Amazon Dash and EyeWatch

Heard of Amazon’s latest innovation, the Dash Button? Let the Wall Street Journal describe it:
“Each button bears a different brightly colored product logo…The buttons mount with an adhesive strip on the back, or fit into a plastic clip.”
See pic below for an example of where/how the button is placed:
Here’s how the Dash Button works:
“You set up the buttons using the Amazon mobile shopping app, connecting them to your home Wi-Fi network and assigning the specific products and the quantities you’ll want to receive with each click. When the button is clicked, you get a smartphone notification, and you can cancel that order within a half hour. And if somebody in your house pushes the Gatorade button 15 times, you won’t get 15 orders—just one (or none, if an order is already on its way to you).”
(This is in addition to the hand-held Dash device that can automatically place orders for household goods by scanning barcodes or speech recognition).

The same “action at the press of a button” concept is applied in the slums of Dharavi (Mumbai) against (hold your breath) domestic violence! Local women of the slum are recruited as members of this NGO called SNEHA who are then given Android phones which contains a digital form and an app called EyeWatch. The form is filled with details of the victim/crime; the EyeWatch app can be used to record audio or video clips.

Here’s the kicker: the forms and audio/video clips are saved on a central database, not the phone. This eliminates the problem of the perpetrator snatching the evidence (had the info been on the phone itself). Further:
“Once the app is activated and an alert raised, a call goes through to a SNEHA employee in case the sangini (member) requires assistance.”
And so:
“The mobile phones, say the women, have brought about a big change in the way people in the neighbourhood perceive them. “When they see us hold up the phone, they start behaving properly”.

Amazon Dash and EyeWatch: putting such totally different uses of the smartphone + Internet combo side by side reminded me of this comment by Ben Evans, a First World guy:
“The next billion are not like us.”
So true. And yet the same tech can be made useful for everyone.

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