An app to manage greetings over the Internet

We have been hearing about air pollution in New Delhi, with the Diwali crackers being the last straw. Most of us suffer from an online phenomenon that is a comparable nuisance.

Someone starts with a list of about a hundred colleagues and sends them all a common greeting the day before the New Year, Diwali, or something like that. The hundred of us blindly “reply to all” in the list sending our own greetings to everyone on the list. Then every one of us spends the festive occasion deleting the greetings received. Ten thousand minutes wasted. The emails serve one purpose – it tells the recipients that the sender is alive and is fit to use email.

Then comes greetings from your bank, the shop where you bought lettuce, some miscellaneous jeweler, and hundred others sending you greetings on the occasion. Many of them send you birthday greetings! Very touching to get a birthday greeting from your bank! The same bank that, when asked for a form, tells you that your request would be attended to in three working days!

There can be many ways of tackling this near-spam enterprise. The best would be for email software to identify pure greeting messages and put them in a separate folder. The software can make a consolidated list of senders available for inspection. You should be able to click on a sender’s name and send a message prepared by you in advance – one designed to be sent to all those who greet you. An email generated by a click should be going only to a single person, unless you indicate that it should be otherwise.

The solution could also be in the form of a well-designed app which people could use for sending greetings, in place of email. Would users be interested in one more app? Can we make it attractive enough to find a big clientele?

There are many possibilities. The app could possibly be branded in the name of a sponsor like Red Cross, UNICEF or other NGO and be popularized by them sending URLs through email. The apps could be linked to an e-wallet like PayTM by the user who downloads it. Every time the users send greetings, the app could transfer a pre-set sum of money, like say Rs 5 or 10, to the NGO. The app’s development and operations cost could be paid by an e-commerce site like “Favorites of my city”, and the app could offer a feature for the users to send gift packets through the e-commerce site when they send a greeting.

The app could be enhanced in many other ways. For instance, there could be a provision for the user to send a canned short message, such as the following:

“The kids are growing up well. Rama choreographed a dance item for the Diwali event at her school. She also fooled her grandma by making a phone call, in a voice resembling that of an uncle. Vinay is busy building his model planes.”

The app could also allow the user to type in a few lines of a customized message to selected recipients.

Srinivasan Ramani

The Internet and Rabies

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization for Animal Health held a conference in Dec 2015 and started a worldwide discussion on ending the medieval horror known as rabies. Visit  http://www.oie.int/eng/RABIES2015/index.html. The Lancet carried a blog post 

http://globalhealth.thelancet.com/2015/12/09/ending-canine-mediated-human-rabies-time-now  and an editorial on the subject (its Vol. 386, Number 10012, Dec 19, 2015). The Lancet Editorial says that 70,000 people die every year because of this disease.  There is an excellent article in Quartz on the topic of rabies in India http://qz.com/487441/best-friend-turns-deadly-foe-indias-rabid-street-dogs-are-killing-thousands-every-year/

WHO says that 20,000 people die from rabies in India every year. Elsewhere, I have read that in the last ten years India has not shown any reduction in rabies deaths per year. Bangladesh, in comparison, has reduced rabies deaths by 50% in the last three years. Immunizing a dog against rabies seems to cost less than Rs 100. Why can’t India commit itself to a vast reduction in the incidence of rabies over the next three years?   

What has all this to do with the Internet, you may wonder! Please hold on for a moment and I will share my thoughts on this topic.

New ideas need to be welcomed even to fight battles we have fighting over the centuries. The following article refers to a good example of a new idea in the field: oral vaccine for animals to immunize them against rabies.  

http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/yourallekiskivalleymore/9420586-74/rabies-allegheny-county#axzz3vl8GiRRi

Next to the Internet! There is so much about rabies in India on the Worldwide Web. Can a few computer science students figure out a way to get actionable information out of all this? For instance, can we identify locations where there is a new cluster of rabies cases?

If this is not possible, can we use social networking to have volunteers report the location of new cases of suspected rabies? In this case, we should be able to automate the collating of received information to alert authorities and media about hotspots of rabies as they develop. It is one thing to vaccinate millions of stray dogs against rabies. It is another to vaccinate a few hundred dogs in a reported hotspot. The smart phone, with accurate location reporting, is one type of tools that can help identify hotspots to focus on.

I would suggest the person reporting a rabies case or dog bite should be free to use a variety of ways of sending information: online forms, a text message over SMS or an Internet based message system, email, an app on a smartphone, etc. A simple notation illustrated below should be enough.

report rabies case

hospital zenith hospital

name ganeshsubramanian

dateofadmission 1-1-2016

locality Jayanagar block 1

city  Bangalore

pincode 560011

(other possible types of information: town XXX, village XXX, district XXX, dateofbirth XXX, dog stray, dog pet, patient male, reportby ramani, dateofbite XXX, patient 98xxx77123; reporter should be free to send whatever information is available)

Design issues: How can we avoid treating multiple reports of a case as multiple cases? Is there a way to use multiple reports from one location to increase our confidence in the report? How can we acknowledge a reporter for his service?