Energy Innovations ~ MIT Yunus Challenge 2009

It's fantastic to see the subject of the MIT Yunus Innovation Challenge to Alleviate Poverty 2009 -- Energy Innovations -- specifically affordable, small-scale energy storage.

"Each year, the Yunus Challenge highlights a need of the world’s poor and enables MIT students to develop solutions through a variety of mechanisms, including Public Service fellowship grants, the IDEAS Competition and D-Lab. The Challenge, named in honor of 2006 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus, was initiated and also supported by MIT alumnus Mr. Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, supporter of the MIT International Development Initiative, and benefactor of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT (J-PAL)"

This year the theme is...

"innovative small-scale energy storage solutions to help alleviate poverty. Solutions must address the needs of people living on less than $2 per day. Solutions are not limited to electrical storage; applicants are encouraged to consider other types of storage, such as storing thermal or mechanical energy. However, solutions should focus on storage and not on insulation or other energy-related issues."

Get engaged!

Failed States ~ Concentrations of Global Danger

The Economist spotlights Failed States: Fixing a Broken World noting that "the planet’s most wretched places are not always the most dangerous." Not surprisingly, the best form of national security is finally being appreciated to be international development...

"In America these days, defence planners say they worry more about weak states, even non-states, than about strong ones. “Ungoverned, undergoverned, misgoverned and contested areas” offer fertile grounds for terrorists and other nefarious groups. [...] Large chunks of its language could have been issued by bleeding-heart aid agencies or the United Nations: it speaks of the need to “build the capacity of fragile or vulnerable partners” and to address “local and regional conflicts” that exacerbate tensions and encourage drug-smuggling, gun-running and other illegality. To the chagrin of old-school sceptics, nation-building is now an integral part of American strategy."

Great! Maybe we'll see USAID and even more entrepreneurial development efforts properly funded going forward.

John Mortimer ~ R.I.P.

John Mortimer (left) creator of the epic Rumpole of the Bailey series -- Rumpole portrayed on the telly by the inimitable Leo McKern (right) -- has been laid below by the ravages of age and godlessness. No less than the Economist rightly salutes Mortimer as a freedom-fighter who championed the presumption of innocence, battled the scourge of censorship, and served as devil's advocate for pornography, fox hunting, smoking and other supposed sins. R.I.P.

Kiva Systems ~ Robots Transforming Warehouses

Thanks to MIT alum entrepreneur Patrick Sobalvarro from Heartland Robotics for a pointer to this nice Wired post Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses by Alexis Madrigal. Madrigal writes how robots are transforming the logistics arena as you can see with this case study of the Kiva Systems deployment at shoe-co Zappos... As Scott Kirsner of Innovation Economy notes, Kiva, Heartland, iRobot and a growing number of firms are part of the blossoming robotics cluster in the New England region.

Signs of Africa ~ BBC Visualizes the Situation ;-)

Leave it to the BBC to spot Signs of Africa...

Water Jet Pack ~ Nextgen Tourism Thrill Vehicle

Thanks to Unique Daily for spotting this water jet pack!

CHES International ~ Haitian Entrepreneurship!

I was delighted to host the Christian Haitian Entrepreneurial Society (CHES) co-founder and President Rebecca Roseme Obounou on my TV show tonight. Rebecca's an Haitian-American colleague of mine at MIT Sloan who has been quite passionate about economic and venture development in Haiti, the Caribbean birthplace of her parents. Between her youth here in Cambridge, MA and her college years at Bentley in Waltham, MA, Rebecca and her parents returned to live in Haiti. Now after studies in business and international relations at Bentley, she's impassioned about prosperity for the people of Haiti. We talked about her startup NGO organization, CHES, whose goal is to restore and transform Haiti economically, environmentally, and socially into a sustainable nation driven by core values. This very young but quite entrepreneurial organization is focusing on three top projects:

1. Boosting incomes for farmers through food processing via dehydrators
2. Making a market for local musicians through PeaceTones
   
3. Developing a business skillbuilding program in collaboration with a northern Haitian community and its local university

I'm really delighted by the progress Rebecca and her colleagues have made over this past year in building CHES and getting those who are part of the diaspora to think of becoming part of the reaspora -- those returning to participate in the entrepreneurial and economic development of Haiti! (And yes, I thought "reaspora" was a original Joost spinonym when I suggested it to Rebecca tonight, but Google schooled me!-)

Greenways ~ Grass-Lined Metro Rail Solutions...

