We had every participant, who had to share an experience, take the "hot seat" and tell us his / her story leading to the few learnings we had.

Keshav spoke about his experiences not in the light of any particular screw-up, but in general on things that could go wrong. Some of his citing:

• Red and green buttons on cellphones are not as intuitive to people in rural areas as to city dwellers. Interfaces, text and basics matter when you want to approach an audience like them. What works in the urban environment, need not necessarily work in the rural environment.
• Do not go after catchy words. This was a learning for his team when the decision to implement for "3G" was too premature, given 3G hasn't arrived yet.
• Entertainment is huge in rural mobile usage. If there's a use case that needs the time of a mobile user, while busy city workers may not have time for it, someone in rural areas might invest that time, for example - downloading ring tones, songs, movie clips, etc.

Key takeaway : Know your audience and target your product or campaign appropriately.

Prashanth who has extensively worked in health care and training especially with several Primary Health Care centres had this to share:

• While piloting training and e-learning for improving the diagnostic skills of rural doctors, his team found that doctors in a certain rural area did not want to be "told" what to do. "What works here, will work elsewhere" is highly contextual.
• Enabling the rural areas with technology will help information being shared and amount of work done going down is not necessarily true. There are hidden costs and skills required that may prove as barriers.
• If the rural setup does not have the infrastructure already, it will be hard to incentive-ise, motivate them to accept anything new. Most doctors in these rural communities, do not even want to work there and want to move to cities. It's hard, in these circumstances, to overcome the mind blocks for accepting new technology.

  These initiatives were mentioned:

  http://www.worldhealthpartners.org/business_service.htm

  http://www.neurosynaptic.com/

Shashank from the Jaago Re campaign had this to share:

• In the use of "SMS" as a tool for interactive response to information on social issues / polling etc, the audience may not be motivated enough to respond. A professionally perceived "need", may not be in "demand'.
• While educated urban audience had issues with being registered voters or with polling booths, they'd rather rant about it on social networks than try and get help from the Jaago Re team. Getting recognition for particpation seems like a bigger incentive for most people than the actual responsibility.

Other participants had these comments:

• Bluetooth is prone to virus and spam, yet it is extensively used for transfer of ringtones, movie/song clips. Using this for a campaign may not be such a bad idea. It is likely that anyhing you pay for, may be wanted.

There was a mention of http://www.simpill.com/ an adherence mechanism to timely pill intake that uses SMS reminders.

A http://www.labournet.in/ survey showed that less than 50% responded to an SMS based information retrieval campaign from rural areas.

Key takeaway : Technology is not always the problem. People and acceptance can pose a bigger challenge.

A participant and his team tried to simulate human behaviour of search and referals:

• It allows you to search for a piece of information that can then be tagged with a question or a confirmation and sent out for free to a fixed number of other users via SMS. (for e.g., search for a doctor, forward your search results to your friends with the question - "Do you think this person is a good doctor?") This appeared to be a "free SMS service" that then went on to being misused, by small groups.
• The two products mentioned here: http://www.160by2.com/ and http://www.zook.in/

  Key takeaway : If there are freebies, be sure that you are covered for any misuse of your intentions