Inspired in 2000-1 by Amy Smith, Saul Griffith and Nitin Sawhney and other MIT colleagues working on international development innovations, DesignThatMatters, ThinkCycle, and Development-by-Design, I started -- together with Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- the grassroots MIT initiatives on Developmental Entrepreneurship (DE), teaching our DE Seminar starting in 2001 jointly between the Media Lab and MIT Sloan. (FYI, we have upwards of a dozen spinout companies to-date including Amir Hasson's United Villages pictured above!-) Furthermore, I co-created & continue to support an ever-growing International Development Network, have co-hosted & continue to run numerous events, collaborations, & activities, long-argued for accelerating development innovations broadly, initiated & helped expand the DE challenge prizes, extended Seed Grants supporting practical field experiences by MIT and Harvard students, and more!
MedGadget spotlights Battling Migraines From the Inside and Out including a noninvasive portable transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS) from Neuralieve, an emergent neurotechnology venture. They claim... Neuralieve has developed the first portable "home-use" TMS Treatment System. The first application will be migraine therapy. Neuralieve's TMS Treatment system is used to stimulate the brain's occipital cortex, inducing a signal that is intended to disrupt cortical spreading depression (CSD), the abnormal brain waves which precede migraine. Scientific experiments have suggested that disrupting the wave of CSD may reduce or eliminate the pain associated with a migraine episode.Still more R&D to be done, of course, but this is a very compelling suite of developments.
In a NYTimes Dot Earth article by Andrew Revkin entitled What’s Really Up With North Pole Sea Ice? the data about seasonal shifts in ice coverage are nicely presented and visualized...
It's now blindingly obvious to everyone that Mugabe is Africa's very own Hitler. (Actually there are several equally swine-like characters throughout the continent.) If there ever was a place where well-executed international interventions are needed, it is Zimbabwe. Again, the role of Peacemaking and Peacekeeping forces will be critical as will the helping hand of prosperity policies and thoughtful aid.
It is very exciting to see Jose Gomez-Marquez and International Development Initiative colleagues Amy Smith and others escalate their efforts in international health innovations! Their new website spotlights the many emergent efforts, including a growing portfolio of inventions, a collaborative co-development approach, and a new member of the D-Labs family of classes on Development-Design-Dissemination!
I hosted Lanthe Chronis of the MIT Media Lab on my HighTechFever TV show tonight. Lanthe described her work with Anmol Madan and Sandy Pentland in the Human Dynamics group on hacking mobile phones, specifically iPhones from Apple. And experimenting with dozens of test subjects! Very promising emergent area of Systems Sociology research! We also discussed her experiences with extracurriculars at MIT, specifically her time as past President of Random Hall, one of the undergraduate dormitories at the Institute. It is difficult to overstate the powerful and formative role such experiences -- beyond the lab and classroom -- play in the development of MIT talent! (Something I documented in my thesis on The Innovation Institute, btw!-)
Enter wearable power generation systems capable of harvesting the oscillatory energy built-up through sport and other vigorous engagements. Enough to power an iPod, Adrienne hopes. The various university researchers she polled are optimistic that the kinetics can indeed be captured. Who else, however, but intrepid MIT engineers could best lay hands on the problems involved and pursue the intensive, iterative experimental research and development required to fully harness such frequencies of nature? Surely this is a task for Media Lab Professor Joe Paradiso whose group captured shoe power over a decade ago? Possibly the MIT Sports Innovation Lab could take this on as their contribution to the MIT Energy Initiative? Maybe Professor Dava Newman will embed such circuits into her spacesuit designs? There are billions of otherwise wasted Watts-gone-wild worldwide!
In my last two Recommended Readings posts, I noted that... James Flanigan in the NYTimes writes that Keeping the Water Pure is Suddenly in Demand, about a spectrum of tech suppliers and operators, large and small all profiting from aquatic action. And Leila Abboud in the WSJ writes that French utility Suez to Spin Off 'Green' Unit creating Suez Environment focusing on water and waste treatment services. These are exciting developments in the eco-sector!...and that...
Jeanna Russell writes in the Globe about visionary water engineer Thomas Baron in All tomorrow's water. Baron has a century-long perspective on waterworks and the infrastructure of urbanization and is urging a multi-decade plan to ensure adequate future aquatic supplies.
And I was chatting with MIT Entrepreneur in Residence and Sloan Senior Lecturer Bill Aulet yesterday about this very sector since he wrote a compelling Xconomy post just recently entitled The Next Big Thing in Energy Innovation and Investing? Let’s Talk Water.
BBC has a video and story about Dynamic Skyscrapers designed by David Fisher to be built in Dubai and Moscow. Plus Evelyn Lee in inhabitat wrote about these a year ago in an article entitled Twirling Wind-Power Tower. Here's an additional video simulating the concept...
Preparations are well under way for the second International Development Design Summit (IDDS) to be held at MIT this Summer 2008! Pulled together by Amy Smith and colleagues from MIT, Olin, and CalTech, the IDDS draws together "students, mechanics, social workers, doctors, carpenters, farmers, and professors" from nearly two dozen countries and regions "to build technologies to improve the quality of life in the developing world." Here are the latest details, including info about last years people and projects.
