A new form of capitalism is arising that recognizes our ability to direct the power and efficiency of market systems toward social impact, leading to a more balanced set of "returns". This social capital market is real and growing, and has real impact on emerging economies.

But does it impact ICT4D? How can technology companies leverage social capital for greater impact? And can NGO's and nonprofits that focus on technology also benefit from the flow of capital towards social good?

Join Kevin Jones, Co-Founder of the SoCap Conference and Good Capital, as he shares insights on the opportunities, challenges and prospects for social capital to advance technology interventions in the developing world.

How can social capital expand ICT4D?
August Technology Salon
8:30a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but be sure to RSVP ASAP, as we only have room for 15 people, then there will be a waitlist.

According to Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the 73% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia who do not have a mobile phone represent $13 billion per year in incremental revenue for mobile telephony operators. Women are the face of growth for the mobile industry in the developing world - 66% of all new mobile subscribers will be women - and there is a huge untapped potential for business interests and for social impact.

But will mobile money be the killer app to drive mobile phone adoption by women?

This is the question we put to Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting and Menekse Gencer, founder of mPay Connect in our recent Technology Salon in San Francisco. (Sign up to be invited to future Salons). With their input, we came to several interesting conclusions around mobile money and women empowerment:

Mobile Money is Many Things

Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA, get tossed around without any real understanding of the differences in systems and outcomes. To help our understanding of these concepts, mPay Connect made great presentations on mobile money, and we're going to steal one, key slide:

Mobile money is really mobile financial services, and like traditional financial services, has several parts - mobile payments where money is moved from one account to another, mobile microfinance where money is loaned and expected to be repaid, and mobile banking where money is kept as a safe repository of wealth.

As you can read in The Mobile Money Movement, mobile money has many benefits, from greater money security to more transparent transactions, but there are two key benefits that we focused on in the Salon.

1. Lowering transaction costs: mPay Connect research shows M-PESA saves 3 hours per day for every Kenyan subscriber in reduced shoe leather costs - the cost of walking money from place to place. If we multiply 3 hours per day, by 13.2 million subscribers, by 365 days, that's 14.4 BILLION hours saved per year. Add in the average wage per hour in Kenya, and the time savings start to make you gasp in savings shock.
2. Increasing business legitimacy: Each business that uses mobile money builds a history of financial activity that they can use for loans, factoring, and even inventory control. It also allows governments to license businesses as such and better estimate and collect taxes. In fact, mobile financial services usually are not creating financial services - many of these systems existed informally through local networks - mobile money is formalizing them and bringing them into the measurable economy.

While there isn't any objective research yet on mobile money directly impacting GDP, you can start to sense the change it brings to an economy.

Mobile Money Involves Many Actors

While we often think of M-PESA as the poster child of mobile money, there are other mobile money systems. Even in East Africa there are payment systems by Bharti Airtel, Orange, and MTN. G-Cash in the Philippines is even older and larger than M-PESA, and other players besides mobile line operators smell the mobile money to be made.

In India, banks and mobile telcos are joining forces, while in Bangladesh, BRAC and Grameen Phone have joined to create B-cash, which is promising to be network neutral - that is allow any payment using any mobile operator's system. Overall, there is real convergence - in both payment systems and in the industries that want to participate in them. Recently in Nigeria, 16 companies were given a provisional license to do mobile payments and banking: only 6 are linked to banks and only 1 to a mobile operator (MTN).

Today's model, where mobile phone companies dominate, is just a snapshot in time.

Mobile Money Isn't Targeted at Women... Yet

Even with all that excitement, we don't see handsets, subscriber plans, or even special services targeted at women in Africa like we do in Asia. Mobile operators in Africa say they are growing too fast to target women - they can barely keep up with their existing new customer influx, regardless of gender. While there is truth to that, there are also cultural issues.

In many patriarchal societies, men control the use and ownership of mobile phones. Mobile technology can be seen as a threat to traditional power dynamics and social norms. There are some hints of change - it is a security line for girls to go away to school as they can be checked on at any time. Especially around health, it's usage as a communications tool can be deemed critical for family well being..

