YAISHWARYAJ: Tech wiz harnesses Internet for the poor

http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/06/tech-wiz-harnesses-internet-for-the-poor.html

LAHORE, Sept 5: While many young tech wizards strive to invent the next iPad, Umar Saif is working to bring Internet-style networking to millions of Pakistanis who don't have access to the Web. He could shake up the country's politics in the process.

Saif's efforts recently earned him recognition by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as one of the world's top young technology innovators.

Technological progress faces immense hurdles in Pakistan, with its pervasive insecurity, shoddy public education system,
struggling economy and chronic electricity shortages.

Given that many Pakistanis still struggle to get enough food and clean water — much less a computer or smart phone — much of Saif's research in Pakistan centres around giving ordinary citizens new ways to use one thing that many do have: a basic cellphone.

The trigger for his research was the 2005 earthquake in Azad Kashmir that killed 80,000 people and caused widespread destruction. The disaster coincided with his return to Pakistan after getting a PhD in computer science from the University of
Cambridge.

Realising that rescue workers were having trouble coordinating, Saif, 32, devised a computer programme that allowed people to send a text message – or SMS – to thousands of people at once. Users send a text to a specific phone number to sign up for
the programme, and then can message all the subscribers, allowing users to engage in the kind of social networking possible on the Internet.

It has since blossomed into a commercial enterprise called SMS-all that is used by at least 2.5 million people who have sent nearly 4 billion text messages.

"You can do the sorts of things that we do on Facebook and Twitter," said Saif, now an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

The company generates revenue by charging a small amount for each message. Saif has expanded the service to Iraq and Nigeria by working with telecommunication companies there.

Roughly 20 million Pakistanis use the Internet, about 11 per cent of the country's total population of 187 million. But there are more than 108 million Pakistani cellphone subscribers.

That was Saif's inspiration.

"The thing to do is to bring whatever you have on the Internet on the phone lines, because that is what gets used the most," said Saif.

The networking power of Facebook and Twitter was seen as a driver of the revolutions that swept across the Arab world this year, especially in Egypt. But Internet penetration in many of those countries is much higher than in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, thousands of lawyers used SMS-all to help organise 2008 protests against the rule of then president Pervez Musharraf.

Now, political parties are using the service, a move that could shake up the political system by allowing smaller groups to compete against the two dominant parties, which have extensive networks throughout Pakistan.

An early user is the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf of Imran Khan who is popular but has had difficulty translating that support into votes. The party set up a group on SMS-all about a month ago and has already attracted over 300,000 members, said the
party's general secretary, Arif Alvi.

The Pakistan Muslim League-N has also set up a group on SMS-all and has taken out advertisements in local papers asking people to join.

Saif is working on several other projects that harness the networking power of the Internet through cellphones.

One programme, being developed in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University in the US, would create the mobile phone equivalent of an Internet chat room, allowing people to ask questions that could be answered by others. He is coordinating
with a hospital to create such a service for cancer patients.

He has also worked on higher-tech programmes, including one called BitMate that targets slow Internet connections in
developing regions and lets users pool their bandwidth for faster downloads.—AP