While I'm quite ambivalent about John McCain's US Presidential candidacy, I've been quite moved by his and other POW stories of forgiveness. I was introduced to the compelling and important moral domain of Prisoners of War and other sorts of "war enemies" by no less than James Clavell as immortalized by his epic Asian Saga, which included both his World War II experience in Changi Jail on Singapore and subsequent effective reconciliation with his former Japanese captors. Jim Halperin's First Immortal also features a tremendously powerful forgiveness meme with an even more personal story. And we have several public case examples of former enemies at Pearl Harbor or other war fronts reconciling and, in a fundamental way, moving on towards a better, more cordial, gracious, friendly, even loving future. There is something extraordinary here which must be understood and captured fully in order for humanity to advance as a species and move beyond such despicable situations as exist in today's oppression and conflict-zones. And this also includes understanding the truth & reconciliation efforts in South Africa and Ireland and other challenging national and ex-colonial situations.
As I've written about before, the development of the King Abdullah Economic City or KAEC (pronounced "CAKE") is a very exciting gigaproject. The BBC surveys the latest in an update by Crispin Thorold entitled New cities rise from Saudi desert. I'm interested in this because such Economic Cities are relevant not only in the KSA but more generally in the MENACA region, from the Moroccan-Med cities to the Vital Levant to the Boom Cities of the Gulf to the emergent developments along the New Silk Road.
After a thoroughly tepid, uninspired, dispirited, borderline incompetent and losing performance by Marco van Basten's Dutch team, I'm now a temporary Russian in support of their Dutchman coach Guus Hiddink's team!-) This other White-Blue-Red team really performed well today and I look forward to seeing them in the rest of the Euro2008. And it's excellent to remember all the ties between Netherlands and Russia, including Peter the Great's incognito trip to Holland in 1697 which laid the foundation for so much Russian development. It is very much worth reinforcing these historic links and supporting current progress.
Nice survey of the energy landscape in the latest Economist entitled The power and the glory. Several emerging energy innovation areas are covered, including a healthy number from MIT! I'm especially interested in the percentage shifts over time -- i.e. the changing fraction of total usage provided by what power source -- and comparing this to other changes over the long-haul, for example as relates to the sustainability of economic growth.
I hosted Lemelson-MIT Program Executive Director Joshua Schuler on my HighTechFever TV show today! Josh spotlighted the full suite of inventor-support programs which Lemelson-MIT runs at the Institute and beyond, including the major $500,000 inventor prize, $100,000 sustainability prize (won this year by KickStart founder Martin Fisher!), the student inventor prizes, the high school InvenTeams program, and the finale celebration next week Thursday & Saturday called EurekaFest... ...a multi-day celebration designed to empower a legacy of inventors through activities that inspire youth, honor role models, and encourage creativity and problem solving!
I was delighted to participate yesterday in the MIT Enterprise Forum Global Board Meeting -- and the afterparty on the roof of MIT's Baker House -- where we both celebrated four years of Joe Hadzima's service as Chairman and Beth Garvin's key support as CEO of the MIT Alumni Association! Plus we discussed major initiatives -- boosting the number of international chapters, engaging with up-and-coming entrepreneurs from MIT and beyond, sharpening up global branding dramatically, crafting tremendous educational and inspirational content in partnership with local chapters for worldwide distribution, and more! Plus we elected multi-company entrepreneur Rich Kivel as our new Chairman together with an all-volunteer slate of entrepreneurs, investors, and new venture mentors as new Board members.
The Times gets it (mostly) right with an article by Damian Whitworth entitled A Brit turns oranje for Euro 2008: What's a guy gotta do to support Holland? Act ‘craazee' while wearing an orange wig, apparently! Quoth he: ...a spokesman for the Dutch embassy said that I would be welcome to join the Oranje order. “Dutch people are really proud and happy with English fans saying they support our guys.” His advice: “Wear orange. The crazier the better.”The true goal, of course, is to encourage the jonges to keep scoring like this shot by van Persie which made it 2-0 NL vs Romania...
...how to be more Dutch? “We're a little bit crazy. We work very hard, then we go nuts for a while. Then go back to work.” He looks me up and down. “You need to be orange!” I go to a fan stall and buy a Holland T-shirt and baseball cap. Vrijs then donates his own orange wig to the cause, pulling it down over my cap. “Ja! Fantastic!”
I cannot understate how seriously the Dutch take their orange outfits: orange Elvises, tangerine suits, men in women's traditional Dutch dress complete with pigtails and false breasts, orange popes (singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life) apparent escapees from Guantanamo Bay in orange jump suits. And the hats. Cowboy hats, Mexican hats, Viking helmets, traditional bonnets, crowns. Hats with soft toys, hats with cheeses, hats with hammers, hats with antennae, with hands, feet, penises. Then there are the glasses. A man could write a thesis about the glasses, which range from the Dame Edna to the downright ludicrous.
