b l a s t u l a reblog++

A green design competition turns up some great new ideas

by Pete Davies

I love gadgets, and I’m obsessed with things that help to increase energy efficiency. So when the two come together, I’m a very happy camper.

This will explain why I’m so excited about the second Greener Gadgets Design Competition that is currently running online. You can view the shortlist and vote for your favorites to make the shortlist that will appear for live judging at the Greener Gadgets Conference later this month.

My favorites:

• 

  The Power-Hog

  is basically a mini coin-operated meter that needs feeding before you can turn on the TV or the Wii. A great idea for teaching kids (and adults) to think about the costs of using appliances and gadgets.

Check out the rest of the shortlist and don’t forget to vote!

This piece originally appeared on The TerraPass Footprint

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Emerging Technologies at 12:50 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

Earlier this week, Google.org announced plans to develop a personal energy metering tool that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. The PowerMeter “will show consumers their electricity consumption in near real-time in a secure iGoogle Gadget,” according to the organization’s website.

Google believes consumers have a right to detailed information about their home energy use, and that real-time energy information could help people make smarter choices that will save them energy and money:

Our lack of knowledge about our own energy usage is a huge problem, but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and fight global warming by reducing our power usage. Studies show that people save 5-15% of their energy costs when they have access to information about their energy consumption.

Over the next three years, with support from the Obama Administration’s proposed stimulus package, more than 40 million U.S. homes are set to receive smart meters. But many currently available smart meters do not display information to the consumer, which Google states is “unacceptable:”

We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see it, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it.

The organization is currently testing the software with Google employees and seeking out utilities and smart energy device makers to partner with. When PowerMeter is released, the tool will be free and is rumored to be based on an open source model.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Emerging Technologies at 12:41 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Sarah Kuck


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Sarah Kuck from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation

By Erica Lee Schlaikjer

With about 300 million people living below the poverty line in China, microfinance — most commonly defined as small loans for impoverished individuals to help them achieve financial self-sufficiency — is an attractive option.

Wokai.org, “a capital-contributing microfinance intermediary,” is trying to bring money to Chinese entrepreneurs who want to set up their own small businesses, like dumpling shops, fruit and veggie stands and animal husbandry operations.

Wokai, which means “I start” in Chinese, fosters entrepreneurship and fights poverty by raising loan capital online from individual contributors for microfinance institutions (MFIs) in China. Its goal is to expand financial opportunities for the country’s poor (and mostly rural) population. Though its primary goal is fundraising, Wokai also provides “capacity building” for microfinance organizations, which can mean anything from emotional support for first-time borrowers to computer training for loan managers.

When Wokai launches its new website in mid-November, it’s going to be like Facebook, Kiva and Wikipedia combined, says 24-year-old Courtney McColgan, one of the co-founders.

“While we are a fundraising platform, we’re also an information platform, and we’re building a community around China microfinance in the United States,” McColgan says. She started the Internet-based nonprofit in the fall of 2006 with fellow American Casey Wilson. The two met while studying advanced Chinese at Tsinghua University, and since then, they have set up Wokai’s headquarters in Beijing and established three U.S. chapters: Seattle, San Francisco and New York. For now, they’re still recruiting a replenishable stream of interns and volunteers to help raise awareness about microfinance in China, as well as research potential lenders and set fundraising goals.

How does it all work? According to the website,

Wokai partners with local MFIs which identify and screen potential microentrepreneur clients. Selected clients are then posted on the Wokai website through profiles that outline their business ventures and loan request. Contributors browse these profiles, select who and how much to finance, and then transfer money to Wokai through our online payment system. Once funds are transferred, Wokai distributes this loan capital to partner MFIs for allocation to microentrepreneurs. At the end of the loan cycle, partner MFIs collect loan repayments and re-issue loans.

So it’s kind of an online recycler of microfinance loans: your contribution gets used multiple times to help more than one person. The average Wokai loan is about $300, which is usually paid back between six months and one year. McColgan says there is a high success rate of repayment.

Wokai was set up as an “intermediary” because of legal and governmental restrictions in China. As McColgan says, “[MFIs] are not illegal, but they’re not legal,” so they’re not given an official status. In other words, they’re “under the black curtain.” As a result, MFIs cannot mobilize funds through savings deposits and active and capital markets. And grants quickly drain away because of operational inefficiencies and a lack of support after an initial fundraising period. That said, Wokai connects with local “field partners”–based on certain criteria–to allocate the funds to Chinese borrowers.

