Day 6: Project Ringtones - Mobile Phone Applications for Workers in China

After being given an introduction to Project Ringtones through the amazing Ted Talk on Sixth Sense which can be found here and an introduction to Mobile Phone Applications and how combination of tools on mobile phones can help build a powerful application, we were put into break-out groups:

1. TB Subgroup - Katrin Stoy from FSU and Constanza Alonqueo from UFRO

2. Mobile phones in China - Andre Reichel and Steffen Bethmann from FSU

3. Empowering Consumers through Mobile phones - Falk von Moellendorff from FSU and Jiayuan Meng from ZU

This article will talk about Mobile Phones in China and how applications on mobile phones can help the low income group workers in China to counter problems faced in the transport system especially in booking tickets for their journeys.

We discussed the target group who require the application, the tools which will be required - the positives and the negatives of the same. We discussed the requirements of such an application viz. easy user-interface, fast learning curve, trustworthy and the application should run on all mobile platforms especially on the ones which are low cost.

We identified that the target group would be young people moving to urban china mainly as workers and they would be needing to travel back home atleast once a year during the Chinese New Year and for such people, the ideal application should provide an easy access and interface to buying tickets on their mobile phone. The challenges which will be faced in such an application would be suspicion on the part of the users since it would be mainly SMS based, mode of payment, authentication and such others.

The group came up with a proposal to develop such an voice/SMS based application whose main purpose is to fight black markets who sell tickets at a high price since the ticket booking system in China isn't very customer friendly.