This Is the App That’s Fueling the Uprising in Venezuela

Entrepreneur Bill Moore was in his Austin, Texas, office last Thursday, watching explosive growth for his company’s walkie-talkie app, Zello, inside Venezuela. Zello had become the favorite app of protest organizers there after recently hitting the mark as the most popular app in Ukraine. Over the past few days in Venezuela, the protests ballooned following rapidly rising food prices, controversy over President Nicolas Maduro’s economic policies, public dissatisfaction over crime and multiple other factors.

Moore was finding that in Venezuela that popularity had a price. Shortly after 9 p.m., his Twitter feed blew up with messages from users inside the country. The government-owned Internet service provider, CANTV, which hosts 90 percent of Venezuela’s Internet traffic, was blocking the app as well as access to Zello’s website. Downloads were dropping off considerably.

Zello sent out the following Tweet: “If you are in Venezuela and familiar with network diagnostics tools, please respond, we need your help to understand the block applied.”

You will probably get a better answer from somebody else, but here’s my understanding.

An ‘app’ (probably short for application or appliance or something) is a little program that can run on your smart phone (and maybe other things like i-pads or even regular computers not sure) and it will do all sorts of different things.

My daughter had one where she could keep records on her baby, when he ate and how much, when did he got to sleep, diaper changes (and what was in them!), etc. It synched up between her phone, her hubbys phone, her i-pad, etc. It was actually great, very easy to use and if we were baby sitting you could look back and see when/what he’d eaten the day before, etc. And of course she could keep tabs on us too. I think that cost her about $15-

And almost everyone has the one that let’s their phone become a little flashlight, using the flash for the camera.

Some are free, many cost only a dollar or two.

They are pretty cool, although I don’t like the alarm one I put on my android phone.

I gotta say, I resisted a long time but those smart phones are really great, they are like swiss army knives of computing.

ping

2 Minutes
UNESCO YouthMobile
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2pMbGxECJU

The new UNESCO initiative called Youth Mobile is growing fast. It aims at teaching young girls and boys to create mobile apps for a sustainable future (Agenda 21). Watch this video, or go to youthmobile.org for more information.

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