2007 Tech Laureate Showcase (Part I)

This past Wednesday was the annual Tech Laureate Awards sponsored by the Tech Museum of San Jose. In addition to the Gala Awards Dinner where the winners are announced, there's a showcase of the 25 different projects (which can be as early stage as a single person or a multi-year effort from a Fortune 500 company or top university). The showcase is a great opportunity to speak directly to these leading social entrepreneurs. It's possible to get several minutes of personal explanation from the people who were most responsible for the project. (In fact, it's sort of disappointing that there aren't more people that attend and mob the tables...)

I had only a limited amount of time at the showcase, so I didn't get to talk to all 25 projects. In fact, of the groups that I talked to, only one TakingIT Global.org won one of the $50K prizes. But among the groups that I talked to:

Marc Andre Ledoux, Consortium SudEco Industrie

This project kills two (or more) birds with one stone. Invasive seaweed is clogging up rivers needed for fishing and transportation. The idea is to harvest the seaweed, dry it, crush it into pellets that can then be used as fuel for burning in cooking stoves. The future plans for this project are the make the pellet-making press run off of oil extracted from other trees, and enable other machines to run off of the energy source as well. This project is still in proof of concept phase.

Association la Voute Nubienne

This project focuses on reducing building costs by (re-)introducing a way of using packed earth bricks for a vaulted ceiling rather than wood (disappearing quickly, and 10X the cost...). The vaults can be 3.2 meters wide and as long as needed. The photos showed a range of buildings that were constructed with the technique. In addition to being cheaper, the packed earth is also cooler than some of the alternatives. There's a great demand for buildings in this style, the challenge is training enough builders: it's an apprenticeship program, and you really need to build two or three with an experienced builder before you're ready to be the main builder, so it takes (if I understood right) a year of training. The growth is exponential (new builders can train more new builders) but only at annual rate of 1.06 (i.e., the number of builders doubles in the same time it takes to double your money at 6% compound interest, about 12 years.)

Kamal Quadir, CellBazaar

Kamal's brother Khalid Quadir was an RDVP fellow the year before me, and his other brother Iqbal Quadir started Grameen Phone and gave a talk at Stanford that I attended. So Kamal has some impressive credentials to start. And he's done some cool work. Recognizing that the cell phone is the access point to the web for many people in developing countries, Kamal has created Cell Bazaar, an online peer-to-peer market place (a la Craigslist.org) that you can access through SMS or other cell phone protocols (in addition to the browser-oriented interface shown above). The service is running, and even though it was the middle of the night Bangladesh time, new posts were being made while I was at his booth. I think he said he was getting about 70,000 daily hits, with a new item or service posted every 2-3 minutes (~700/day) and that a follow up survey had determined that about 28% of them sold. Cell phones were a high-traffic item, and tutoring services were another. He had already identified another country in Eastern Europe where he planned to roll out the next site.

Kiva.org

Kiva.org is a current media darling, and rightfully so. Matt and Jessica Flannery have really harnessed the power of the web to raise investment capital from the "retail investor" (John and Jane Q. Public) to fund microentrepreneurs around the world. They've gotten a ton of publicity (I still find it weird to see full page ads of Premal Shah in BusinessWeek for BlackBerry) and have had some growing pains along the way. Even now, they've had to restrict the amount of money you can invest, because they can't productively place all of the capital that people would like to invest. They are sending people out into the field to evaluate more MFI's, but Matt definitely said that placing the money is their biggest challenge now.

Elluminate, Inc., Fire and Ice / Elluminate Live!

This one seemed like a commercial product that was also being pitched in a "for development" context. Elluminate showed how their platform for teleconferencing over the web could be used for education, bringing together students from around the globe to learn and share ideas about environmental issues. The required hardware is minimal (a $3 microphone, I think they said) and once it's in place, there are plenty of other uses beyond primary and secondary education, like vocational training for nurses, ability for doctors to participate in conferences, etc. They'd run a couple of pilot events, and the students continued using the system after it was "over", leading them to set up more ongoing projects and events.

(watch for a Part II post with the remaining projects I saw, coming soon...)