Thanks to Inhabitat's Bridgette Steffen for pointing out that Europe’s Grass-Lined Green Railways = Good Urban Design...

Mobile Metrix ~ Census Count of the "Invisibles"

It's fantastic to read in the Monitor about How to count the "invisibles": A new kind of census, by Gregory Lamb, which spotlights Mobile Metrix, a social venture founded by Echoing Green Fellow Melanie Edwards to count the 1 billion people living off the grid...

"Mobile Metrix hires local youths to go into neighborhoods carrying PDAs, hand-held devices capable of storing and transmitting data as well as audio. Their work often paints a clearer picture of who lives there than government estimates or infrequent paper surveys that can be inaccurate or years out of date. The PDAs allow information to be gathered more accurately and shared more quickly than with pencil and paper. But the key Mobile Metrix innovation in early pilot programs in Brazil has been employing young people from the neighborhood, male and female, to conduct the surveys. These "mobile agents" must be recommended by a prominent community member, such as a church or nonprofit organization leader. They are trained in how to conduct a survey and how to use their PDA. A typical survey might ask 60 to 80 questions, such as "How many people live in the home?" and "What is their level of education?" The mobile agents are 16 to 25 years old. "You see these youths transformed," Edwards says. "That tends to be the age where they could be going into prostitution or the drug gangs, so we’re hoping this is an alternative to that. In several cases, we’ve had gang members come up and want to become involved."

The ICT-enabled leveraging of local community workers is a blossoming theme, for TB-DOTS work, for ClickDiagnostics tele-diagnoses, and a whole array of social, financial, and other services. This is a truly essential innovation!

MIT @ Arcahaie ~ Sustainable Village, Haiti-Style!

Ron Fletcher writes in the Globe about Lifting the poor with sustainable design: MIT architect aids village in Haiti. MIT Architecture Professor (and RISD alum) Jan Wampler is collaborating with the wonderful Haitian community organizer Gerthy Lahens -- co-founder of MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition D-Track Grand Prize Winner Bagazo, the agriwaste charcoal fuels company -- on designs for Haitian villages which are not only sustainable, but beautiful and affordable, and with what Gerthy calls "a little Haitian style"!

Swype ~ Finger-Tracing Text Entry on Soft Keys

Thanks to Gwen from Oxcullent Findings for spotting Swype...

"A revolutionary way of creating messages... The company founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden with their team have developed a system that recognizes words when you slide over the qwerty keyboard with your fingers. Instead of typing the words, like hardware keyboards this is a touch screen. When you want to write a word you simply connect the dots and the program will recognize the word..."

Valley of Peace ~ Jordan-Palestine-Israel Projects

Back in mid-2008 Jennifer Schenker wrote a BusinessWeek piece on A Mideast Valley of Peace about the proposed Red-Dead connection and larger peace initiative. I just found and read this and it threads together several recent themes of special relevance including:

• the Hummus 2050 Project proposing an eastern-Med network of vital cities;
• the emergent global Peace Parks movement to ease tensions and come up with third-pathways to resolve conflicts;
• the Levant Prosperity Parks initiated by Stef Wertheimer to boost employment and entrepreneurship;
• proposed solutions to save the Dead Sea;
• the Saudi and other Arab Rail & Translogistics initiatives;
• investment in Greater Aqaba, Jordan's southern freeport; and
• growing development of the MENACA-EU Med region generally;

We need to accelerate these kinds of projects and seek out ever better pathways towards a peaceful, prosperous, and vital future.

Globish ~ French Defeated by Simple English;-)

The BBC's Hugh Schofield reports that New lingua franca upsets French...

