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Rapid Android (RapidSMS) Launched on Android!

Feb 12, 2009 ICT, Mobile, News, SMS, Travel

Today UNICEF’s Innovation Group in partnership with Dimagi has just announced the launch of Rapid Android a mobile data collection and SMS messaging system, for the Android platform. RapidSMS has gotten a lot of well deserved, positive attention for being the technology behind Columbia University’s and UNICEF’s amazing Child Malnutrition and Surveillance and Famine Response project which recently won the USAID Innovation Challenge.

Rapid Android is so exciting because it represents the first time (at least that I know of) where a phone can now be used not only as a data entry tool but a data aggregation platform. A hybrid – bot SMS Gateway server AND client; traditional technical lines are beginning to blur as our the types of applications we can hosting on a phone.

Rapid Android should make deploying field based SMS data collections systems both easier and more affordable. Previously, deploying RapidSMS required a computer with Linux, a compatible phone or GPRS modem and someone with the technical chops to be able to install RapidSMS and its many dependencies.

Some advantages of Rapid Android include:

price – available on any android phone ($400) and only getting cheaper. Android on netbooks makes this even more exciting.
power – a phone requires requires much less power, can be charged from 12V, has a built in UPS (battery)
portability – having a battery makes it portable, you don’t need a physical location (just a person) where to host it. Rapid Android phones can be easily shipped for deployment minimizing the need for a technical person on the deployment side
data entry – ideal data entry device with touch screen, keyboard and form based error correction

Rapid Android includes many of the original features of RapidSMS including::

ability to bulk send and receive sms to groups of people
data collection via SMS forms which are editable on the phone
local data entry using standard SDK Android forms
view and aggregate data from incoming SMS messages
plot data in graphs and export via excel over a wifi link

RapidAndroid is not a web server and currently can’t be used to host forms which could be accessed from a remote computer yet. This is a very powerful feature that hopefully we’ll see later.

Rapid Android is a result of a collaboration between UNICEF and Dimagi an initiative that came out of the Open Mobile Consortium. Rapid Android was developed primarily by Daniel Myung and Cory Zue at Dimagi with support from the UNICEF Innovation team. Rapid Android is free and open source and now available at: http:www.rapidandroid.org.

For more info on RapidSMS, a review I wrote for MobileActive is available here.

Finally some screen shots!