Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Julia Novy-Hildesley of the Lemelson Foundation gives a nice talk here at 9mins 45 sec.

Lemelson is targeting populations where individuals earn <$2/ day.

She highlights projects with:
E+CO – Nonprofit, provided grant and loan. Launched 3 new solar entrepreneurs in Tanzania. 7 new entrepreneurs in 2010.

IDEAAS - in Brazil. Bringing solar home lighting system that worked in more affluent areas to the Amazon. Working in 8 villages with 120 families, all have paid loans on time. Reaching 2000 families by end of next year. Link to Lemelson page.

SELCO – Forprofit. Grant, loan and equity investment. New innovation center to complement existing technologies. Eg. solar headlamps for midwives and for women who were picking roses and tea leaves at night to get the highest price at market. Now reaching 30k people per year in India.

Envirofit – Nonprofit, provided grant. Working in South East Asia – Philippines. Motorcycle taxis emit more than the global feet of cars. A retrofit.

Emergence Bioenergy – For profit, loan and grant. Raised $1.2M in equity, launch in Bangladesh. Village-based power center, 3 entrepreneurs. Sell power to community.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Click image to enlarge. Legend: Red = Physical water scarcity, Yellow = Economic water scarcity, Blue = Little to no water scarcity, White = No estimates

With the Dead Sea dying, the City of Venice sinking, and Las Vegas’s desert oasis faltering, it’s pretty easy to find examples of our mismanagement of water.

Considering that we are ourselves about 60% water and that the leading cause of death worldwide is water-related, it’s surprising that we don’t devote more time to managing this major natural resource.

In each of the cases listed above, the solution governments are posing seem far more complex than the simple, more direct solution: Draining the Red Sea to fill the Dead Sea (as its tributary, the Jordan River, gets sucked dry for irrigation and drinking water). Build massive water gates to defend against the “rising water” (as the people continue to deplete the underground aquifer for drinking water.) Blah blah.

Usually, the best design solutions are simple. Not to say they are easy. Reaching simplicity is often far greater of challenge.

One thing’s for certain – we are good at changing our environment, but not always to suit our needs.

Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

PBS Link on Venice sinking
BBC YouTube video on Dead Sea drying

Popularity: 1% [?]

On February 11th, Bill Gates apparently demoed Xobni in front of a huge crowd! Xobni’s Matt Brezina writes:

Bill Gates demoed Xobni as part of his opening keynote at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California today.

Bill called Xobni “the next generation of social networking.” He credited Xobni as leveraging the data in email to help users better manage their relationships.

Vestal designed Xobni’s user interface several months ago, and it’s great to see our design up on the big screen…

Webcast (Thanks, Xobni )

Popularity: 15% [?]

Kogbox lets users create snippets – small scripts limited to 100 lines and 10 seconds of execution time. Write as many as you like, and combine your snippets with others’ to build simple web tools.

This new project is kind of like a Wikipedia for code… but active code, not code examples. I’ve often come up with ideas for small tools or functions which don’t quite merit an entire website, and which could be easily incorporated into other projects. Kogbox (as its name implies) allows users to create small snippets which all work together to accomplish larger tasks. It’s also a kind of sandbox for experimentation.

You don’t have to take my word for it, take a look at the Kogbox website »

For now it’s invitation only. Contact me for an account.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I’ve been spending some time on my own projects in the last month, and the one I’m most proud of is called ARMSFLOW.

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. It was created with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year’s exports) and 228 government entities.

Visit ARMSFLOW

Popularity: 18% [?]

This was covered by Engadget already, but it is amazing enough that we’re jumping on the bandwagon.

Victor Kaonga points us to Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, a Malawian, who has built a prototype power source made specifically for Africa. It generates power using sugar and yeast for up to 8 hours at a time.

Link »

Popularity: 20% [?]

Have you ever wanted to move things with just your thoughts? Well ‘sci-fi’ isn’t too far away. Brainloop, a media project created by the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, is turning brainwaves into movement, in this case through a program like Google Earth. Simply by thinking about moving your right hand, you can transmit a non-muscular signal to the ‘Brain Computer Interface’ unit and elicit a response from the program, such as zooming in, allowing you to travel the world literally without lifting a finger.

Aside from just being cool, this could have some very real applications for the physically disabled. While this might not replace Helper Monkeys anytime soon, it’s a step towards creating a different medium for people to communicate and turn thoughts into actions.

Link to Brainloop

Video:

Popularity: 18% [?]

A common problem for our clients is that they’d like to display images which have been optimized for web display (500px wide, jpg compression, nice and crisp) but want to offer the full-resolution images for download also. However not everyone wants to boot up Photoshop, Automator, or their photo editor of choice to create the thumbnails and web-sized images. Here’s a WordPress plugin incorporating James Heinrich’s phpThumb() thumbnailing script. It automates the process:

• Simply upload a large (huge) version of the image, put them in normal <img src="" /> tags. WPIR parses them out and generates 400px wide versions (configurable) in a <div class="images"></div> at the top of the post. You can style this to float:right; or whatever.
• It also generates a <div class="presskit"></div> at the bottom of the post with links to the high-res originals. These do a force-download instead of opening in the browser window.
• Exempt images from resizing: <img class="custom" src="foo" />

• Puts a nice, slight unsharp mask filter to crispify the images after that muddy bicubic resampling.

  There are more details and specifics in the INSTALL file. The plugin does not create any new databases and all the resized images are cached in the plugin folder. Using ImageMagick as described in the INSTALL file is highly recommended.

  I’d like to have a full WP interface to allow different widths to be configured, perhaps by what kind of page they’re in, what category, or even just a field in the WordPress sidebar to specify pixel width. But this is a good start… anyone want to pitch in?

  Download the plugin: wp-image-resizer-0-7.zip (v0.7)

  (Documentation: install.txt)

  All versions:
  
  
  wp-image-resizer-0-7.zip (v0.7)
  
  wp-image-resizer.zip (v0.6)
  
  
  

  
  

  Popularity: 21% [?]

We just launched a cool Flex interface for soccerratings.com. The widget allows you to chart several team’s ratings, or predict the outcome between two teams on their current ratings, all in realtime. A bittersweet widget, perhaps, as I just found out that it looks my alma mater doesn’t have good prospects this season.

Link to soccerratings.com

Popularity: 8% [?]

Just bookmark this page, or go to: Google’s widget generator

Popularity: 7% [?]