Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Technology really is becoming an incredible tool for empowering the poor. Whenever I see a great example of this, I get excited. Vital Wave Consulting covers the opportunities in serving developing markets and one of their blog posts really grabbed me. In M-Pesa is our hippo! we get to hear the story of a cell phone banking service that gives the poor effective banking services in Kenya when the country's banks have declined to serve them. Other great comments from users of M-Pesa directed at traditional banks: You closed our accounts and chased us like dogs. Don’t bark at us. The sly person is in trouble when the fool gets smart. And, Kenya is not the only country to discover this opportunity. The Philippines has had cell phone banking for years. The common thread is prepaid cell service. You load up your phone with minutes with money. Why not trade your minutes for money back (for a small fee) or trade minutes with other people as payment for goods and services? These ne...

We often brainstorm about things we would like to build. I was recently looking at the Rockefeller/InnoCentive partnership . InnoCentive is a place where you post problems you'd like solved. We came up with a similar list for Benetech. However, since our issues are all information tech issues, we don't fit the InnoCentive model (which is hard sciences). But, I thought I'd share some of these ideas so people have some picture of what we're thinking about. 1. “The One Place” – a single global database for accessible content on top of all of the other, partial databases. 2. Plug-in for Mozilla to allow disabled users to surf websites and to read books and newspapers directly, without requiring a screen reader and therefore making book access more practical in developing countries, as well as libraries (because you don’t need to buy a $1000 piece of software). 3. Firefox add-on that "optimizes" pages for screen readers. E.g., remove useles...