Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas.html?sudsredirect=true

Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.

GRND Lab

http://www.grndlab.com/

Built solar system developed and installed in southern Kenya to provide power for the new Living with Lions research camp. (see 'work' link)

DIY Solar video kit

http://solarvideokit.wordpress.com/

Tilting at windmills: the boy who harnessed the wind

Malawian teenager William Kamkwamba built a generator out of a bicycle and tractor fan. Now he's lauded by environmentalists. more

Dial 'M' for 'Mackerel': Can New Mobile Services Promote Economic Empowerment?

Mobile phones now easily outnumber fixed lines in many developing countries, spurring telecom providers to roll out mobile services tailored to these customers. One of the most striking examples is mobile banking in Africa, particularly after the success of mobile payment services like M-Pesa in Kenya, a country counting some 15 million handsets today compared with only 15,000 ten years ago. more

Cheap computers from TVs and old videogame consoles

UC San Diego-based Playpower Project Receives $180K MacArthur
Digital Media and Learning Grant. Details here

Kenyans invent bike phone charger

Two Kenyan university students invent a device that allows bicycle riders to charge their mobile phones. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/8166196.stm

How I built my family a windmill

See William Kamkwamba in an acclaimed TED talk here. Visit the project web site.

Datadyne EpiSurveyor

EpiSurveyor is a free, open source tool enabling anyone to very easily create a handheld data entry form, collect data on a mobile device, and then transfer the data back to a desktop or laptop for analysis -- without expensive consultants.

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

In recent years the mobile phone has emerged as the main modern communications link for rural areas of Africa. From 2002 to 2007, the number of Kenyans using cellphones grew almost tenfold to reach about a third of the population... more

Mobiles give Africa's farmers the chance to set out their stall

The latest technology is enabling villagers to bypass middlemen and find out the prices their crops will command. more

How to build a local phone network

Article about Dabba, which uses re-programmed wifi hubs, cheap wifi handsets, and pay-as-you-go cards.

Kenya elephants text rangers

Elephants in Kenya are sending text messages to warn wildlife rangers that they are heading for the crops of neighbouring villages. more

Mobile environmental monitoring

Goes both ways: In London you can receive air quality info by SMS. Or sensors embedded in mobiles can detect and send radiation or pollen levels. "Grassroots citizen science" work by Eric Paulos in Ghana attached sensors to taxi drivers' phones in Ghana to measure pollution levels. Details here.

See also Urban sensing: Out of the woods: "Services such as Google Earth have driven to nearly zero the cost of this visualization measured in terms of dollars, time-to-deploy, and technical sophistication required." (See an example of the scientific use of Google Earth here.)

Microscope Enables Disease Diagnosis with a Cell Phone

A research team at UC Berkeley is developing a technology that will enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to diagnose malaria with just a cell phone and a special microscope. more

A bag full of sunshine

Energy: A combination of flexible solar cells and low-energy lighting provides a way to bring electric light to isolated communities

story

See-saw to power African schools

A young inventor is hoping to tap the unbounded energy of children in a playground to power schools in Africa.

story

bikejus

Bicycle + DC motor + inverter. Details here.

Datawind Pocketsurfer 2

...claims to provide near=broadband speed internet access anywhere in the world in a small device, for one time fee of £180. On-board GPS. Well reviewed (in Financial Times.) Downsides: No audio or video, some usability problems. The price includes 20 hours/month in UK only; abroad costs aditional £6/mo., though this is expected to go down. Details here.

Open source mobile phone platform

Mobile phones, currently closed and self limited, will rival broadband computers. When based on Open standards, they will deliver ubiquitous computing and vanish.

Ubiquitous computing means more than computing wherever you wander: It means knowing the locale, weaving seamlessly into the local fabric, and vanishing.

OpenMoko is an open source, Linux-based mobile phone software platform. Read more here.