Building on the examples in Examining the Intersections Between mHealth and Mobile Money, mPayments can be interesting way to free women for city life - imagine dowries paid in airtime vs. livestock or payroll and government benefits direct to handsets vs. husband's hands. Conditional cash now paid at hospital visits could be used as incentives for other positive behavior change, like family planning and career advancement.

Now make your own positive behavior change for career advancement - sign up to be invited to future Technology Salons - so you can participate in discussions like this first-hand.

Brooke Partridge, CEO of Vital Wave Consulting, put forth a startling proposition in a previous Technology Salon. She described a new ICT4D paradigm: Women + Mobile Phones + mServices = Economic Development.

She believes that combining the traditional role of women in the family and the power of services delivered through the mobile phone (mServices) has the potential for exponential impact. It is the perfect, and the obvious combination; empowering women through the benefits of mobile phone ownership is the easiest and most straightforward measure we can adopt to advance social and economic growth in developing countries.

Mobile phone payment in India

The most popular and well-known mService is mPayments. Safaricom's M-Pesa is expected to have reached a throughput equal to an astounding 20% of Kenya's GDP in 2010. In their research, Vital Wave Consulting found Kenyan women to be more aware of the value that mServices could provide them, because of their exposure to M-Pesa.

But are there real development opportunities in mPayments and the greater concept of mobile money? Can financial transactions on mobile phones by half the population really lift an entire society?

To help us deep dive on the power mobile money will be Menekse Gencer. Menekse is an expert in mobile financial services and the founder of mPay Connect, a consulting service for clients seeking to launch mobile financial services for the unbanked in developed and developing markets. Her work has taken her to Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In her newest publications for The World Economic Forum and Innovations Magazine, Menekse identified why mobile money will have a significant impact on the GDP of emerging markets and how mobile money bolsters the outcomes of other industries like healthcare.

Together, Brooke and Menekse will lead us in a discussion around mobile money, its opportunity to advance development, and its specific impact on gender in the next Technology Salon in San Francisco.

Is Mobile Money the Killer mService for Women?
February SF Technology Salon
Tuesday, February 8, 10-11:30am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but be sure to RSVP ASAP, as we only have room for 15 people, then there will be a waitlist.

At the How Peer-to-Peer University is Hacking Higher Education Technology Salon in San Francisco, Philipp Schmidt discussed his Peer 2 Peer University initiative, an innovative approach to further the reach and impact of higher education.

The initial concept stemmed from the idea of creating peer groups to help each other out through open-source education materials like MIT's Open Courseware, in a fun engaging method.

However, through P2PU's flexible business model and Philipp's entrepreneurial character, P2PU quickly evolved to become more. P2PU now offers peers to teach over 30 different courses to 500+ other peers online from subjects such as software skills, to music theory introduction, to finance.

And while Philipp expected most courses to be built around MIT Open Courseware, in fact, peers have taken the classes in a whole other direction, with much greater variety. The more interesting and popular courses are "Kitchen Science" base don an MIT chemistry course, "School of Webcraft" with the Mozilla Foundation, and "Copyrights for Educators" developed by P2PU peers.

P2PU offers capacity building for peers who lead courses, though they are still trying to find a good name for the lead peers, without giving them titles that denote too much post (such as professor) as the educational model is still peer learning vs. top-down learning.

For learners, the draw of attending P2PU vs. a traditional university is its online convenience; coupled with intimate, peer learning. P2PU is also looking at offering credentials, such as Mozilla-branded web development certificates and adult education credits from the University of California at Irvine.

For Philipp, the challenge is scale and sustainability. P2PU is attempting several models to exponentially increase enrollment, such as requiring each new attendee to bring a friend. Sustainability could be met through a mix of income from the credentialed courses and by direct user fees for those that have the means and capacity to pay. Or via funding from renewed foundation interest in online education.

P2PU is already having an impact. Its attendees have shifted from the techno-elite of North America to the teeming millions in Brazil and India who would otherwise never have the opportunity for higher education.

