internet
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Great Africa + Technology Blog Links
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San Francisco Gets Its Very Own App Store
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Google Goes Public (Sector)
A Whole New Level of Supporter Engagement
Published September 23, 2009 @ 02:03PM PT
We all know (or at least have heard) how the internet is breaking down barriers between nonprofits and supporters, celebrities and fans, and companies and clients. On the upside, companies can get feedback, collect ideas, and distribute messages like never before. On the downside, the internet also makes companies liable to very public shaming.
Sometimes critique is done particularly well, as is the case with the website buzzing around Twitter today, "You're Killing Me Zappos." The site is basically an open letter to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh exalting his company but asking him, quite earnestly, to update the design on their website. The tongue in cheek letter begins:
I’d like to start by saying that I think Zappos is an exceptionally cool company - everything I say from this point on is exclusively in the interest of helping. I understand why you guys are successful. I’ve been floored by stories of your generosity towards your customers, and your company culture sounds wonderful. So, when I heard about the Amazon acquisition, I grinned wide. Then, the other day, I checked out your new website and wanted to stab my eyes out with a sharp object.
The letter goes on to make some very specific suggestions (which, by the way, it would be useful for just about all web designers to check out) about how to improve the site: clear iconography, visual hierarchy, and more. And then, the icing on the cake is that author Andrew Wilkinson and his team at Metalab Design actually went on to mockup a new design that embraced the suggestions.
First the current Zappos design (click image to see full):
And Metalab's mock up (click image to see full):
There are a lot of things I love about this. First of all, it's a fun letter and a fun site. Second, it's an awesome example of how exposed (for good and bad) companies are on the internet. Not that people are going to change their minds about whether or not to buy from Zappos because of this, but talk about losing control of the message. Finally, it is - whether intended or not - an incredible advertisement for Wilkinson and his team at Metalab. I just spent 30 minutes clicking through their client history and thinking about whether they would fit with any projects we have going on at Assetmap. Who knows - maybe they even land a contract with Zappos because of this?
Demos and Dreams at TechCrunch50 Day 2
Published September 15, 2009 @ 10:56AM PT
The TechCrunch50 conference is happening just down the street in San Francisco, and although I can't be there, I'm following the streaming video and keeping track of the new companies that have the potential for direct and indirect social impact. As business increasingly moves online, web tools are increasingly providing an apparatus for good, as these companies demonstrate.
Since the early sessions when I first posted about TC50, a number of additional companies of potential social significance have pitched.
Healthywage enables employers to give employees cash incentives for better health. They're running a challenge that will enable some participants who meet a set of pre-determined weight loss goals to win $1000, paid for by advertising and referral fees. I'm not totally convinced about the model, but the cash incentive could be a context that catalyzes someone who's been "meaning to get healthy" take the plunge. With skyrocketing rates of obesity that cost individuals and society both in terms of health and economics, creative solutions are worth trying.
Redbeacon and Crowdflower both offer busy people a potentially easier way to get things done. Redbeacon connects local service providers (think plumbers) with people who need their services in a fast, reliable, and automated way. While it's not directly social, this could improve the general efficiency of local economies. Crowdflower is a Mechanical Turk-like service that crowdsources small tasks more easily accomplished by humans. Depending on how they run their service, it can not only be a more efficient way for businesses to accomplish goals, but could provide decent supplementary income for participants.
Maybe the company I'm most excited about is CitySourced. CitySourced gives citizens and governments a platform to collaborate around identifying and solving basic persistent municipal issues like potholes and grafitti. This sort of basic level of civic engagement is not only immediately useful, but can potentially deepen and broaden the way citizens view their relationships with government.
I'll post one more update later with more information about companies that present this afternoon and the winners of the competition.
(photo: TechCrunch50-2009)
Tech Startup Mecca at TechCrunch50
Published September 14, 2009 @ 10:30AM PT
TechCrunch50 is a platform from which inventive young tech startups launch in hopes of big investments and big buzz. Hosted by leading web2.0 blog TechCrunch, the two day conference is not only about panels full of field luminaries, but is a chance for fifty companies to pitch to the biggest audience of their lives. While the companies participating are all for-profit tech companies, a number have the potential for social impact.
The fifty companies are presenting organized by theme. Each theme session has a panel of experts who react and provide commentary about the companies. The sessions include everything from "Youth and Games" to "New Frontiers." While the companies are only being revealed as the sessions launch, the first session "Youth and Games" demonstrates the social overlap.
I just caught the presentation for ToonsTunes. The program is a virtual world where kids ages 6-14 learn to create and share music. While I was skeptical at first, it actually looks like a ton of fun, and in a world where music education programs are constantly threatened, this could actually help people discover their creativity.
While I can't attend the event itself, the whole thing is streaming online. This is immensely cool, particularly for other startups, who get to see not only peers pitch, but who get the benefit of seeing experts interact with the companies and give them advice. For example, when ToonsTunes suggested it was looking for a $15 million valuation, the venture capitalists in the room balked and suggested that they talk with folks like Disney, Activision, and other major companies in the space vs. venture investors.
Over the course of the next couple days, I'll keep this blog updated with the social side of the tech innovators presenting.
(Photo: Magerleagues)
Carrier Pigeons, Competition, and the Need for Technological Infrastructure
Published September 10, 2009 @ 07:08PM PT
Some days I get a single story sent to me from everyone I know, and today's Mashable article "CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL" was one of those stories.
The premise of the article is about an "experiment" in South Africa where a company called the Unlimited strapped a 4GB memory card to Winston, an 11-month old pigeon, and sent him from their office in Pietermaritzburg to Durban. The trip took the pigeon around 3 hours, at which point only 4% of that data had transferred over South Africa's Telkom DSL service.
