The SXSW Interactive conference, held in Austin Texas, is five days of undeniably awesome presentations from the brightest minds about up-and-coming technology. There are also numerous networking events hosted by industry leaders, and special programming to showcase innovative ideas that the international community has to offer.
Category: Blog
Peace through technology in the Middle East; this is what Elizabeth Buckner has set out to do. If you grew-up in the early tech-world of portable Gameboys and bulky PCs in the classroom, you’ll appreciate Buckner’s electronic teachermate, an educational device teaching children in Palestine and Israel about ‘life on the other side.’
It’s hard not to get excited about the work being done bringing health care into the digital age. Mobiles have the potential to increase efficiency at nearly every step of health care provision. These efficiencies aren’t hypothesized—waiting to develop given improvements in technology or infrastructure—they’re being realized right now in clinics and health systems around the world.
Imagine two clinics in rural areas, Community Health Workers (CHW) in one are overburdened searching through paper records to identify previous drug treatment regimens, unable to confirm children with diarrhea are receiving oral re-hydration salts, travelling hours carrying blood samples and results back and forth from the nearest hospital where tests can be preformed.
We’re going to continue to look at emerging mobile health applications this week. While last time the focus was on promising technologies on the horizon, these projects share an approach that maximizes the impact of what’s already available—in most places that means sending an SMS. The low cost and high penetration of mobiles make them an incredibly powerful platform for promoting health. In these examples, mobiles are used to expand public health education and improve patient monitoring.
The importance of both mobile network and software security continues to grow as more personal and significant information is communicated wirelessly. Two new attacks threaten the security of the GSM standard, an unwanted headache for mApp developers, while two others threaten the Android and Apple families of moblie operating systems.
The BlackBerry smartphone, launched in 1999 by Research In Motion (RIM), is the quintessential, on-the-go tool for communicating. In 2004 BlackBerry had over two million subscribers worldwide, one of the key selling points has been the unique ability to use the free Blackberry Messenger service (BBM) to communicate with fellow Blackberry users. Now however that usage has been banned in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) because it bypasses their ability to monitor communications.
Today’s Tech@State event produced some great insights into current uses and future applications for mobile money. The presenters did a wonderful job detailing the different models currently being used to engage the billions who are unbanked but have access to a mobile device. Some key take-aways from the day were (1) the need to focus on user inputs, (2) the importance of building a network of physical agents, (3) and possibilities for other services that are enabled once a successful mobile money system is established.
Sitting in the 140conference in Washington, something got my attention. Or should I say someone. His name is Blake Hall, co-founder of TroopSwap, a recent Harvard Graduate and Army Captain. Initially, he just made me feel inadequate, and then he started his presentation by saying: “ I was asked here to speak about Enterprise 2.0 and the military”. As any good conference attendee would, I instantly Googled the term Enterprise 2.0. Half expecting to see a page full of Star Trek references, I was instantly surprised about how big of a deal this concept is.
Last month I taught the first ever course on “Technology and Peace” at the UN-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica. The course drew 16 participants from 11 countries, representing a number of distinguished organizations including Ashoka, the Council on Foreign Relations and George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR).
Several of us at TechChange had the privilege of attending a great event MobileActive and the World Bank put on last night that focused on those failures that I’m sure most involved try to forget. FAILFaireDC brought together some real pioneers in the ICT4D space to discuss issues they had dealt with and well-intentioned projects that went wrong. While the fails ranged from election monitoring and e-governance to ICT for education and health, some key concepts kept popping up. Most importantly? Hubris kills.