The idea was to provide a texting kiosk for prisoners to SMS friends and family.
Building the technology MVP to run an iMessage-like application on a tablet was the easy part. Getting prisons interested in making a few pennies per SMS - also easy.
Why did it fail? (why did we stop short?)
- The jails required hardware that, "cannot be turned into a weapon." Phone handsets are used as hammers and ripped from walls, so much that these came about http://media.columbian.com/img/photos/2014/08/25/257871_A_Po...
- Manufacturing and installing "safe" kiosks required for our app, like http://www.talton.com/images/kiosk_phone.jpg was a costly proposition.
- Internet access and power. Consider weak-or-no data signal, and ethernet & power that must be drilled through thick concrete walls.
- Existing jail phone systems with the hardware already installed are protective of their business and were not willing to put our software on their devices.
- Integrating with existing canteen systems (a prisoner's bank account) was also complicated. There aren't exactly APIs for that.
- Lastly, and I found this to be most interesting, in our discussion of beta testing with certain prisoners was deemed a bad idea, citing that those who have special access become targets for other inmates.
I loved Hutson's Shutterfly-like photo service when I first read about it, since it improved a prisoner's quality of life without introducing the technology hurdles above. Amazing founder story and product.
After my own experience, I'm even more impressed reading that Pigeon.ly is handling over 2 million minutes per month and would be interested to hear the "how we did it" story on that one some day.