Biz-o-mat, for small business in developing countries

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The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

There will be less poverty, because poor people in developing countries will be empowered to create sustainable livelihoods for themselves.

Biz-o-mat helps people in developing countries to establish and expand small businesses. It provides free information and links to information on all business-related topics, in most languages.

A YouTube video that uses this photo to explain some of the social and technology issues involved in this project. What do you see in this picture?

The information is managed by the franchisees: niche experts who make money using Biz-o-mat’s hosted software.

This mashup project will enable those franchisees to have many tools with which to share their expertise, and help small businesses in developing countries. The target beneficiaries are people in places where the physical and and institutional infrastructures are relatively weak.

The result of this mashup challenge will be that Biz-o-mat.com will be better able to help more people.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

The comprehensive range of topics includes, for example, bee-keeping, packaging, food processing, and repair businesses. It assumes that small businessmen and women have to organise everything, including production, transport, marketing, licensing.

There is much information on the web already. The Biz-o-mat tools facilitate making this information more accessible, by having it organised, and including ratings and reviews. (more)

The numerous paper guidelines and regulations that are relevant to the small businesses are part of the project. (more)

Much valuable information is tacit knowledge, what is in people's heads - many of the tools involve getting people to share their knowledge. Forum discussion is created on the site. (more)

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

Biz-o-mat is the successor of the CyberInstitute website, a 2004 Stockholm challenge finalist, and Petersburg Award nomimee. (more)

While it received substantial international recognition, the CyberInstitute did not provide enough for the small businessmen and women who sought help.

Biz-o-mat is a reinvention of the CyberInstitute, with a new business model and greater openness to collaboration.

Cause Area:
- Community Improvement
Cause Area Tags:
- Poverty Reduction
Project URL:
http://www.bizomat.com
Financial support?:
No
Country:
Global

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

This is a later-stage project, so that engineering help and creativity are needed more than initial design skills. What is need to expand and leverage the information includes:

Machine-translation software linked to the wiki of phrases
Software that delivers web-page sizes, so that users can estimate page upload time
Simple interface for cell-phone upload and download
Enrich existing user profile features to integrate with other social network softwares
Online auction software for allocation of franchises
CSS files that integrate softwares with clear, simple interfaces, working in all browsers and all fonts
Talking avatars that can read the words on a page with mouseover, so illiterate people can understand the information

So far there is some software for Biz-o-mat, including search, directories, discussion forums, polls and surveys, quizzes, and ratings and reviews.

Mashup Data Sources

Biz-o-mat.com itself contains much information, so leveraging that information is the crux of this mashup project. (more)

There may be other information that can be mashed in, and suggestions are welcome. For example, there may be full-text instructions about how to do various small-business activities which has software that can link well to Biz-o-mat.