Atif Mumtaz’s Tele-healthcare project, Jaroka, was short-listed for DHL’s YES Awards.
He is among the five finalists in the social sector in Pakistan and the only with a medicine related project. You can learn more about the award by visiting Atif’s blog
Date: Thursday Jun 14th
Location: DV Lounge
Time: 11am-12pm
Speaker bio:
R. Gopalakrishnan is executive director of Tata Sons, chairman of Rallis India and vice-chairman of Tata Chemicals. He is a director of several Tata Group companies such as Tata Motors, Tata Power and Tata Internet Services. He also serves on the board of two non-Tata companies, ICI and Castrol India.
A key member of the Tata Group Executive Office, Mr Gopalakrishnan plays a vital role in providing direction and impetus to the Group’s forays into potentially viable areas of the new economy.
Mr Gopalakrishnan joined Hindustan Lever (HLL) as a management trainee in 1967. In 1987, he joined HLL’s management committee as executive director of exports. In 1991, he was appointed chairman of Unilever Arabia, based in Jeddah, to establish and manage Unilever’s consumer products business in Arab countries. On his return to India in 1995, he was appointed managing director of Brooke Bond Lipton. After the company’s merger with HLL, he was designated vice chairman of Hindustan Lever. After 31 years with HLL, he joined Tata Sons in August, 1998.
A graduate in physics from Calcutta University, Mr. Gopalakrishnan also has a degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
His recently published book, The Case of the Bonsai Manager: Lessons from Nature on Growing (Penguin India, 2007) is about nature, management and intuitive leadership.
With sadness we announce the passing of Prof. V.K. Samaranayake. Dr. Sam, as he liked to call himself, was an illustrious figure in the world of ICT for developement in Sri Lanka. In the brief time he was at Stanford Dr. Sam was an inspiration to his fellow fellows. He was a vissionary, a teacher, and a mentor to an entire nation. Forceful and graceful. He will be missed.
The Digital Vision Program would like to send our condolences and all of our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends.
Ken Banks’ organisation, kiwanja.net, in collaboration with Stanford University, has been awarded a $200,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to build on its work with FrontlineSMS. The MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Banks has just returned from a ‘Mobile Activism in Africa’ workshop organised by Fahamu and Tactical Tech, held in Nairobi, Kenya. The purpose of the meeting was to enable activists to exchange experiences and plan strategies to support their work. There are also plans to establish an African regional network of social justice advocates who use mobile technologies, and to facilitate an ongoing support network for these organisations
Following a successful presentation at the W3C Workshop in Bangalore last December, Ken Banks was interviewed about his work with kiwanja.net in Africa for Nokia’s “Emerging Horizons” magazine. “Emerging Horizons” is a quarterly newsletter targeted at anyone interested in new growth markets and reaching the next billion subscriber milestone. It also provides industry insights from different players, including operators, regulators and research companies. A PDF of the interview can be read here.
Date: Monday 4 Jun
Location: DV Lounge
Time: 10-11am
Speaker bio:
Growing up in a family of four that barely had enough, Anshu always felt the pain of the needy. Years later, he heard an echo within him that couldn’t be denied. With his wife, he took 67 items of clothing from their closet and donated it. Soon after, he quit his corporate job, and started ‘Goonj’ — a Hindi word that means echo. Six years later, Goonj transports over 10,000 kilograms of donated clothes every month, to the most remote regions of India. Moreover, they’ve done it largely with a volunteer network! It’s an incredible story.
Anshu grew up in Dehradun (one of the states where I piloted Knowledge Games), has a communications background, worked at a telecom company and quit in 1998 to start Goonj (http://goonj.org/). He is an Ashoka fellow (http://www.ashoka.org/node/2523 and http://www.changemakers.net/journal/300510/displaydis.cfm) and has recently won a World Bank Global Development Marketplace award (http://dmblog.worldbank.org/and-winners-are-0).
Date: Thursday, May 31, 2007
Time: 3:30-5pm
Location: Cordura 100
Speaker bio:
Nishita Bakshi conducts social and environmental research on shareholder campaigns to support dialogues with target companies. Previously, Nishita worked as a researcher for academic, governmental and non-governmental organizations such as the Indian Institute of Forest Management/World Bank, Virginia Tech, and Redefining Progress. She holds a MS in Agriculture and Applied Economics from Virginia Tech and a MBA in Forestry Management from the Indian Institute of Forest Management.
