Kopernik

Amazing gadgets for the poor

March 9, 2010

Imagine that you live in a poor country, without money for a pair of glasses or access to an optometrist, and you’re not seeing as well as you once did.

This product, a pair of self-adjusting eyeglasses, could change your life.

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Or imagine that you are one of the 1.1 billion people on earth without access to clean, safe drinking water. Your child is in danger of contracting water-borne diseases, which kills 1.8 million a year. What would you give for this portable, water-filtration device, called LifeStraw?

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Maybe you are one of the 1.6 billion people without regular access to electricity. Your children study at night using a kerosene lantern, but the fuel is expensive and dirty. A solar-powered lantern would be a dramatic improvement.

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These breakthrough products, all of them invented in the last 5 o 10 years, are examples of what can be done when technology is designed for the poor. You’ve probably heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the low-cost connected computer developed by Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, but it’s just one of dozens of high-tech, high-impact products aimed at helping to spur global economic development. The trouble is, even though many of the products are low-cost–the LifeStraw, for example, sells for about $6.50–they aren’t available to many who need them.

That’s where a nonprofit called Kopernik comes in. Kopernik connects innovative technologies, poor communities and people who want to help. [click to continue…]

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Why 13,956 heads are better than one

February 28, 2010

GR_Logo_no_TagAs a small “d” democrat, and as someone who is skeptical about the idea of expertise, I’m a fan of decentralized power.

Decentralized political power, a.k.a. democracy. Decentralized economic power, a.k.a. markets. Decentralized computing power, a.k.a. the Internet. Decentralized media power, a.k.a. blogs. Decentralized power, literally, a.k.a., rooftop solar. You get the idea.

That’s why I’m interested a start-up company called Genius Rocket, headquartered near my home in Bethesda, Md. (“Headquartered” is a stretch: Genius Rocket has just five full-time employees.) But this little company is built on a big idea: That advertising and marketing can be crowdsourced. Which is a fancy way of saying that two or 200 or 2,000 heads are better than one.

In practice, this means that entrepreneurs, startups, small companies, nonprofits and others who can’t afford high-priced Madison Avenue agencies  can let Genius Rocket become their virtual ad agency and outsource their creative work to a global crowd–13,956 minds, at last count.

Customers include nonprofits like Ashoka, which promotes social enterpreneurs,  Riverkeeper, the clean-water advocacy group led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Kopernik, a new and very cool bottom-of-the-pyramid NGO, about which more another day; small companies like Al Fresco All Natural, which commissioned a video for its chicken sausage, and True Lemon;  and big brands like Sony Bravia and PepsiCo.

markwalshRecently, I had lunch with Mark Walsh, the CEO of Genius Rocket. (Small world: I wrote short piece about Vertical Net, Mark’s b-to-b web company, in 1997 for FORTUNE, headlined The Web’s Trashiest Site: SolidWaste.Com!) Mark, who is 55, a lively guy who has had an action-packed business career, working at HBO during the early days of cable, at AOL during the early days of the web, then at Vertical Net where he made a pile of money and more recently as the volunteer Internet guru for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and the founding CEO of Air America. “I’ve always been a new business junkie,” he told me.

Advertising is in Mark’s DNA. His dad ran an agency in Baltimore and his mother provided the voice for one of the best-known commercial slogans of the 1960s: “More Park Sausages Mom! Please…” Now, by eliminating the costly [click to continue…]

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