Part farce, part sorry reminder of the state of quality broadband service in Africa, the article has been streaming around the web today. While it's important not to look to glib stories as the only source of information about a place, the piece highlights how detrimental slow access is for people on the continent, a theme often riffed on by folks like Erik Hersman and Jon Gosier.
This is what I talk about when I mention the "ecosystem" of social entrepreneurship. Is the technological infrastructure for coordinating business available? Are their payments systems? Communication systems? Are government policies enabling ease of business? Are their training programs to better help people translate ideas to action? These are the sort of questions we have to answer if we want to unleash the power of social entrepreneurs to change the world.
(Photo: Fiona MacGuinty)
Obama Education Speech: Innovation, Problem Solving, and Twitter
Published September 07, 2009 @ 07:31PM PT
Twitter CEO Evan Williams and President Obama: Inspiration?
Look past all the controversy and President Obama's education speech is an evocation of the heart of the American mythology; work hard and you can achieve. The speech is an interesting case study in entrepreneurial role models.
The main thrust of the content is about the fact that while parents, teachers, governments all have a responsibility to help in our education, how we use what we've been given is ultimately a matter of personal responsibility and initiative.
Importantly, Obama recalls the sort of "asset-based thinking" he was schooled in while organizing in Chicago. He says "every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide."
Of course, there's a call to action to recognize how education will prepare students for the problems we face. Importantly, in this speech it's not just about how engineering and more PhD's will help the US keep its technological advantage. Instead, he says "You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free."
Finally, in the climax of the speech he calls out a new generation of technological innovators and links them to the history of students who changed the world:
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
Giving Life on Your Birthday
Published September 07, 2009 @ 11:10AM PT
Four years ago, a simple birthday party to raise money to help provide clean water in Uganda launched what would become one of the most high-profile nonprofits today. Since then, charity:water has been continuously innovating around how to use media to compel people to action. So today, on my birthday, I wanted to take a moment to ask why we act for change, and how we can accelerate that action.
charity:water is an incredibly media-savvy organization. Their design is absolutely top-notch, with materials and production that is extraordinarily professional without being unfeeling. Moreover, they know how to use video that is extremely captivating without sensationalizing.
But far more important than their production value is how successfully they connect "us" and "them." Their largest campaign to date has been their "Born in September" campaign, which gave people a platform to ask their friends and family to donate money to building wells rather than giving them gifts. In their second year of the campaign, they raised $150,000, and then almost a million in their third.
I think this is compelling for a couple reasons. From the absolutely most prosaic, one's birthday is a context that makes it appropriate to reach out to friends and ask for money. In this instance, the ease of giving through platforms like charity:water or even more, Causes' Birthday Wish application on Facebook, accelerates donations.
On a slightly more philosophical level, birthdays remind us from where we came, and of all the people who have contributed to our own success. They provide moments to think about oneself and one's relationship with the world more reflectively, and are a good time to engage a commitment to justice.
One of the things that charity:water does better than almost anyone is sell the idea that people who are working with them are part of a larger movement for good. People want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, but this requires not only a big goal to buy into, but examples of people who seem like you who make it feel like you really can contribute. charity:water's founder Scott built that first fundraiser around his birthday, and even though they fundraise year round has had September - his birth month - be the staging ground for their main push. I don't think this is about ego, I think it's about helping people have an entry point.
I'm not raising money on this birthday, for the sole reason that I ask people to contribute to enough things around the year that adding another one might be a little extemporaneous. Instead, I'd ask everyone reading to use this day to recommit to what you care most about, and redouble your efforts to that end.
For those inspired, use the comments to share your passions.
(Photo: charity:water)
Does Google Have the Right to Digitize the Global Library?
Published September 05, 2009 @ 04:20PM PT
The market for digital books is getting bigger and more competitive. That's why some people are worried that Google's desire to digitize and sell access to the world's libraries is an anti-competitive move from the internet giant. According to the Economist, after settling a class-action suit with a group of authors and publishers last year, Google and it's former legal rivals are now seeking judicial approval for the deal. It's a fascinating case study in the evolving role of copyright in 21st century economics.
Copyright is the direct product of technological evolutions that have historically allowed ever easier access to the copying and distribution of original creative productions, be they written works, artistic pieces, or something else. For most of that history, copyright's have been seen as necessary to safeguard the rights of the creators of original works from those who would unjustly profit from their work without properly compensating the originator.
At the same time, however, part of the original intent of protecting the rights of content producers was to encourage general learning. According to Wikipedia, the legal concept originates with the British Statue of Anne of 1710, which designed explicitly "for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books."
Yet if the origins of the notion of copyright are rooted in protected content creators so that they can contribute to the general good, the advent of the internet and it's major disruption of traditional media publishing have produced a situation in which copyright law is all too often used to uphold the rights of the old power brokers of publishing. Reknown copyright thinker and blogger William Patry ended his blog last year, due to a state of overwhelming depression with the field:
Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.
So how does Google, which employs Patry, fit into all of this? Under the terms of their settlement of the class action suit, Google would be able to scan millions of out-of-print digital works without previous approval of the copyright holders. It could then sell access to these works, providing it gave authors that could be found a portion of the proceeds.
Opponents are worried about a private company being able to dictate the terms of copyright in a new digital era, a concern that I share. They're also - at least groups like Amazon - worried about Google cutting into their profitability. The upshot is that this could open a huge amount of currently unavailable work for much wider distribution. The case will be heard later this month, and I'll update readers with the results.
(Photo: Ginnerobot on Flickr)