Bob Buderi & company at Xconomy have replicated their original Kendall Square (now generalized to Boston) site and launched in Seattle! This primarily online business -- plus high-quality ultra-local event-experiences -- is pushing towards a different media-engagement future than that represented by either Scott Kirsner's Boston Globe colleagues (although Scott does quite interesting things with his own Innovation Economy initiative and with FutureForward colleagues), or Doug Banks and his MassHighTech / BostonBusinessJournal colleagues, or, for that matter, Jason Pontin and his Technology Review colleagues. I'm curious when we'll see Xconomy in Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai, Hong Kong, Zurich, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago, Sydney, Bombay, Manilla, Bangalore, etc, etc... 
What's especially interesting is looking at both the pace of adoption and whether it's gotten faster, and at decomposing the adoption to the level of multiple generations of a product. For instance, 8086 PC's versus 286 versus 386 and 486, etc. Or different videogame consoles, etc. Even more interesting is seeing this century-long diffusion plotted for the worldwide population of Earth, not just the rich US.
Very cool that MIT's homepage today honors and spotlights our Founding Father, Willam Barton Rogers! His persistence and bold vision for a new kind of Institute lead to MIT's formal birth in 1861 and operations in 1865 (after the US Civil War). Rogers stayed intimately involved with MIT for the rest of his life, including personally selecting and recruiting the remarkable Francis Amasa Walker as President in the early 1880's.
Is dominant mode of western public opposition to such mega-construction projects an indicator that the US and yesterday's rich countries are stagnating? On the other hand, Scott Van Voorhis writes of the Building booms in Boston: 60 projects, worth $4B, going up in the Boston Herald, which strikes me as a positive counterpoint to the worry that the boom is increasingly outside the US.
My compadre DRo -- a.k.a. Daniel Rosenberg -- and I had an intense chat this afternoon at Charlie's Kitchen, our venue of choice as discerning consumers of carbs and proteins in the form of Stella Artois and Double Cheeseburger Specials;-) Our top talking topics? Moments of Science. In Demo Veritas. HighTechFever. Builderati. Maximizing Progress. Are these all labors of love or is there an economically rational reason to continue developing these inspirational media initiatives?
I had an excellent chat with Beth Garvin this morn about MIT alumni initiatives, but her next move naturally got me thinking about RISD and Providence (and comparing with MIT and Cambridge which I'm inclined to do anyways for the sake of my Understanding MIT class). She noted that in addition to private-reserve "insider" blogs there is also an outward-facing our.risd.edu! So I went surfing. President-Elect John Maeda's opensource administration and grassroots approach to engaging the RISD community is a breath of fresh air in contrast with the blackhole of feedback and top-down style of the current regime at the 'tute. Maeda's blogged already about dozens of RISD experiences and interactions, including a serendipitous connection with a visiting newly admitted student, an emergency call with the campus safety officers, and other very intentional explorations. From this view through the blogoscope many things excite me about RISD, but one tidbit stands out just now, namely RISD Works, an art and design retail gallery featuring works from both students and alums worldwide. How cool!...a kind of an anti-institutional institution. We've done our best to present the various facets of the organization without using the word "program" to box in what are simply organized human activities in pursuit of a common mission. AS220 is part Incubator and part Bazaar. We also build new audiences and infrastructure for artists to stimulate the cultural mulch in Rhode Island.
It was great gameplay too, pretty clean and lots of action, as others have lauded. All the goals were very impressive sweet shots, including... 
One fan noted: The national team represents an attitude towards life. We all stick together and are a massive band of the young and old.P.S. And this includes the kids! One of the great elements of the Cup are players families and the post-celebrations with the children too...
Institute Professor Bob Langer at MIT is one of my favorite people ever! Yes, he's generous and thoughtful and supportive of young talent, and he's also prolific and inspired as inventor and scientist! Winner of multiple honors, including most recently the Millennium Technology Prize...
Recent discussions about Bjorn Lomborg on Global Priorities and Paul Collier on Africa's Challenges have inspired my interest in Peacekeeping and the more general suite of diplomatic engagements and military interventions. It's remarkable just how many historical and currently on-going initiatives there are just run by the UN (versus EU, Nato, African Union, or individual countries) as you can gauge from this map... 
I interviewed Kiril Alexandrov, Executive Director of the International Economic Alliance (IEA) and Founder of Big Skinny wallets, on my HighTechFever TV show tonight! I've known Kiril since his days as co-founder of EyeGen, winner of what's today the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Most recently, with the IEA, Kiril has helped dial-up this Harvard KSG spinoff from its founding roots running the Russia Investment Symposium in 1997 to creating practical Pathways to Prosperity via their upcoming Global Investment Symposium this September. With Big Skinny, Kiril has brought his great design aesthetic to a product everyone needs. I think this is the beginning of a very compelling family of accessories and up-and-coming smart fashion brand. Check out his infomercial v.1.0 ;-)
I'm sitting in Kirsch Auditorium at MIT's Stata Center listening to my big idea, incarnate: a wonderful tag-team of two pairs of two generations of entrepreneurs at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Innovation Series event...
