The idea of this hyper-local browser is interesting. I was wondering if these could be used for some marginalized communities we are working with.

Best Regards, Ishtiaque

Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of Toronto, ON, CA Ph: +1 647 220 3482 Skype: syed.ishtiaque.ahmed web: https://www.ishtiaque.net/ My Availability: Google Calendar Link https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ishtiaque.uoft%40gmail.com&ctz=America%2FToronto

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed ishtiaque@csebuet.org Date: Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 1:58 PM Subject: Fwd: [TIER] GAIUS: Enabling hyperlocal communities to interact and transact with local content To: Ishtiaque Ahmed ishtiaque@cs.toronto.edu

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan arjuna.sathiaseelan@cl.cam.ac.uk Date: Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 1:44 PM Subject: [TIER] GAIUS: Enabling hyperlocal communities to interact and transact with local content To: gaia gaia@irtf.org Cc: tier tier@tier.cs.berkeley.edu

Dear all, Some of us from the ICTD community have formed a startup to address the issue of unavailability of local content in emerging markets. GAIUS (www.gaiusnetworks.com) is a New York University spinout. Our ambition is to create decentralised sustainable highly localised lightweight mobile web ecosystems for the next 3 billion users. The platform includes an innovative hyper-local browser that enables hyper-local communities in emerging markets to create, interact and monetise local content relevant to their communities in their own languages. GAIUS also has key technological innovations that improve mobile web performance and early trials demonstrate that mobile pages created within the GAIUS ecosystem have a 60% reduction in bandwidth consumption and download upto 90% faster compared to traditional mobile webpages. GAIUS is part of Microsoft for Startups, invited member of the Alliance for Affordable Internet and incubated by IDEA London (Cisco, EDF and UCL).

We are currently doing early trials in India (with Microsoft Azure) and in Kenya (with Liquid Telecom). We just completed the first phase of trials across 1200+ users and are now on to our next phase. We would like to invite users from INDIA and KENYA to trial our platform.

*Users from other countries can still trial out - you will be redirected to our test platform.

We are also looking to start a few more trials across other emerging countries especially the Pacific Islands, so if there is interest, we are happy to look at it.

You can download the app from: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gaius.gaiusapp&hl=en_U... *iOS and KaiOS coming soon.

Thanks.

Regards Arjuna