Imagine imputing an object into a rigid four-year, $100,000+ process, hoping that when it finally leaves this system its a useful tool. That's the current university system, where higher education resembled the Waterfall software development process.

Now contrast it with short bursts of learning using educational materials openly available online, with constant feedback on progress by your peers, and immediate application of skills learned, like the Agile software development process. That's the change P2PU - Peer-to-Peer University seeks to accomplish with its disruptive innovation in the higher education system.

On Friday, September 17th, we'll have Philipp Schmidt, the director founder of Peer 2 Peer University and a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, joining us at mission*social to explain how he's creating high-quality, low-cost, lifelong learning leveraging the Internet.

How P2PU is Hacking Higher Education
September SF Technology Salon
Friday, September 17, 8:30-10am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but be sure to RSVP ASAP, as we only have room for 15 people, then there will be a waitlist.

Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, which started as a way for Nokia engineers to test mobile phone network operations, has grown into a killer app - for everyone. At the SMS4Dev Technology Salon in San Francisco, we looked at three ways to apply SMS to pressing development projects.

SMS:Gov

First we discussed the issue of local government communications with their constituencies. The problem being that usually they don't communicate with constituencies outside of infrequent in-person meetings.

By employing software like FrontlineSMS in a SMS:Gov usage model, local governments could offer two compelling services: 311 and MyObama.

• 311: By offering a single, simple text message menu tree using keywords, local governments can categorize constituent needs and wants into categories for prompt response, like the 311 systems in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco.
• MyObama:Local politicians can use the same process to become knowledgeable on the electorate's concerns, and individualize their message to respond to those concerns, like MyObama did to great success in 2008

Rob Munro discussing his SMS efforts

Categorizing SMS via Artificial Intelligence

But what if the categories for keywords are not known in advance, or a community doesn't understand the concept of a keyword? Rob Munro faced this challenge in Malawi when implementing FrontlineSMS with rural Community Health Workers (CHWs) who mainly use the Chichewa language.

The doctors at a central clinic spend one hour each day managing incoming CHW text messages, but with a patient population of 250,000 this averages to just 5 seconds per patient per year, and so any automation for triage incoming text messages from CHWs can lead to huge productivity increases.

Rob developed self-learning artificial intelligence algorithms that parsed free form SMS text messages in three different ways:

1. Normalizing spelling variants of keywords by learning linguistically predictable alternations
2. Segmenting words into their component morphemes to identify key substructures (like "patient" as the key form of "patients")
3. Using the normalized/segmented data to classify each message to determine its urgency - patient-related vs. administrative texts

With the algorithm learning from just 600 text messages it was was able to achieve about 95% accuracy, which should hold across any language using an alphabetic writing system and improve as the volume of text messages increases.

Applying SMS to Private Industry

Stepping away from SMS itself, Zach Berke spoke about two ways in which his company, Exygy, is developing text messages to support private industry expansion into the developing world.

• Payment plans: Solar power can be expensive, but how do you have a payment plan for an installed system? Require owners to text in codes they buy from local retailers to unlock another set amount of usage.
• Pharmaceutical validity: Counterfeit pills are a huge issue for consumers, but a simple code printed on a package can be texted to a central verification system to confirm drug authenticy.

Now both of these systems have their challenges. For the solar system, how do you pre-set codes into the hardware, or keep someone from soldering around the payment device. For pharmaceuticals, its printing variable yet secret codes on a specific end-user level package, with each code unique yet short enough to text without error.

Yet it can be done. Unicef used RapidSMS to track the distribution of 63 million mosquito bed nets across Nigeria with test messages on ordinary mobile phones using no-charge SMS shortcodes.

Are you a Technology Salon subscriber on the West Coast that's feeling left out of our two SMS4D Salons in Washington DC? Don't! We're bringing all the great SMS text messaging fun to San Francisco with SMS4Dev-SF on June 17th.

