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Call it a social experiment or just plain crazy, but I refuse to buy a cell phone. This mobile-addict is detoxing. Not long ago, I was a slave to my Blackberry. I even started putting it next to my pillow...

Perhaps the biggest thing to come out of this years famed South By Southwest Conference (SXSWi) was the GroupMe app. And since there’s basically an app for everything, we need to wonder what is so special about this one. What...

The BBC reported today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12976254) on the value that Twitter has provided to stock traders.  This is an example of how social media, when well filtered, can have a verifiable positive effect .  For our purposes, it also shows that...

You land in a country that is recovering from a long war.  The infrastructure is limited, but there is a nascent democratic government.  To make up for the lack of infrastructure, citizens use text messages sent to a central receiver...

The first Palestinian Intifada (meaning “Uprising” in Arabic: الانتفاضة) began in 1987 and the second in 2000. With the recent flock of revolution in the Middle East, a third was called for – via social media – to take shape...

Deep in the “Chaco” of Paraguay where farmers live under two dollars a day, resides a budding entrepreneur named Alfonso Parada. “I took out a loan to start my farming business and with the profits I’ll send myself to IT...

This past week, I had the valuable opportunity to step out of my usual role as a graduate student at Georgetown and instead, for one day, serve as a teacher/facilitator for a graduate seminar on non-violent conflict resolution. I had...

On March 3, 2010, the World Bank launched Urgent Evoke—an online video game designed to help individuals across the world develop innovative, creative solutions to the globe’s most pressing social problems while developing ten much-needed skills: collaboration, courage, creativity, entrepreneurship,...

Qatar-based Al Jazeera may be completely responsible for the lack of productivity amongst university students, in many different disciplines, all over the world. Walking through the halls of a local university you may hear, at any one point, one student...

Much of the event data that new technology is making available to practitioners contains geographic information, and to take advantage of this we need a way of thinking about geographic information in a predictive way.  Combining today’s post with last...