“Our job is to raise money abroad, bring it in, and funnel it through their system and give contributors the opportunity to see that people can pay loans in China,” McColgan says.

And that’s where the Internet social networking microfinance mash-up concept comes into play. Wokai will be similar to Kiva in that it highlights the individual aspect of microfinance by featuring profiles of both entrepreneurs and lenders to facilitate face-to-face engagement; in other words, it’ll empower users to pick and choose where their money’s going. Also, it’ll be like Facebook because users can network with each other, start discussions and share content. And, finally, it’ll be like Wikipedia because volunteers will edit and translate English content into Chinese in order to create a fully bi-lingual platform, catered to field partners in China, as well as U.S. chapter staff.

Currently, the nonprofit is fundraising for $50,000 to cover operational costs through April, which will include the costs of training, evaluating and coordinating with its field partners in China, as well as paying its staff and rent. To listen to a 5-minute podcast with the co-founders, click here.

Erica Lee Schlaikjer is the founder of ResponsibleChina.com, a blog about environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship in Greater China. She is based in Chicago. Email her erica@responsiblechina.com.

Photo credits: Wokai.org

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Socially Responsible Investment at 10:16 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

Is there value in knowledge for the sake of knowledge? My gut says “of course,” but when the question comes down to dollars and cents – and it does, in the case of funding for arts, science, and other often intangible cultural resources — it’s helpful to have a more practical argument on hand.

I thought about this issue a lot last weekend, when I traveled to North America’s epicenter of livable density to attend a sold-out screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The film was The Atom Smashers, a documentary about Illinois-based Fermilab and the international race to discover the Higgs boson. The film was produced by Andrew Suprenant at Chicago-based nonprofit 137 Films (COI: several members of the 137 team are good friends of mine).

The documentary does a thorough job of explaining the heady topic of atomic physics (with the help of smart line-drawing animations) and humanizing the scientists, who take tango lessons, raise kids and nurture dreams of rockstardom when not scrutinizing data in pursuit of the Higgs. The Fermilab physicists work with the Tevatraon, a four-mile ring equipped with high-charged magnets (and a comic-book-worthy name). The Tevatron accelerates infinitely small atomic particles to high speeds and then crashes them into one another so that they break apart, allowing the scientists to peek at what’s inside … and search for anything that they’re not expecting to see. What gives the story its drama is that as the Fermilab scientists are continuing their decades-old search, the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is building and readying its Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that’s bigger, more modern and more powerful than the Tevatron. Once CERN begins to operate the LHC, the Fermilab team admits it’s unlikely they will be able to keep up.

What happens if they find the Higgs? Well, as the theory goes, the Higgs is the missing link that gives clusters of protons, neutrons and electrons the quality of mass … thus enabling life to exist as we know it. So if they find the Higgs, they get to understand one key foundational truth of the universe. And the United States gets to claim that ours was the first nation to know.

But is that enough? The Higgs is not the cure for cancer. It won’t bring clean water to impoverished populations in developing countries. It’s pure understanding for the sake of understanding. And as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that it’s difficult to set a budget for deep knowledge of the universe.

In recent years, the Fermilab physicists have watched their funding drop by hundreds of millions, as science funding in the United States was cut dramatically. In one interview during the film, experimental physicist Sheldon Stone (co-chair of the terminated Fermilab BTeV experiment) is concerned about the future of scientific discovery in general:

“We’ve had colleagues in Australia who are getting a lot of the grad students who used to apply to the U.S. The number of grad student applications to physics to the U.S. is going down dramatically. They’re going to other places in the world. Because other places in the world are investing in science.”

Stone, of course, had a personal interest at stake. But interviewee Natalie Angier, a science journalist for the New York Times, put the topic in a larger context that I think brings it closer to home:

I’ve talked to scientists who said when they were young, back in the 50s and 60s, science was seen as something “ooh, cool!” You know, you were, maybe, OK you were a little geeky, but you were cool! Because there was the space race, there was a lot going on, the future was beckoning, you had these world’s fairs, everyone was so excited — and that’s sort of gone away. And science is not seen as something that’s drawing the best minds. And why should it? Because if you become a scientist in this society, it guarantees you total obscurity!

