Montagenik has a new follower!

Welcome new follower to montagenik! At the moment I am responding to people who dm'd and tweeted me - and to some email back up... I also need to revise my options P/L sheet as I had to return some profits yesterday when the market suffered a little down swing. (This actually necessitated an early exit from the mHealth summit for me - so I could manage a margin warning. It is not as bad as it seems, but some options moved into the money and some some of out of the money options had big swings in Mark to market P/L that affected my margin. I will live to trade another day. go over to my super secret finance blog to read more...


On to saving the world. Thursday and Friday was the mHealth summit. It was an incredible opportunity to speak with people working in all areas of mHealth, from tracking smokers in the US to developing telescopic additions to phone cameras for telemedicine. The big question is, is in the developing world how to pay for this


better answers to questions - these are some questions that people asked that I gave half baked answers to - here are better answers

1)Why dont you use google sms... RapidSMS (or other roll your own gateway solutions) let you work in any country with any local telecom. I dont think I could have used google sms in Malawi. For us deployment google sms might be ideal. In the us, I have worked with celltrust for developing an SMS service for product validation (eg are you really drinking evian, tropicana, popov vodka). This is a paid service. I think using google sms is a viable solution though. I have no idea how well the service works, so I cannot speak to it. However, it is nice to be able to have your own sms gateway for testing and that is what rapidsms and frontlinesms lets you do.


2) What IVR solutions have you used. I could not think of anything because I was super shot and in SMS mode, but here are some IVR solutions I have worked with (not tried google yet).
some examples
cloudvox
ribbit - you have to use actionscript/flash/flex and/or do some wack AJAX work around


3) can you make money with this stuff?
For mhealth surveillance in the developing world - No.
However I do think there is a market for mHealth surveillance in the developed world. Say for example I want to collect data on a variety of vitals

I have to go take dog to vet - must respond to other questions later