i have been volunteering now for 2 weeks at the Institute for Indian Mother and Child (IIMC) in Kolkata, and really enjoy it. IIMC is an NGO that provides medical care, education and micro credit to villages south of Kolkata.
i spend my time between building a contact management system for them (which they are really excited about) and teaching computer to kids. we have 4 computers at the moment, and are busy practicing typing, paint (beginners), and Word/Powerpoint (more advanced student). yesterday, a girl came for the first time — she had never used a computer. i showed her how to move the mouse, and it was a quite magic moment when she started to understand that it moved on the screen also. stuff we take for granted. i guess i learn as much as they do (if not more), but in any case we are having a great time together.
i was at BarCampMU3 yesterday — good exchange, interesting folks. here are my slides about my talk on open source communities.
approximately 40 per cent of Indians lack access to formal financial services. the biggest barrier is cost of penetration. last week, i met with Shan Shank Chowdhury, VP at A.Little.World, a mobile software business in Mumbai who has developped a microbanking platform called “ZERO”.
the platform relies on Custom Service Providers (CST) in remote villages to deliver financial services. a CST is a local entrepreneur who uses a cell phone, combined with a RFID reader and a fingerprint. local bank customers show their bank card, which includes biometrical datas (picture and fingerprint). the CST verifies the identity of the customer, and performs the transaction via mobile phone.
a typical case in rural India: a woman buy and sells vegetables during the day at the town market. when she comes home in the evening, her man takes the money for drinking. ZERO lets her deposit the money right when she leaves the market, and pick it up again the next day.
the complexity of the system is humongous: 14 states in India, 16 banks, 200 villages (1000 planned for June 08)… the only negative point i see so far is that only large banks are involved, not small local ones.
ZERO will also be active in the national remittance markets, by dramatically shortening the time it takes for money to reach the beneficiary (currently 7 to 10 days) and lower the cost of the transaction to 1/10th of the current cost. there are currently 2 pilots in Dehli and Bihar.
I got a chance yesterday to visit the OLPC (one laptop per child) pilot in Khairat, a rural village close to Mumbai. The pilot started last October with 20 XO laptops.
It was great to see the students playing/working with their laptops: they impressed me by how confident/comfortable they were with their laptops. The teacher is incredibly dedicated to the project and the kids. He demoed us a shared chat, where he would ask problems (like 2+2=?) and the students sharing the chat session could cast their answers. All this over mesh networking, with a dead-simple way to create/join a session. One girl showed me proudly her Etoys project (drawing shapes, connections, text, animations, simple scripting), and we managed to find out how to animate the objects, which they (and I) found very cool.
I felt they were very comfortable with the interface (Sugar). The biggest shortcoming at the moment is that it is not yet localized in their own language (Marathi), so text-only commands/menus are quite hard for them, since they don’t know much English yet. Still, they are trying all possible menus, and share their discoveries with their mates. And anyway, the software will soon be localized. The team is also looking into alternative energy sources (solar, human powered generator) to deal with frequent power cuts.
Kudos to the OLPC and Reliance teams for this great pilot, which will soon be followed with more pilots all over India. Also, thanks to Carla and Venkatesh for connecting me with the team.
Yahoo announced it is running the world’s largest Hadoop application, a 10,000 core Linux cluster producing data used by the Yahoo! Search Webmap.”. the numbers are really impressive:
- number of links between pages in the index: roughly 1 trillion links
- size of output: over 300 TB, compressed!
- number of cores used to run a single map-reduce job: over 10,000
- raw disk used in the production cluster: over 5 petabytes
today at the Indian embassy in Bangkok, i met this desperate US guy that was short on 2200 bahts (~$67) to get his visa for India, so i lent him the money. then followed a nice conversation, and after chatting about the elections, i said: “you know what would make me more happy than you paying me back, is if you would donate the money to Obama” (note: non-US citizens cannot officialy donate for US campaigns). the guy took a few secs to think, then said he didn’t think Obama needed more money, but that he would do it if i wanted it.
i don’t know all that much about Obama and his program, but for me a major strength is that “[he] knows what it means not to be an American”.
Acer just announced that they would develop a low-price sub-laptop. some might see it as a competitor to the OLPC laptop. i prefer to argue that the OLPC laptop is such a good concept that other companies (like Intel, Asus, and now Acer) are now doing the same.
i have been traveling with my Asus eee for now one month (i missed the opportunity to get an OLPC laptop), and i must say i really like it. it’s very compact, quite fast, extremely stable, has a good wifi, can run Skype, and is quite cheap (~350$).
just like it is very common nowadays to travel with a memory stick, in the future i can imagine that people might travel with a mini-laptop. this is very convenient, especially as wifi becomes more and more available.
it’s now been 4 months that i travel through Southeast Asia. i stayed mostly in rural areas, or small cities. so many faces, so many smiles… people always starting a conversation — sometimes in the hope of making a few ruppes, sometimes just to share a smile, or talk about our different ways of living. in very remote areas, i always wonder how long it will take for them to be online. it will probably happen much faster than it took/will take them to get electricity, phones. it’s actually already happening big time… and i think i want to be part of that. not sure how, and where, but it seems to me that the internet can be a good tool for development. to facilitate the clash of our civilizations.
processing holds true to its premises: imagine, sketch, twist, publish. it becomes that simple… here’s a little tribute to one of my favorite books as a kid
i just got back home in boston, with a new visa for my job at galaxyadvisors. we have big plans to bring social network analysis to the next level and help businesses and organizations use it. more to come soon…