Payments and Location

enabled = connected + empowered 

Pablo Picasso once said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible” and the WORLD project has taken that to heart. During the last few months, the WORLD team has been squirreling away making technical advances, looking for funding and quietly building an even more interesting digital platform. Our Marketing team has expanded, and we welcome Lynne Wilkinson who has offered to lend a hand in that arena. Lynne has work experience in various industries and her numerous skills are a welcome addition to the existing team, which comprises of mostly engineers.

At WORLD, we refer to our messaging platform as “GoSsiPS”, a word that hints at conversation and was chosen based on the idea of sharing messages via a Geo-Spatial Publish and Subscribe system. To date, we have not implemented our full vision for the geospatial nature of the platform, but that is about to change.

One way to visualise this is to picture people spread across a field, shouting out their messages. Messages sent will be given a “volume” attribute, being an indication of how loud the sender wants to shout their message. Recipients will be given a “sensitivity” attribute, indicating an ability to receive messages from further away. The combination of volume and sensitivity will be used to decide which messages will be delivered to the individual participants in a discussion.

For the purpose of distance calculation, the geographical origin of a message can be chosen as either the sender’s location or the topic’s centred location. The geographical position of the recipient will default to the recipient’s last known location, but a “home” location can also be specified.

While the system needs the user’s approximate location for this functionality, privacy is paramount. For that reason, a user’s location will never be shared with other users unless this is explicitly granted for a specific purpose, like location sharing with a trusted friend.

Use cases for the GoSsiPS functionality include:

– local classifieds (such as jobs, lost pets, items for sale)

– local interest groups (social sports, church groups)

– geographically relevant public service announcements

Feel free to contact us if you have an application in mind for this functionality.

The WORLD wallet has recently been launched in Eswatini. These days, with social distancing and lockdowns life can be even more challenging, but with the WORLD wallet, it is now easier to make mobile money transfers. After a one-time set up of a wallet, people in Eswatini are now able to transfer money to friends as simply as sending a message. Gone are the long strings of USSD codes, stars, and hashes.

With some mobile money transfers, a person can specify a reason for the transfer. Usually this is simply a reference number or a few words so that both sender and recipient know why the transfer happened. With the WORLD wallet, Citizens can send pictures, emojis, voice notes as well as long text messages with the transfer. In effect, WORLD has flipped money transfers on its head, making the message the priority. So now, along with a birthday message you can send a birthday present.
Currently, WORLD supports Eswatini Mobile and MTN Eswatini mobile wallets.

At present WORLD is only accessible from Android devices but basic support for Windows and IOS will be available later this year.  

 WORLD – always connected

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