International expansion - Social Impact Project

WHO : Grey-box is a social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY: 50% of the world lives offline – they haven’t connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada does not have access to the minimum speed for the Internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW : Over the last 2 years and based on field research and work, we have developed an array of mostly open-source social innovation projects. Each of those projects has a dedicated page on Riipen, but this listing serves as a quick summary: UNI  is a low-cost device (and soon an Android application) that allows Wi-Fi access to everyone, everywhere, even in areas without reliable or safe internet. With a simple click to upload, Slides, PDFs, videos, Moodle, databases, or even copies of entire websites can be made available offline for free. Project Codex  uses AI to translate medical databases in several languages and regions to facilitate international operations. It can be accessed via a mobile site or a tool such as WhatsApp. The Medical Codex project aims to provide an easy-to-use tool that can help coordinate medical equipment between countries and to quickly translate medical terms across multiple languages while accounting for local variations such as brands and generics. Project   Symmetry  is an application using AI to accelerate Wikipedia's translation efforts in less-represented languages (less than 1 million articles) by building a semantic understanding of similar articles in various Wikipedia languages and providing relevant translations for missing information Project Scraper  is a Google Chrome extension that enables offline access to a web page or an entire website with just a few clicks. Project Mesh  is an application that enables Android devices to connect and send files and messages over long distances without requiring internet connectivity. Project Cybercafe  is software that runs on an Android device, enabling smart hotspot functionality for the sharing of internet connectivity with other Wi-Fi devices. Recognizing costs and other restrictions that may exist in our targeted regions, several controls are in place to allow a high level of control over how a user’s hotspot device is used for internet access.

Chrome Extension for Offline ressources for remote communities (Project Scraper)

WHO: Grey-box is social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY: 50% of the world lives offline – they haven’t connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada does not have access to the minimum speed for internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW: In a nutshell, the current project (codenamed: Web Crawler) takes the shape of a web browser extension (chrome and chromium) that allows scraping individual webpages or even a whole domain (ex: 5 pages deep). The result is a cloned website that can be accessed by remote communities without reliable access to the internet.

Mesh Networking for Android Devices (Project Mesh)

WHO: Grey-box is social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY: 50% of the world lives offline – they haven’t connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada do not have access to the minimum speed for internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW: In a nutshell, the current project (codenamed : Mesh) aims at providing low-cost android devices like UNI (https://www.grey-box.ca/uni/) with mesh networking capabilities in order to be able to share storage, communications (IM) and increase their total network range. Grey-box is a nonprofit structured under the principle of mobile-first and remote-first. Diversity is not only encouraged, it is an integral part of the strength of the team and its projects

A portable cyber coffee shop manager for rural internet (Project Cybercafe)

WHO : Grey-box is social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic. WHY : 50% of the world lives offline – they have not connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada does not have access to the minimum speed for the internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem. HOW : In a nutshell, the current project (codenamed: CyberCoffee) aims at providing low-cost Android devices like UNI (https://www.grey-box.ca/uni/) with the ability to share their internet connection (usually through a 4G modem) with a group of users and manage everyone's access with more precision. The goal is to ensure that no individual user can slow down the access of the whole group by using too much bandwidth or monopolizing the available data.