Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Tomorrow is an exciting day for our Bookshare online library for students with dyslexia or visual impairments.  We have incredibly generous matching grants from two of our dedicated tech entrepreneur supporters, Bernie Newcomb and Lata Krishnan.  Tomorrow, Tuesday May 5, 2015, is Silicon Valley Gives day, where donors from around the world will find their contributions to organizations based here matched by local donors. We love reading, and we know how important being able to read a book is to educational and employment opportunity.  Each year, we provide more than a million books that are spoken aloud, enlarged or made into braille for students who can't pick up a print book and read it because of a disability. We've never done a crowdfunding campaign specifically for Bookshare, and tomorrow we'll find out if some of our 350,000 users and their families are able to express their appreciation by helping match these challenge grants. And we need help: our annual fede...

I recently had a great meeting with Terry Farris and Alan Keliipuleole of the newly launched ammado web platform . It’s an impressive web-based application for helping multi-national corporations engage their employees and customers in social sector activities such as volunteering or donating. It’s the brainchild of an Irish tech entrepreneur, Peter Conlon. I know Terry because he was UBS’ point guy on philanthropy in Singapore and Asia before joining ammado. The challenge around something like this is critical mass, and the ammado team seems to be aiming very high in terms of execution. The site already works in a dozen languages and support for giving in more than twenty currencies. So, a high tech company with operations all over the world can engage their employees in each country to get involved with local charities, operate matching gift programs and so on. They also have a charitable gift-card concept for employees or customers (buy $250 of product, get a $10 or $20 gift c...