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The African Startup Using Phones to Spot Counterfeit Drugs
- azinman2 11y agoThis is great. Local problems solved by local companies in an otherwise underserved market, all aided by simple tech. Twilio should be using this as an example app. What I don't understand is why it took $10M of HP product to do this. Perhaps I'm not understanding something here but it sounds like they generate random 12-digit numbers, have some metadata on what that's attached to, and have an SMS-interface in? Granted they may need physical servers in the telcos, but couldn't one $1-3k bare metal postgres instance handle most of this (500M rows, majority of which have been used and won't be seen again), and some separate $1-3k bare metal SMS gateway and REST api for static pages? Or what, you scale both of those components 1-3x more? Still no where close to 100k left alone 10M. I shipped a server to Haiti to power a voice-based jobs board post-earthquake. It was a single $2k Dell server with a $1.5k ISDN card -- that 1U went into Digicel and handled 16 concurrent calls for thousands and thousands of people. And that was voice!