As directors Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown told the audience after the screening, the process of making of the film brought together two seemingly different constituencies – scientists and artists. These are groups who constantly have their hand out to donors, governments and institutional funders because their work simply doesn’t often earn enough money on its own. Some art, of course (like the most recent Batman), and some science (like the chemistry keeping my cereal crunchy in milk) earns plenty of dollars. But one question that’s worth asking is, what would the world be like if culture was a free market, and the less practical contributions to these liberal fields simply couldn’t fight hard enough to continue to be produced? And why are scientists — who, in my opinion, are part of our front lines in the most challenging crisis our planet has ever faced — rewarded with so little attention?

The documentary looks at the issue from a national standpoint, homed in primarily on this local story. But it made me think, and it’s worth saying especially in these scary economic times, that this is an important issue to examine and re-examine at the local, regional, national and global levels. What resources are important to us … and what secrets are worth the quest for understanding? It’ll be interesting to see what comes first: an answer to the Higgs theory, or a renewed pride in American science.

The Atom Smashers will be broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens on November 25. Details here.

Photos courtesy of 137 Films.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Features at 5:05 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Julia Levitt


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Julia Levitt from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

I wouldn’t consider myself a tree hugger or environmentalist by any means. However I do see their point. I bent my bike tire the other day and when I had it fixed I discovered it was twenty dollars cheaper to buy an entirely new bike. Oh, speaking of bikes and natural resources, I don’t ride mine these days for the exercise.

This waste is affecting business as well but going green isn’t the only problem keeping CEOs up at night. The list also includes:
1-    Boomers retiring, leaving an inexperienced group to take over the business
2-    Hard competition to attract and retain the new Net Gen
3-    “The need for speed”. Companies are seeking to innovate to stay ahead
4-    The need for trained workers quickly

The Eco-Patent Commons initiative that Dan Herman highlighted earlier this week demonstrates another example of businesses opening up to the masses. Crowd sourcing has leveled the playing field in research and development demonstrating that ideas don’t just come from specialists and experts. In fact, in greenbiz Julie Sammons highlights a few more initiatives that are tapping into a younger crowd.

Schools like the Presidio School of Management that has interdisciplinary teams of students work with business to solve problems. From their website: The Better World Project’s mission is: to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits you, your community and millions of people around the world.

What better way to attract the Net Gen then to involve them and give them a cause? Interdisciplinary teams create innovation and break through silos. Project oriented curriculum keeps students interested and gives them experience. Empower the younger crowd and somehow technology will find its way into the project.
What kind of internship program or other student programs does your company maintain? What are the students doing? What kind of relationships do you have with the local universities? To investigate this further the article gives some other valuable resources:  U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, the business portal for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and Net Impact, the professional association for socially-minded MBAs.

I’ll end with this: my university flew me out to talk with executives on Wall Street. At one of the huge Investment banks we visited they explained to us that around 80% of their interns were hired upon graduating. What does that mean? Probably an even higher portion came back asking them for a job. In the competition for talent collaboration is vital. Think about it.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Caleb Love


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 2:51AM

Originally by Caleb Love from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 4:51am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

A few months ago I wrote about the mobile banking solutions I found while travelling in Africa – essentially a series of PayPal-like systems for mobile users. Given the limited nature of financial services in the region, and the overall paucity of infrastructure, these innovations make sense.

But do they make sense in more developed markets? That’s still very unclear.

RBC (Royal Bank of Canada for non-Canadians) recently rolled out a trial for their own mobile banking solution. RBC Mobex is billed as an “innovative payment solution designed for use with your existing mobile phone to make life more convenient for you. Just imagine, you already use your mobile phone to access friends, family, work and play: now you can use it to access your money too. Use it when you don’t have cash in your wallet, there isn’t an ATM nearby or cheques and/or debit / credit cards are not accepted forms of payment.”

The value of such systems comes with scale. I may want to pay someone using this system but if the receiver isn’t signed up then I can’t. And getting this scale isn’t necessarily easy. Projections for the growth of the mobile banking section range from the objective to the fantastic:

• Gartner has forecast that there will be 33 million mobile payment users worldwide in 2008, with the Asia Pacific taking the lead. Gartner expects this number to triple to 103.9 million users in 2011.
• IMS Research sees the combination of contactless mobile payments, mobile banking and over-the-air payments pushing the number of mobile banking users to 884 million in 2012.
• And finally, Juniper Research predicts said in April that 816 million consumers will use mobile devices for banking services by 2011.

