Street Level Tech
Mobile is the hardware, messaging is the operating system, chat is the interface, and services are the experience.
I love coffee. I especially love the stories of the coffee farmers. From Honduras to Ethiopia, small farms growing small lots of specialty coffee varietals have changed the way the world tastes and values coffee. Verve Coffee Roasters from Santa Cruz, CA has been on the forefront of specialty coffee for the last decade. They recently released a stunning photo journal called Farm Level Digest, Vol 1 — Honduras. The journal has two sections, farmlevel and streetlevel. The idea of “street level tech” was inspired by what we can collectively create to empower people to trade and transact in real life.
The streetlevel tech stack starts with a mobile phone or tablet with GPS, connected to a network. Value comes from services that deliver novel experiences with these capabilities. A good example is Google Maps, which delivers maps, directions and info about things around a location. And then came Uber, which was built on top of Google Maps to provide people with transportation from a network of “independent” drivers. Another amazing street level technology is Square’s credit card reader that plugs into a mobile phone and turns it into a point of sale terminal. Using Square anyone can collect money from credit or debit cards via their phone. For people in Kenya, the best example of street level tech is M-Pesa, a simple and now standard mobile money solution based on airtime credits (no network or gps required).
The most far reaching example of street level tech today are messaging apps like Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Before messaging apps, there was SMS/texting, the first and most enduring example of street level tech. But Messaging apps are far more than SMS, they (almost) remove the cost factors at the carrier level (data charges apply). Messaging apps are cross platform, cross device, free, and recently opened up to 3rd party developers to build additional services on top of. In China, WeChat users are doing lots of cool things within a single chat interface, such as ordering food before arriving at a restaurant, hailing a ride, getting schedules and paying for public transport services. Mobile is the hardware, messaging is the operating system, chat is the interface, and services are the experience.
Symvasi is aimed squarely at street level, and even has some great uses at farm level. When I saw the amazing photos of the coffee farms in the Farm Level Journal, I thought of the green coffee buyer traveling to a farm in Honduras. What if they could create a contract to secure 20 bags of particularly nice coffee, right there in the fields on their phone? What if the farmer could then send contract offers to three additional workers to help harvest the beans faster? Having a contract in place would increase confidence, trust, and accountability for the coffee buyer, grower, and the workers. Direct trade transactions means fair market rates paid directly to the farmer and farm workers.
While these interactions and transactions already happen today, there is a lot of friction. Just like you can look up and call a local taxi when you need a ride, Uber is just far easier. Uber removes a lot of the friction of getting to and from places. Symvasi aims to reduce the cognitive energy, time and cost of using service contracts and formal agreements. The experience and technology is optimized for street level in emerging markets, meaning minimum app file size, low data consumption, and backwards compatible with older mobile devices. Symvasi is essentially low tech, optimized for a broad set of agreements and devices, but focused 1000% on doing the specific job of creating and executing contracts.
We’re inspired to serve people at street level, by building useful tools that help people #tradefair and do good work for good pay.