FrontlineSMS has been shortlisted in the “Messaging Application/ Service: Public Sector/Not-for-profit” section of the 2007 Mobile Messaging Awards. The winners will be announced at a Gala Awards Dinner in Monte Carlo on the 5th June 2007, immediately after the first day of the Global Messaging Congress.
A special get together is planned to launch the felicitation volume of Prof. V. K. Samaranayake and to revive the IT Chapter of the Alumni association of the University of Colombo. The function will be held on the 4th of June 2007 from 4.30 - 7.00pm at the Prof. V.K. Samaranayake Auditorium of the UCSC*.
The commemorative volume is based on academic articles and memoirs by over 40 professional colleagues of Prof V. K. Samaranayake whom he considers Partners in Progress. These are further enhanced by the inclusion of the proceedings of the felicitation ceremony. The contents of this volume illustrate the breadth of the contribution made by Prof. Samaranayake towards the development of Education, Science and Information Technology and towards social action both nationally and internationally.
Seminar Details:
Date: Tuesday May 31, 2007
Time: 3:30-5pm
Location: Nora 103
Seminar Speaker:
Arjun Batra, Director - Intel India, manages Business Development and US Operations for Intel India and is based at Intel’s world headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The mission of this function is to help Intel capitalize on the opportunities presented by the availability of high quality talent in India. He has played a key role in the establishment, success and rapid growth of the Intel India Development Center at Bangalore, India which now employs about 3000 professionals and has become a true microcosm of Intel Corporation in a short span of six years.
Arjun also drives all internal and external interaction in the US and oversees key initiatives including an ILH Program - a vital program to attract and hire professionals, with critical skills and experience, from the USA wishing to return to India.
Arjun did his undergraduate work at Delhi and his Master of Business Administration, MBA, from the Indian Institute of Management at Calcutta and McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He has worked in various leadership positions in IT, engineering and marketing, with Dow Chemical, IBM and Intel, in India, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the US. Arjun is a naturalized citizen of the USA and the Silicon Valley has been his family’s’ home for the last two decades.
Mexican American Community Services Agency has released its 100 Most Influential Latinos in Silicon Valley list with the top 10 people in 10 different categories. Margarita has been listed in the Business category. You can vote for your top 10 here.
Date: Thursday 5/17/2007
Time: 3:30-5:30pm
Location: Cordura 100
Speaker bio:
Chandrakant Patel, known for his pioneering work in energy-efficient computing, is an HP Fellow at HP Labs, where he is responsible for strategically engaging in thermo-mechanical research for future microprocessors, workstations, servers and data centers.
Patel played a key role in establishing HP’s leadership in energy-efficient computing by founding HP Labs’ thermal technology research program in the early 1990s, and subsequently the data-center architecture program. He foresaw the thermal-management challenges associated with high power density due to miniaturization in semiconductor technologies, and the need to manage energy as a key resource as enterprise IT system resources became increasingly connected and shared.
He pioneered a holistic approach to power and cooling that encompasses everything from chips to systems to racks to the data center itself. With partners in HP’s product R&D groups, he started a virtual thermal community known as the HP Cool Team.
Patel’s work has been incorporated into HP products and services, including its Adaptive Infrastructure offerings, and also used by HP to manage its own information technology infrastructure.
His interest today is research in energy used by data center cooling resources at a global level through the HP Labs’ smart cooling proposition. The smart cooling vision is to dynamically provision cooling commensurate with the heat loads in a data center, and to provision computing, and thus the heat loads, based on the available cooling resources. Chandrakant and his team are exploring the “smart” data center that integrates power, cooling and system architecture.
The vision is to realize a savings of 50 percent in cooling energy costs in the global data center network of tomorrow through a combination of mechanical thermo-fluids engineering and computer science.
Patel joined HP Labs in 1991, initally leading the cooling and packaging research of the Wide Word microprocessor. This research contributed to what later became Intel’s Itanium, which represented the next generation of microprocessors.