So somewhere between 100 million and 1 billion people will be using these platforms by 2011… helpful.

Perhaps more interesting is the geography of usage, this from Gartner’s research on the topic: “Asia Pacific has the most mobile payment users with a projected 28 million users in 2008, accounting for 85 per cent of the worldwide total. Western Europe is expected to have 499,000 users in 2008, and North America is projected to have one million users.”

While there are certainly markets in Asia / Pacific whose usage and demand for such solutions stem from infrastructural deficiencies (for example, India and China), other markets such as Japan and South Korea are big users despite having dominant bricks-and-mortars financial services players. So what makes them want such services? This links back to Naumi’s recent post on why North American consumers seem to demand less than their East Asian bretheren. Perhaps we’re just technology luddites, satisfied with what serves our needs, and less willing to try new services that, while cool, may or may not add value to current activities.

And within that lies a much deeper cultural and sociological analysis of what makes different people tick - and the subseqent incentives for companies to innovate for them. Has the East Asian model of state-driven development embedded a greater sense of confidence or trust amongst people,  or perhaps even a  greater willingness to fail given the backing of the welfare state? And conversely has a more free-market oriented system which pushes competition and failure actually produced a populace that desires stability rather than constant change?

I’m full of questions rather than answers but nonetheless it would make for an interesting thesis on the link between the path of economic development and the subsequent impacts on culture and innovation.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Dan Herman


reBlogged

on Sep 26, 2008, 3:08PM

Originally by Dan Herman from Wikinomics on September 26, 2008, 5:08pm

Posted under reblog innovation

Talk one of four at PICNIC was a small seminar for the European Journalism Center. Their part of the PICNIC experience was hosted in a geodesic dome tent within the “club” - the noisy public space where attendees are eating, drinking and having fun. So it felt a bit like giving a seminar in the anteroom of a dance club… not the easiest experience.

The talk after mine came from the founder of Zemanta, Jure Cuhalev, an interesting plugin for bloggers. You install Zemanta on your browser, it watches what you’re writing as you author a blogpost, and it sends your text to a server, which does natural language processing analysis, and suggests videos, photos, hyperlinks and tags for your content. The media suggestions appear in a window, and you can drag and drop them into your post - they’ll appear with appropriate attribution, ensuring that you follow the “rules of the road” of the internet. Related articles can optionally show up in a section at the end of a post, and the page will be tagged for optimum findability from search engines.

I love the idea - and especially some of the features, like entity extraction. When I type a name - Jure Cuhalev - I’m usually going to look up that name on the web and link to that person’s webpage or blog - Zemanta promises to this automatically. Looking forward to trying it out on my blog soon. And here’s a good video from G4’s attack of the show which introduces the tool.

Chatting with a journalist after my talk, I ended up showing up late for Adam Greenfield’s talk, coming in for one of his more gruesome examples. Adam’s specialty is ubiquitous computing, and he’s done great work thinking about what happens when computation makes it into every aspect of our lived environment. This ubiquitization happens a little bit at a time. In European cities, it’s become common to fence off spaces with retractable bollards - metal posts that rise out of the ground to block spaces to unauthorized traffic. When an RFID-enabled vehicle with the right permissions passes by, the bollard retracts and gives one access to a street.

When a system like this crashes, things go badly wrong. Adam shows an example of a car - properly authorized - which was assaulted by a misfiring bollard, killing a passenger. “Who do you call for tech support when a system like this fails?”

As we transform our urban spaces, we’re starting to see spaces that are “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery“. Here Adam is borrowing terminology from Steven Flusty at USC. Stealthy spaces can’t be found; slippery ones can’t be reached. Prickly spaces can’t be occupied comfortably; crusty ones are armored and can’t be entered. Jittery may be the most interesting to Adam - they can’t be used without being under surveillance.

map from cabspotting.org

He adds “foggy” to this list of spaces - spaces that can’t be mapped - they don’t exist on your GPS, you can’t plot routes to them. This may become increasingly important as we start visualizing urban spaces in terms of data, offering a network overlay to help us understand our places better. These overlays might look like the map of San Francisco drawn by GPS in taxi cabs. Or a map using Zillo’s information of real estate value. Increasingly, we’ve got information about a place in that place, made local and actionable. We might choose how we move through a city based on the air quality of the areas we plan through, or the traffic we might encounter. “Networked overlay closes the loop, changing how we interact with urban space.”

