Watching the future unfold

This year, 2008, has been one of embarassing inactivity from the Wepoco team. The failure of the UK Met Office to support our Ethiopia project, then Tanzania was, in hindsight, inevitable. Quite why we let it knock us back so hard and so far is hard to understand. Anyway it's time to move on and it's good to see that others are making progress.

Here's a wonderful story from the New York Times -

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Jan Chipchase is clearly very talented - just take a look at the wonderful photos on his blog. It's good to know that people like Jan are contributing to the challenge of bringing better lives to those at the working end (base) of the pyramid.

Another blog I'm watching, in the hope that more posts will eventually come, is Julia Kumari Drapkin's Eye on the Earth.

The future of weather forecasts in India

On Wednesday the government of India's Minister for Earth Science announced the District-Level Agro-Meteorological Advisory Service (DAAS) [press release].

"despite considerable technological advancement and improved irrigation facilities, Indian agriculture continues to depend on fluctuating weather conditions. Hence, there is need to have a system which can help farmers to take advantage of benevolent weather and minimize the adverse impact of malevolent weather. "

Agriculture everywhere is of course affected by changes in the weather, but this vast commitment by the Indian government to provide quality weather forecasts to her farmers may well bring really significant benefits within a couple of seasons.

wepoco 2.0!

Welcome to the new Wepoco blog.

Wepoco began in early 2006 as a few ideas, questions and friends. Today it's a small charity with a few more ideas, lots more questions and a few more friends.

This first blog post marks the launch of the Wepoco.org website where we hope that more ideas, questions, and friends, can join the Wepoco adventure.