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.