As spaces become addressable, scriptable and queryable, we can start doing very weird things. What happens when billboards in Times Square start warning individual pedestrians that they need to catch a cab right now if they want to make their flight to Jamaica. Or letting you know that the NYPD knows that that guy is carrying a gun, and that they’re watching him. “I don’t expect these spaces to be pleasant,” he tells us, but they’re coming.

The more hopeful version is a world in which we move from browse urbanism to search urbanism, where we find ways to reach out to the different experiences waiting out there in the city.

I’m not really doing Adam’s work justice here - I’d recommend reading his blog for lots more of this stuff.

My friend Bruno Giussani leads a session introducing nominees to win the Picnic Green Challenge. This is a big prize, funded by the NL Postcode Lottery, and awards 500,000€ to the winning project. Out of 235 nominees, we see four finalists:

routeRANK - a website that looks for the best travel route, both in terms of time and environmental impact.

Greensulate - an insulation that works like extruded foam, but is grown on locally available byproducts, like rice and cottonseed hulls. The result is like styrofoam but produced with a far lower carbon footprint.

Smart Screen - a window glass that reflects solar energy away from warm spaces and opens to absorb solar energy in warm spaces.

Veranda Solar - Easy to install solar panels that sit on your windowsill and plug into existing electric outlets.

We’ll know in a few hours who wins the big prize - I’m pulling for Veranda, because I want to buy some of those as soon as they’re available.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent blog, My Heart’s In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 2:02 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by Ethan Zuckerman


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ethan Zuckerman from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Robert Katz in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Jessica Flannery is, in many ways, an accidental entrepreneur. Had she not met a guy named Matt at a DC conference in 1999, the entire enterprise she's known for (Kiva.org) might not exist today. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Jessica for an interview on Thursday here at Pop!Tech 2007, where she agreed to share many of the other fortunate "accidents" that have marked her journey.

The best part about interviewing someone like Jessica Flannery is that I don’t have to tell and re-tell the Kiva story. After all, NextBillion.net was one of the first web sites or blogs to even talk about Kiva, the peer-to-peer microfinance web site that Jessica co-founded with her husband, Matt (ok, that’s a smidge of story, I admit). What’s more, Sara Standish – a former NextBillion writer and current MBA candidate – conducted a long interview with Kiva principals including Matt, Premal Shah, and Krista Van Lewen. And Kiva has been featured in a slew of mainstream media – from Newsweek to BusinessWeek to Oprah to NPR.

Since the basic story of Kiva is well known, Jessica and I decided to focus our conversation on some of the lesser-known aspects of her journey and the business it has spawned.

A special thanks to Jessica Flannery and to the Pop!Tech press folks, who helped make this interview happen.

Rob Katz: Why did you take two years away from Kiva to attend business school?

Jessica Flannery, Kiva.org: To be honest with you, it’s the result of timing more than anything. When I applied to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford in 2005, I was working at the school and Matt was full-time with TiVo. Kiva was just a nights and weekends projects. We started it with 7 businesses that I met in Uganda and $3100 that we raised through friends – and we raised it by spamming our wedding list.

So in the fall of 2005, I entered business school. About two months later, we got slammed on the blogosphere – mostly through NextBillion, Worldchanging, and BoingBoing – and Kiva took off. I was in the middle of my first semester, but I strongly considered leaving school. After all, Kiva was a dream for me. After conversations with professors and administrators at Stanford, and long talks with Matt, we decided that I would stay in school and Matt would quit TiVo to concentrate full-time on Kiva.

RK: Why Matt, and not you?

JF: I admit that it didn’t necessarily make economic sense. Matt was earning a paycheck, while I was costing money in terms of tuition and living expenses while at school. But fundamentally, Matt is a true visionary – which makes him better suited to run a high ceiling social enterprise like Kiva. And on a practical level, Matt could program the alpha and beta versions of the web site, while I couldn’t.

