Locally available hardware
(Left) Samsung Galaxy Y, not available in Boston; (Right) Symphony Multimedia Phone
Due to customs, cost, and sustainability reasons, we wanted to use phones that could be purchased locally instead of importing them from abroad. The best available Android-powered phone that was available was the Samsung Galaxy Y, a phone designed specifically for India and Bangladesh with their lower price points (13,000 Taka or $175 USD inclusive of taxes, custom fees, etc.) These phones were only launched recently in Dhaka in January and available at the main technology market in Agargaon. The main challenge with the phone itself was the smaller user touch interface, about 30% smaller than a Nexus One, which was used to originally developed the mobile apps. The rest of the specs from the location and time sensing worked the same. One internet-enabled phone that was quite popular at a significantly lower price point was what is called a multimedia phone made by a Chinese company called Symphony. The phones do not have the standard Android or iPhone operating system but do have links to YouTube, Google Maps and other web applications at up to a sixth of the cost or less ($30). While not fully functional for our purposes, they do indicate how fast prices for these smartish phones are plummeting, putting increasing pressure on the rest of the market and increasing adoption faster than anyone’s most optimistic predictions. Affordability Most of the smart city efforts developed by big companies like Cisco and IBM rely on building a whole new infostructure to integrate different parts of the city from water to energy to traffic systems. For a city like Dhaka, this investment is cost prohibitive especially given that the physical infrastructures for water, energy and roads are not in good shape. As such, the intention of the flocksourcing workflow was to minimize costs by leveraging resources that are relatively cheap in Dhaka: mobile data networks and organized groups of people. Mobile data networks in almost any city including Dhaka is Thesis Defense DRAFT, 35