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:
“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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