Ultimately, my decision to stay in school was a good one. After all, there’s no better place to be while starting something than business school. Stanford’s community of students, professors, and outside experts provided a great test bed in which Matt and I could develop and grow Kiva. It also took over six months – from November 2005 to April 2006 for Kiva’s platform and deal flow to be sufficient to support us. By April 2006, I was nearly finished with my first year of business school. So from both the theoretical and practical side, my staying in business school was definitely the right choice for me, and the right choice for Kiva.

RK: You have a bachelor’s degree in English and a passion for international development. Why did you go to business school in the first place?

JF: Honestly, I happened into business school. To understand how I ended up at Stanford, you first have to understand how I ended up in California – and that goes back to 1999. In 1999, while a senior at Bucknell University, I attended an interfaith conference in Washington, DC, where I met a really nice guy named Matt. We stayed in touch throughout the year, and when I graduated from Bucknell, I moved to California to be closer to him.

When I got to California, I moved into an 11-person group house on Sand Hill Road. My rent was $200 per month (we eventually got evicted). But I moved to California to be 3 miles from Matt, instead of 3,000 miles. I had no job – so I took copies of my resume over to the Stanford campus and walked around.

My first job in California was temping at the Center for Social Innovation. It was a directed accident, if you will. I knew I was interested in international development, so when I read a little about the Center for Social Innovation and what it does, I decided to walk in. The accident part of it was that they needed a temp. My temp job became a contract job, which became a permanent job.

RK: How did your work at the Center for Social Innovation develop from temp job to Kiva to business school and beyond?

JF: Well, the first thing I did with the Center was help coordinate the Global Philanthropy Forum. I was a 23-year old, moderating sessions with Fortune 100 CEOs – and it worked. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I kept working at the CSI for three years, watching students go through business school. At first, I wasn’t jealous – I cared about changing the world, not driving core competence in search of profits.

But after a while, core competence – and incentives, profit maximization, and all those other b-school concepts – started to make sense to my own personal mission. These business school students, contrary to their stereotypes, actually cared about changing the world. Not only that, but they were getting my dream jobs – managing and running non-profits – when they graduated. So that’s how I became interested in business school.

RK: What about Kiva?

JF: Kiva was, in some ways, born out of necessity. Matt and I had a relationship problem: he wanted to do high-tech startups, and I wanted to do microfinance in Africa. We knew that we had this problem when we were dating, but we were in love, so we got married anyway and decided to figure it out as we went along.

Think about it – Kiva marries the high-tech startup world with microfinance. It’s the perfect solution to Matt and my relationship problem, and I can honestly say that it was born out of love. I would never have been able to get my head around Kiva had I not worked at the Center for Social Innovation, where these kinds of social innovations were part of the standard, day-to-day office talk.

RK: What do you want NextBillion.net to know that we don’t already?

JF: Pursue your passion. Peel away the boundaries between you and the people you want to work with. If you do that peeling, you can build connections that change you and change the world. In the course of pursuing passion and peeling away boundaries, you become vulnerable. Don’t fight it. Strive for vulnerability – beautiful things can happen out of it. In that same light, here’s my one-liner: never, ever think you are better than anyone else. If you can live like that, and work in the BOP context, then you can really change things.

Pop!Tech - Interview With Kiva’s Jessica Flannery is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:21 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Biomimicry — getting ideas from nature for the way we make or do things — isn’t just for robots and velcro. Plant leaves and sea sponges are inspiring researchers and companies to invent better photovoltaic cells; one by building the cells the way nature does, the other by having photovoltaics work more like photosynthesis.

Built Like Nature

Daniel Morse at the University of California Santa Barbara has been getting inspiration from sea sponges to make efficient solar cells. Manufacturing silicon solar cells is currently done the way all semiconductor devices are made; the process requires very high temperatures, plasmas and vacuum chambers, and many nasty chemicals. Sponges, on the other hand, self-assemble complex nano-structured silicon materials (their skeletons) out of protein and seawater at ambient temperature and pressure. And there’s no need to worry about wafer shortages: As a university write-up of the research says, “Nature produces silica on a scale of gigatons.” The sponge’s secret is molecular templating, which Morse and colleagues are learning to imitate. Technology Review reported that “Morse and colleagues have made more than 30 types of semiconductor thin films and tested their photovoltaic properties. They are now working to incorporate the semiconductors into functional solar cells.”

Works Like Nature

In status-quo photovoltaic cells, incoming light hits a doped semiconductor material, knocking electrons out of lower orbits into a free state, where they can be carried off by metal wires. New electrons come and fill the old holes via the same wires, so the material can absorb new photons. Pushing electrons around from one place to another like this is what generates a current.

