Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Joe, Elena, and I met on the weekend (3/16) to prepare for the midterm project presentation. Joe showed us some interesting market analysis slides from the Assured Labor (AL) founding team. Elena prepared slides for the Project Timetables and Roles. Together, we discussed upcoming field testing. We summarized the field testing effort by the Sloan AL founding team including zooming in the South America - Brazil market and selecting the target companies such as TeleListas.net, Garner, and Spoleto. Going forward, we are planning testing in both Brazil and Boston. In Brazil, we will focus on small businesses and small focus groups; in Boston, we aim for the Portuguese communities. The field testing will further validate customer needs to support value propositions and understand user needs to increase user buy-ins. The testing also intends to verify the product/system usability. The scenarios of the testing include:

1. Customers sign on the web site and post jobs
2. Users receive SMS message and provide feedback to the AL web system

For testing, we went through a few SMS messages to flow though the SMS parsing and the feedback logic.