In addition to his work at HP, Patel has taught computer-aided design as an adjunct faculty member at Chabot College in Hayward, California since 1990, and graduate level thermal management courses at University of California, Berkeley Extension and Santa Clara University since 1999.
He has authored many refereed journal and conference papers in the area of electronics cooling and has been granted 68 U.S. patents. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Engineering Advisory Board at Chabot College and a member of the Industrial Advisory Board at Santa Clara University.
In addition, Patel was the winner of the 2005 Joel S. Birnbaum Prize for Innovation for “visualizing and leading the creation of end-to-end solutions for managing the energy requirements for computation thereby positioning HP as a leader in physical design of datacenters.” The Birnbaum Prize, named for a former director of HP Labs, is awarded annually to a member of HP Labs for contributions to HP or HP Labs that demonstrate extraordinary vision, perseverance, innovation and creativity.
“The Loose Wire Blog”, written by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff, has reported on the use of Ken Banks’ FrontlineSMS system in last months Nigerian elections. NMEM, the group who used the software, have just released a report (available by clicking here) detailing the monitoring process and their findings. FrontlineSMS and NMEM’s report was also showcased on the White African website, which specialises in the use of ICT on the African continent.
Tomorrow night, through a videoconference, the Digital Vision program will meet online with students from Tokyo’s Keio University Research Center for Foreign Language Education. This will open their English language teleconferencing program (called the E-Lounge).
Their announcement is here.
General info:
Future Mobile Applications - Practical and fun
May 12th, 2007 (Saturday)
1:00 pm — 4:00 pm (Registration starts at 12:30 pm)
Fenwick & West LLP, Silicon Valley Center
801 California Street, Mountain View, CA 94041,
650 - 988 - 8500
Summary:
Though not focused on mobile phones, one of the things we have learned from the mobile phone boom is the viability of the ASP model. Some apps are fun, while some are just quite germane to life. Either way, the economies of scale is what makes them all successful. It so happens that the ASP model is central to the success of the ICE network and there is a lot that computer/PDA/laptop OEMs and ODMs can learn from the success of the mobile phone ASP example.
Event info:
It is the bi-monthly seminar of Silicon Valley-China Wireless Technology Association (SVCWireless), a registered non-profit organization with over 3,500 members. We are not just technology focused, but also focus on promoting entrepreneurship, networking, learning, and building a bridge between the wireless industries in Asia and the United States.
The theme of discussion this time is the future of mobile applications. We will invite a few industry leaders to talk about what is hot in mobile applications, what makes a “Killer App” for end users, what are the revenue streams that can be generated from this growing market and other key questions to understanding this growing market. Details are enclosed.
Date: Thursday, 5/10/2007
Time: 3:30-5pm
Location: Cordura 100
Seminar Synopsis:
New Hands for Old Palms
The purpose of this project is to get unused PDA hardware into “New Hands” in the global south, initially with very simple software for literacy and health, including HIV/AIDS. The idea can have the greatest impact if we can create a new user model — circulating the units to multiple students and individuals like a library book, instead of the traditional 1:1 adult work approach.
The session will start with hands-on experience with the graphics software, and move on to discussion of the many aspects of making it all happen. Of special interest is the possibility that additional locally-determined software content could then attract sponsors and/or customers, so the project could generate revenue.
I invite RDVP fellows to become advisor-partners to help get New Hands projects going with specific organizations in your various countries. It could be a new platform, to complement your own and other projects, especially if our creativity can get income streams.
John is talking about online communities & gaming tomorrow at the Stanford
Humanities lab from 3-4:30 on the 4th floor of Wallenberg.
RSVP with Henrik Bennetsen - bennetsen@gmail.com
The US federal agency, Americorps*Vista, has awarded Global MapAid (GMA) a kick-start grant over three years, to fundraise, build and test a ‘Geographic Emergency Response Vehicle’ (Geo ERV) for use in mainly New Orleans and the southern coastline. The project will be accomplished in Partnership with the University of New Orleans. A manager is needed for the project, preferably a recent retiree, with long term sales and marketing experience. There are three other technical positions also available. Read the rest of this entry »
Ken Banks’s interview with Erik from White African through Skype is now available. White African is a popular blog on Africa and technology. The interview is available here.