"That the French resent the global supremacy of the English language is nothing new, but [...] a newly evolved business-speak version is taking over. [Already] French executives draft reports, send e-mails, converse with their international colleagues -- and increasingly even amongst themselves -- in English. It is of course a kind of bastardised, runty form of business-speak full of words like "drivers" and "deliverables" and "outcomes" to be "valorised", but is nonetheless quite definitely not French. [One day, French author-observer Jean-Paul Nerriere] noticed that he and the other non-native English speakers were communicating in a form of English that was completely comprehensible to them, but which left the Englishman nonplussed [...] a new form of English is developing around the world, used by people for whom it is their second language. It may not be the most beautiful of tongues, but in this day and age he says it is indispensible. He calls the language Globish and urges everyone -- above all the French -- to learn it tout de suite."

Even an entire country, Rwanda, has joined the movement, tossing the French language into the dustbin of history in exchange for the far more global and useful English. De Gaulle and Napoleon are no doubt flipping in their graves;-) See here the creator...

Meet Your Meat ~ Dutch TV Visits Slaughterhouse

As an urbanized carnivore (or really, an omnivore, but let's focus on the meaty part), I have been totally ignorant of the full food-chain from raising the animals through cooking them. And I was especially ignorant of the slaughter. Lamb chops, steak tips, breakfast bacon, lobster roll, grilled chicken sandwich are all simply things I either buy at the market or order at the restaurant. So I was quite interested to stumble across Eet Smakelijk, a six-part Dutch TV show which invites celebrities to go with the host -- top-chef Leon Mazairac -- to visit a slaughterhouse and to watch-and-participate in every step of the process going from live animal to ultimately eating the resulting meat as part of a chef-cooked meal. It's a simple concept, but fascinating -- and it clearly helps contemporary consumers become more fully-informed about what's behind their foods. If you're curious -- and not too squeamish -- watch for yourself: Lamb, Cow, Pig, Lobster, Chicken, and Wild Boar. After seeing these, I'm now curiously hungry!

Bike Innovations ~ Making Cycling Ever Better...

Thanks to Paul at GeekPress for spotting this projected LightLane... And thanks to Fun Safari for spotting this backpackable folding bike...

Cellphone E-Cash ~ America's Slow Adoption...

Leslie Berlin writes in the NYTimes asking about Cellphones as Credit Cards? Americans Must Wait. She writes...

"Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. The technology exists, and, in fact, people in Japan have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. And in small-scale trials around the world, including in Atlanta, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, nearly everyone has liked using this form of payment. But consumers in the United States won’t be able to wave and pay with their cellphones anytime soon: The myriad companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses have yet to agree on how to split the resulting revenue. “In Japan it was easier,” explains Gerhard Romen, director for corporate business development at Nokia. [...] This is not the case in the United States."

High-Low Tech ~ New Crafts Blur Classic Lines...

It's delightful to see our newest MIT Media Lab Professor Leah Buechley speak about New Craft: a Marriage of High and Low Tech...

Namba Parks ~ Terraced Gardens Shopping Mall!

Thanks to Justin at Metaefficient for spotting Unusual Green Architecture In Japan: Namba Parks...

"In a city with few green spaces, Namba Parks is a welcome swath of green for the inhabitants of Osaka. The complex stands where Osaka’s baseball stadium used to be until 2003, and consists of a 30-floor skyscraper, Parks Tower, and a shopping mall with eight floors of terraced gardens. The sloping park connects to the street, welcoming passers-by to enjoy its groves of trees, clusters of rocks, cliffs, lawn, streams, waterfalls, ponds and outdoor terraces."

Gigapan.org ~ Zoom In On Obama's Inauguration!

Thanks to Cynical-C for spotting Gigapan.org's Obamavision! Zoom in on this gigapixel image like you're surfing a Google map!

Change.IT.gov ~ BarackBerry & MacBook Air One!

Several amusing IT changes afoot in the Obama Whitehouse, including MacWorld's revelation that Obama administration frustrated by old White House PCs, with author Cyrus Farivar suggesting that Apple HQ urgently "outfit the new president with his very own MacBook Air One, pronto." The new staff reportedly said "it was like going from XBox back to Atari";-) And CNN reports that Obama 'to get spy-proof smartphone'... "Writing on his blog for the Atlantic magazine, Marc Ambinder reports that the National Security Agency has approved a $3,350 smartphone -- inevitably dubbed the "BarackBerry" -- for Obama's use." Hilarious! Mobile Mag reveals what this beast of a device is like...