July one of the service providers was charging 300 Uganda shillings for the service, about 15 cents. Now that we are back we learned that another provider seems to be running a bit of a pilot on the service and is offering to send the messages FREE of charge. To Jon and I that sounds like a dare. I haven't run a check on this new blog system but I will send the first blog soon. I'm hoping to fill up that account. We will see with what consistency they actually arrive to the address.