The material properties require a tricky balance. The more conductive a material is, the harder it is to hold electrons in shells that are ready to be conveniently popped up by incoming light. But the less conductive a material is, the harder it is to get the electrons out to become useful electricity. In 1991, Michael Graetzel and colleagues developed what’s now called the Graetzel cell (listed in Wikipedia as a dye-sensitized solar cell), which works more like photosynthesis in plants. It splits the process into three different steps and three different materials, using a little more chemistry than just solid-state physics. As explained on the web site of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Croatia,

In [a] natural solar cell the chlorophyll molecules absorb light (most strongly in the red and blue parts of the spectrum, leaving the green light to be reflected). The absorbed energy is sufficient to knock an electron from the excited chlorophyll. In the further transport of electron[s], other molecules are involved, which take the electron away from [the] chlorophyll. In [a] Graetzel cell, the tasks of charge-carrier generation and transport are also assigned to different species.

The “Graetzel cell” uses a thin coating of ruthenium and organic bipyridine molecules for light absorption, kicking electrons up into higher orbits but not quite all the way to being free electrons. This coating sits on a framework of titanium dioxide nano-crystals that carry the electrons away. A separate electrode replenishes the coating with more electrons (so it can absorb more photons), with the electrons carried from the electrode to the coating by a liquid electrolyte of dissolved iodine in which the entire coated framework sits.

These cells are not very efficient yet. However, they’re far cheaper than silicon solar cells, because even though they are not manufactured in a biomimetic way (like Morse’s cells), they also do not require the high vacuum and plasma and other difficulties of traditional PV manufacturing. We’ve mentioned before that the company Konarka has been selling these cells by the roll as “Power Plastic” since 2002, and have even made PV fabric. Power Plastic is currently about 3-5 percent efficient according to Machine Design, but they are hoping to jump to 20 percent efficiency by combining Graetzel cell technology with organic solar cells. Maybe at some point they’ll combine their devices with the templating methods used by Morse to create PV cells that not only work more like plant leaves, but are made more like them as well.

Image Credits: UCSB’s Convergence Magazine, Konarka

Biomimetic Solar Cells is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:58 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


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on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

Having a personal computer the size of your hand is something that, in a relatively short period of time, went from being seemingly impossible to practically ubiquitous. In fact, many of us can barely imagine leaving the house without one. These tiny personal pieces of technology allow to send messages and images anywhere — from across the table to across the globe, connecting us to each other and the world.

Exploring the extent to which this technology could benefit society as a whole is mobile company giant Nokia. Yesterday, Nokia announced its contest, Calling All Innovators, encouraging developers to design applications that could help better society.

“Calling All Innovators is not just about making mobile applications that could help society; it’s about developing mobile applications that will help society,” Tom Libretto, Vice President of Forum Nokia said. “Imagine if an application could help relief workers reallocate resources in real time for disaster-torn areas — how much could that help both those in need as well as the relief workers in the area?”

Developers wishing to enter the contest have until Dec. 15 to submit their ideas within three categories:

• ECO-Challenge: Make a difference by submitting an application that will work to minimize mobility’s global environmental impact and develop ways to offer mobile solutions that help consumers make sustainable choices such as reducing their energy consumption or carbon footprint.

• Emerging Markets: This category opens up new opportunities for developers to imagine the possibilities of pioneering applications and services impacting the daily lives of millions in developing nations, which could include solutions for education, health data access, infotainment, rural agriculture, or any other application that improves lives in emerging markets.

• Technology Showcase: This is an opportunity to create and showcase compelling, experience driven applications, using any technology that runs on Series 40 or S60 devices, such as Flash Lite, Java, Python, or open source. From a single-purpose application to completely community driven, this developer’s showdown will help open consumers’ minds about what an application can do.

Winners will be notified in January 2009. Their reward (which, of course, will include cash and fabulous prizes) will be to see their design distributed throughout the world. And even though I know little about how to design mobile phone applications, the possibilities here seem endless and putting technology and information in the hands of those who need it most is entirely fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Photo credit: Flickr/blueoneiam, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Social Entrepreneurship at 10:08 AM)

Originally
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by Sarah Kuck


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Sarah Kuck from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation