by Mark Glaser
MediaShift

Perhaps some day in the not so distant future, every person on the planet who has a cell phone camera will be able to snap a photo of a newsworthy event happening in front of them and easily send it to a web clearinghouse of such news images. That’s the dream of Erik Sundelof (pictured at left), a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University, a program that aims to develop technology to advance humanitarian goals in underserved communities.

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2006 Fellow Robert Maranga was featured in Red Herring magazine as one of six “Unselfish Technologists”. Read the rest of this entry »

by Paul John Lamb
CommonDreams.org

How we can we meaningfully connect bleeding edge technology with bleeding heart activism to influence positive social change? And how can we identify and support high-impact, scaleable projects that percolate from the grass roots upward?

These questions were on the minds of a diverse crowd of foundation representatives, nonprofit leaders, technology companies and techies that attended the Innovation Funders Network summit in San Francisco last week. Sponsored by the Community Technology Foundation of California, the summit highlighted a number of cutting-edge tools and services, and invited the attendees to engage in targeted discussions around the theme of ‘networks, innovation, and social change’.

The group endeavored to look beyond the typical top-down technology solutions to pressing human, environmental and social issues that too often have met with failure. For example, does anyone remember a program called PowerUP that was launched by AOL and Gateway in 2000? Announced with great fanfare on the heels of Colin Powell’s America’s Promise initiative, the program promised to provide $10 Million in seed funding, free computers and software, and volunteer tutors to 5,000 after school programs serving poor Americans. Today a Google search on ‘PowerUP’ will lead you to a variety of fine commercial retailers of power products and services. Suffice it to say the ‘PowerUP’ has long since powered down.

Having learned some valuable lessons on how not to leverage technology for the social good, many capable entrepreneurs, techies and activists have launched an impressive array of projects in recent years. Just check out some of the wonderful efforts spearheaded by benetech.org or those being initiated by a group of global social entrepreneurs at Stanford University’s Digital Vision Program. Even a book on technology for social change has just hit the shelves, authored by former Soros Foundation Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Peizer.

But despite significant progress made as heads and hearts collide, there still exists a significant disconnect between technologists and social activists. A prime example is the open source movement, which is having trouble translating the promise it offers nonprofit organizations and the everyman into a language and actual services that they can understand. A large part of the problem is that many tech geeks lack street credibility and the activists and people on the ground are unable to communicate in geekspeak. When translators with great ideas do emerge from either group or from the middle ground, these ‘technivists’ often lack the funding resources and marketing apparatus to bring their ideas to scale.

Perhaps there is something we can do about bringing the worlds of the bleeding edge and the bleeding hearts closer together in a meaningful way? Here are a few ideas:

1. Bleed together: Organize intensive training sessions that bring together community-based activists and social leaders (with little or no tech experience) with technology/innovation activists and bleeding edge techies. Part of the training would introduce the social sector folks to the latest technology tools and potential applications, and another part would further sensitize the techies to community and social issues. Toward the end of the ‘Bleeding Edge Meets the Bleeding Hearts’ summit, collaborative groups would emerge to develop specific project ideas and then present those ideas directly to funders for financial commitments.

2. Support the small ‘technivist’ in a big way: Create a think and do tank that brings together teams of talented social entrepreneurs with policy experts and funders to address major social and economic issues. Instead of the usual small-scale support for piecemeal projects that are difficult to scale, why not offer an independent environment where professional teams focus on large scale social issues and offer large scale solutions - and have access to significant funding support needed to operationalize these solutions. The Gates Foundation is pursuing this strategy successfully in the area of public health and disease. Why can’t it be done in other social arenas as well?

3. Establish an annual ‘gadgets for good’ exhibition. How about an alternative to the Consumer Electronics Show and the MacWorld expo - a Social Electronics Show that features gadgetry and tech stuff that actually matters? At a minimum, we need the organizers of these and other tech extravaganzas to put aside a little money to support a social electronics exhibition at their own events? That way at least the do-gooders can get some residual press coverage and lure potential investors.

We can do better at combining the cool with the good, the geek with the meek. But the best innovations for social change will happen only when people across the political, economic, and social spectrum agree on a clear need and come together to do something about it. Technology is the easy part.

Consultant Paul Lamb is a founder of streettech.org and a Fellow with the Community Technology Foundation of California. You can reach him at pauljlamb@gmail.com.

By John Markoff
The New York Times, Business/Financial Desk
Published: January 30, 2006

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 29 — It sounds like a project that just about any technology-minded executive could get behind: distributing durable, cheap laptop computers in the developing world to help education. But in the year since Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, unveiled his prototype for a $100 laptop, he has found himself wrestling with Microsoft and the politics of software.

Mr. Negroponte has made significant progress, but he has also catalyzed the debate over the role of computing in poor nations — and ruffled a few feathers. He failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on including its Windows software in the laptop, leading Microsoft executives to start discussing what they say is a less expensive alternative: turning a specially configured cellular phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, demonstrated a mockup of his proposed cellular PC at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, and he mentioned it as a cheaper alternative to traditional PC’s and laptops during a public discussion here at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Craig J. Mundie, Microsoft’s vice president and chief technology officer, said in an interview here that the company was still developing the idea, but that both he and Mr. Gates believed that cellphones were a better way than laptops to bring computing to the masses in developing nations. “Everyone is going to have a cellphone,” Mr. Mundie said, noting that in places where TV’s are already common, turning a phone into a computer could simply require adding a cheap adaptor and keyboard. Microsoft has not said how much those products would cost.

Mr. Mundie said there was no firm timing for the cellphone strategy, but that the company had encouraged such innovations in the past by building prototypes for consumer electronics manufacturers.

It is not clear to what extent Mr. Negroponte’s decision to use free open-source software in the laptop instead of Windows spurred the alternative plan from Microsoft. But Mr. Gates has been privately bitter about it, and Mr. Mundie has been skeptical in public about the project’s chance of success.

“I love what Nick is trying to do,” Mr. Mundie said. “We have a lot of concerns about the sustainability of his approach.”

This has not deterred Mr. Negroponte. At a private breakfast meeting on the digital divide at the forum on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte said that he had a commitment from Quanta Computer of Taiwan to manufacture the portable computers, which would initially use a processing chip from Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, Calif. He also said he had raised $20 million to pay for engineering and was close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations — Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina — to purchase seven million of the laptops.

Also on Saturday, Mr. Negroponte’s nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations Development Program at a news conference here, under which the two will work together to develop technology and learning resources.

Mr. Negroponte is showing only a mockup of his laptop, which will have a carrying handle, built-in stereo speakers, a wireless data connection, a hand crank to generate power and a screen that is visible even in bright sunlight. He said that he hoped to be able to hand out working laptops to some participants at the forum in Davos next year.

He also acknowledged that months of discussions with Microsoft and Apple Computer about using their operating system software for his computer had been fruitless, and that as a result, the laptops would use a version of Linux, the open-source operating system.

According to several people familiar with the discussions, Microsoft had encouraged Mr. Negroponte to consider using the Windows CE version of its software, and Microsoft had been prepared to make an open-source version of the program available.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, had also offered a free version of his company’s OS X operating system, but Mr. Negroponte rejected that idea because the software was largely not open-source, meaning users could not get free access to software and its source code, which they could then modify. Mr. Negroponte said in an interview here that he had resolved to use Linux not because it was free but because of its quality and maintainability.

“I chose open-source because it’s better,” he said. “I have 100 million programmers I can rely on.”

At the same time, Mr. Negroponte, who is on the board of the Motorola Corporation, said he was not opposed to the idea of building a low-cost computer using a cellphone. He said his research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab had experimented with the idea of a cellphone that would project a computer display onto a wall and also project the image of a keyboard, sensing the motion of fingers over it. But the researchers decided the idea was less practical than a laptop.

Some business and development policy specialists have raised questions about Mr. Negroponte’s laptop, pointing to the price of Internet connectivity, which can cost $24 to $50 a month in developing nations. But Mr. Negroponte said networking costs would not be an obstacle because the laptops would be made to connect automatically in a so-called mesh network, making it possible for up to 1,000 computers to wirelessly share just one or two land-based Internet connections.

The Media Lab researchers are also planning to approach an upcoming meeting of the international consortium overseeing G.S.M., or global system for mobile communications, for cellular phones about setting up a data standard that would allow low-cost and educational use of wireless network capacity.

“We call the concept ’standby bits,’ ” Mr. Negroponte said, explaining that the concept was similar to the way standby passengers on airlines can travel when there are empty seats. The laptops would send and receive Internet data only when higher-paying commercial data was not being transmitted.

At the Davos meeting, a number of participants raised questions about the wisdom of Mr. Negroponte’s plan to persuade governments to underwrite the cost of the laptops.

Stuart Gannes, director of the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, said a better way to bring computers into poor countries would be to put them into the hands of entrepreneurs and make them revenue generators. “We need to look at technology as a way to bring cash into the poorest communities,” Mr. Gannes said.

Mr. Negroponte said that “a lot of people were apprehensive” about the project before he won the backing from Quanta, but that he believed he had put the doubts to rest. Quanta manufactures about one-third of the world’s laptop computers, he said.

By L. A. Chung
Mercury News

What happens when a New York media organization specializing in “women’s news'’ wants to make its first West Coast foray to meet supporters? It gets Margarita Quihuis, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, to make the introduction.

“In many parts of the world the news, `It’s a girl!’ is met with disappointment,'’ Quihuis said to guests at the evening reception honoring Bay Area women in San Francisco Thursday night. She said the reason she joined the board of the non-profit online news service, Women’s eNews, was that it provides the opportunity to put issues overlooked by other media on the national agenda.

“We can’t solve problems unless we know they exist, we can’t manage what we don’t know, we can’t solve what we don’t know,'’ she said, sounding for a moment like the Stanford engineer she was trained to be.

Fostering entrepreneurs

Quihuis sees connections between the work of the news service and the work that has interested her in the past several years — private equity, incubation, wealth creation, and now international development. Quihuis is a Stanford-educated petroleum engineer and a venture capitalist, the first in her working-class Mexican-American family to go to college.

As the founding director of the Women’s Technology Cluster, she helped female entrepreneurs raise capital. Now a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford, she is developing a project to foster entrepreneurship with the profits generated by remittance services — patronized by Mexican immigrants who send money home.

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By Robert Mullins
Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal

Queen Isabela I of Spain originally rejected Christopher Columbus’ pitch for venture capital to fund his three-ship expedition in 1492. But after her accountant told her the amount requested was no more than what the kingdom would spend to entertain a visiting dignitary for a week, Isabela relented and gave Columbus 2,000 maravedis in A round funding.

Columbus’ trip lead to the discovery of the New World, generating an incalculable rate of return on Isabela’s original investment.

“Yes, the first venture capitalist was a Latina,” said Marcela Davison Aviles, of San Jose, founder of the Isabela Project, a program to give today’s Latino entrepreneurs a better chance at landing venture capital in Silicon Valley.

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By Kendal Madden
Stanford Report

“When the relief workers arrive after a disaster, what is the first thing they need?” asked Dipak Basu, a Reuters Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Vision Program, at a campus forum on disaster relief on April 22. “Communications,” he answered. “They need a way to talk with the rest of the world, to request supplies and to let the world know what is going on.”

Basu and two other engineers participated in a panel discussion on the technological responses and challenges that followed the December 2004 tsunami disaster in Asia. All three men have extensive background working with international development organizations to bring crucial technology to the developing world. The discussion was moderated by Leonard Ortolano, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Haas Center for Public Service. The event, held at the Haas Center, was the third in a series of panels on post-tsunami reconstruction called “After the Waves.” The series is hosted by the Haas Center, Engineers for a Sustainable World and Stanford Student Relief.

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By Njideka Ugwuegbu Harry
Community Technology Review

The Owerri Digital Village is a paradigm community technology and learning center, the first of its kind in West Africa, serving rural people between ages 8 and 25. Many of these young people come from low-income farming communities, are unemployed, and in some cases have low educational achievement. The Owerri Digital Village is an extended learning model bridging the technology, gender, education and community divides. YTF programs are focused on youth as they are quick learners, community catalysts, and have the longest productivity horizon; YTF has designed technology programs to improve the economic, educational and social status of program participants.

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By David R. Baker
San Francisco Chronicle

Picture landing in a remote stretch of Sumatra ravaged by last month’s tsunami, your ship or plane loaded with medicine or food for survivors.

You’re ready to help, but you’re not sure where all the hospitals and health clinics are. You don’t know which roads are passable and which have been washed out. You can’t find all the refugee camps scattered along the coast. And the camps, clinics and blocked roads don’t show up on any standard map.

A project hatched at Stanford University may be able to help.

Called Global MapAid, the effort builds maps of disaster zones or other areas where international aid agencies work. With a combination of handheld computers, satellite phones and innovative software, the organization can quickly draft and update maps that show the washed-out roads and altered coastline, the location of aid centers, even areas with contaminated water.

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Twenty-Five Global Innovators Recognized for Work to Use Technology for the Benefit of Humanity

SAN JOSE, California, USA, November 16, 2004 – NetHope, an information technology consortium of fifteen of the world’s leading humanitarian organizations, was one of several organizations honored by The Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity on November 10, 2004. NetHope received the Agilent Equality Award for their use of technology to benefit mankind.

“This award recognizes the impact computers and communications can have in making a significant difference on relief, development and environmental efforts of humanitarian organizations,” said Dipak Basu, Executive Director of NetHope and a Cisco Systems Leadership Fellow. “Our passion is to accelerate and scale the adoption of information technology for humanity, which in turn helps tens of thousands of aid workers in the developing world, and to serve hundreds of thousands if not millions of their beneficiaries.”

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By Kendall Madden
The Stanford Daily

A patient walks into a clinic in a rural town in India, talks to a doctor, receives a diagnosis and a prescription, and leaves the office. Sounds like a normal visit to the doctor, doesn’t it? Except in this case, the doctor is thousands of miles away and conversed with the patient via video camera.

Impossible? Don’t tell that to Stanford doctors.

Rather than traveling around the world to visit patients, American and Indian doctors are hoping to revolutionize medicine in rural areas with a package of technologies known as telemedicine, through which patients correspond with a doctor through videoconferencing, audio communication technology and e-mail.

Doctors are in desperate need in rural areas around the world. In many developing countries, the idea of an accessible general practice doctor is dream — a specialist is even less likely. In rural India, for example, there is one doctor on average for every 15,500 people. Specialists are only found in the metropolitan areas that are not accessible for the majority of the rural population.

Many enterprises are springing up on the basis of new telemedicine technology to alleviate the scarcity of doctors and specialists in these other areas of the world.

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Pingali Rajeswari’s 2001-2002 project, the Digital Dirtbike (or “Computers-on-Wheels for People-Centered Development”), designed and executed by Whipsaw, Inc., was awarded bronze in the 2004 IDEA competition. According to Kristina Goodrich, Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer of the Industrial Designers Society of America, “the Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) is the world’s most prestigious and coveted design accolade.”

By G. Pascal Zachary
Business 2.0

Let’s say a Kenyan immigrant living in the United States wants to surprise his folks 8,000 miles away in Nairobi with something special for the holidays. Cash? That’s easy, but a pretty cold way to say “I miss you.” Store-bought gifts? No surprise there. Hey, how about a 150-lb. sacrificial mbuzi — a live goat? After all, a goat is the ultimate symbol of respect in the Kenyan culture. Just one can feed an extended family, even a small village. His parents can be proud — and enjoy a feast.

But where does a smart shopper go to find just the right goat? Neiman Marcus? The local Piggly Wiggly? Nope, no U.S. company — not even eBay — is set up to ship live goats from one continent to another. No, for quality goats and no shipping costs, go to Mamamikes.com, the website of a three-year-old Nairobi-based service. Place your order, pay by credit card, and the folks back home receive a phone message that their voucher is ready to be picked up at Mama Mikes’s office and redeemed at a local Nairobi farm. The delighted recipient can have a prime mbuzi home the next day.

Economists and entrepreneurs aren’t really in the market for goats — what intrigues them is Mama Mikes’s clever voucher system. The company markets vouchers for everything from groceries and roses to gasoline and doctor’s appointments.

These seemingly unremarkable purchases could soon make remarkable inroads in a giant global market: One in nine U.S. residents were born outside the country, and according to the World Bank, they send home more than $31 billion annually in cash and products. Banks and transfer agents such as Western Union and MoneyGram charge commissions of 10 to 20 percent on cash transactions. But Mama Mikes charges simple flat fees — $4.99 or $9.99 — on purchases of any size. That creates plenty of incentive for emigres to buy goods and services rather than send home cash.

American companies have so far left this emerging field to foreigners. A service similar to Mama Mikes caters to Nepalese living in the United States. Another concentrates on Ethiopians. But Americans are bound to pick up on the trend. “Won’t Western Union have to deliver goods to Africa someday?” asks Kuria Githiora, a teacher in Michigan who hails from Kenya and spends about $500 a year with Mama Mikes. Western Union — with 188,000 outlets aound the world — says it’s watching this new market evolve. But at $99 per mbuzi, maybe not for long.

By Jessica Wang
The Stanford Daily

Mexico’s Institute for Telecommunications (INTTELMEX) will sponsor two scholarships for the next school year. These scholarships will allow two technological professionals from a Latin American country to take part in Stanford’s Digital Vision Fellowships.

Stuart Gannes, director of the Digital Vision Fellowship Program, said that the new scholarships will provide the financial resources necessary for applicants from Latin America to participate in the program.

For the full text of this article, click here.

by Mohammed Abdoolcarim
The Stanford Daily

Imagine a “smart card” that can track information using a Web-enabled central database. This may seem like a gadget Safeway would use to track your grocery shopping. Or perhaps, a way American Express could learn about your buying habits to cater credit card plans for your shopping needs. But not if this smart card is part of the Digital Vision Fellowship, which allows working professionals to utilize technology in innovative ways.

In this case the smart card is being used to track the date of immunizations in a child’s life in India. Health assistants could then monitor the weekly coverage and identify drug inventory and gaps in treatment.

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By Srikumar Bondyopadhyay
The Financial Express

Today deprivation is not only about lack of food, clothing, shelter and healthcare, but also about information and knowledge gap. In fact, bridging the gap can help one in overcoming the other shortcomings, too.

This is what the inhabitants in seven remote villages adjoining Parvathapur in draught-prone Mahbubnagar district in Andhra Pradesh are banking on. It depends upon the recently launched Computer-On-Wheels for People-Centred Development (COW) project evolving into a self-sustaining, enterprise model after its trial phase, though.

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By Jon Fortt
Mercury News

Brij Kothari was watching a subtitled film for a Spanish class seven years ago when he had an epiphany: Words on a television screen might help millions of people in his native India learn to read better.

Kothari’s idea — stripping subtitles along the bottom of popular Bollywood Indian music videos — was enough to earn him a nomination for the third annual Tech Museum Awards, which were presented at a gala Wednesday night in San Jose. Research has suggested that the Hindi-subtitled music videos improve the reading skills of barely literate viewers.

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By Lisa Tsering
India-West

In Rajasthan, a rural woman crafts a brightly colored, handmade cotton quilt in return for a handful of rupees. Half a world away in a high-end store, the same quilt is sold for $150. How fair is that?

A San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur — unhappy at the way the global supply chain puts more money into the pockets of middlemen than the craftspeople themselves — is betting that shoppers will try a new system that funnels profits straight back into India’s villages and communities.

With Sanjay Bhargava’s novel business plan, buyers in America can get the exact same quilt for only $65 (a portion of which is even tax-deductible), while the craftspeople earn more than twice as much income for their work.

Bhargava calls his social entrepreneurship project SuVyapar (”good trade” in Hindi). SuVyapar “connects these rural artisans and their communities to the enormous American consumer market through an innovative process that reduces friction in the entire logistics and marketing chain,” states the company’s business plan.

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By Madhavi Devasher
The Stanford Daily

SuVyapar, a new social entrepreneurial project launched this year at Stanford, aims to create an innovative business model that helps the developing world.

The project was founded by Stanford Reuters Digital Vision Fellow Sanjay Bhargava, who has worked with companies such as Citibank and was one of the founding members of PayPal.

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By Mercy Wambui
Development Gateway

They arrive from all walks of life with one purpose — to dedicate their creative energies to the ICT-based project ideas they have a passion for. Not surprisingly, the fellows leave with more than they bargained for — interaction with cutting-edge Silicon Valley technologists and entrepreneurs; the experience of soaking up the prestigious Stanford University environment; and collegial relationships that will no doubt last a long time.

The Digital Vision Program was launched in October 2001 with five fellows in the inaugural class. The current 13 fellows who are nearing the end of the sabbatical have been hard at work, applying vision and talent to innovative applications of technology relevant to countries such as Brazil, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Peru, and India. The program has gained a lot of attention from both the IT industry and foundations. Applicants for 2003-2004 include individuals from 41 nations and a wide range of companies and organizations, including Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Bechtel, Mitsubishi Electric, the United Nations, and the World Bank.

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