Mobile phone payment in India

At mission*social, the Inveneo offices on Mission Street in SoMa, we'll have the following three discussants explaining how they're utilizing humble text messaging to change lives in the developing world:

1. Robert Munro will explain how he's developed machine-learning algorithms to categorize free-form SMS to a 95% accuracy - across any language - for SMS:Medic
2. Zach Berke will showcase a SMS verification system that Exygy helped build which protects against pharmaceutical counterfeiting in India and a new SMS micropayment platform for solar power installations
3. Wayan Vota will expand on SMS:Gov, an innovative use of SMS text messaging to create a 311 system for local governments

If you'd like to join us, you'll need to RSVP for this Salon via SMS: text SMS4Dev, your name, your organization to the live SMS:Gov demo at (202) 506-0148. For those that need an example, I would send "SMS4Dev, Wayan Vota, Inveneo" (w/o quotes).

SMS4D-San Francisco
June SF Technology Salon
Thursday, June 17, 8:30-10am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but be sure to RSVP ASAP, as we only have room for 15 people, then there will be a waitlist. In DC, we're filling up the same day as the announcement goes out.

On April 8th, Inveneo was pleased to host approximately 20 experts in technology and development for a Technology Salon held at mission*social, a collaborative workspace for social enterprises.

The event was billed as a conversation about the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Haiti earthquake response, but the conversation focused on a wide range of opportunities and constraints facing the use of ICTs in responding to disasters, wherever they occur.

(We're now bi-coastal! To join the next San Francisco Salon, get invited here.)

The event featured presentations from three ICT and medical professionals with direct experience leveraging ICTs to support disaster response followed by open and free-ranging discussion.

Download Mark's presentation

Mark Summer of Inveneo

To kick us off, Mark Summer (CIO of Inveneo) presented on Inveneo's WiFi networking efforts in post-quake Haiti working primarily with the NetHope alliance. This network provided broadband connectivity to NetHope member organizations - and a few others as well - in the crucial weeks following the quake, when local ISPs were not functioning effectively.

Mark emphasized the value of reliable, low-cost networking technologies, the need for better pre-planning and the importance of building local capacity.

Download Eric's presentation

Eric Rasumussen of InSTEDD

Eric Rasumussen, CEO of InSTEDD, then described a wide range of initiatives in which he and his team were involved in Haiti, including work to facilitate and curate the flow of communications from victims and the public (much of it via SMS) and to feed this information back to first responders.

Eric focused on the importance of tight coordination among responding organizations, that these organizations must be self sufficient in the operating area, and the need for regulatory and policy reforms to enable.

Dr. Kumar Menon of Amrita University

Dr Kumar, of Amrita University, joined via Skype from India to describe in brief his organization's efforts to provide web-enabled critical care capacity in the wake of floods and the 2004 Tsunami. Dr. Kumar focused his comments on the need for reliable broadband connectivity in order to support medical aid via telemedicine during disasters.

There was good debate on several issues, but the following points got a lot of nods from participants:

• There is a general need for more collaboration around an integrated framework for the use of multiple channels of information during disasters
• Organizations involved in ICT response must be entirely self sufficient on the ground (bring 1khz Honda generators!!)
• Development and effectiveness of systems will require a hospitable policy environment (e.g., free SMS during declared disasters, liberalize use of radio spectrum, etc.)
• Better ICT pre-planning is needed (caches of networking equipment, sharing of information resources - ie, mapping data - within local setting, localized caching of Internet content, etc.)
• There must be an appropriate balance between reliance on Internet/cloud and localized content/resources
• Public education about use of alternative communications channels during an emergency will make response more effective

What other ICT lessons learned are there from Haiti?

In the immediate aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, several Bay area organizations deployed life-saving ICTs to speed disaster response in Port-au-Prince and the greater humanitarian efforts across Haiti. At the next San Francisco Technology Salon, we'll hear from InSTEDD and Inveneo on how they deployed their respective technical ecosystems, its impact, and their transition possibilities for rebuilding Haiti.

Mark Summer optimizing WiFi

• Eric Rasmussen and Ed Jezierski will describe InSTEDD's establishment of the Emergency Information Service with AlertNet of the Thomson-Reuters Foundation on the Port au Prince airfield, serving as a critical node for more than 90,000 Haitian SMS messages
• Mark Summer will describe Inveneo's role in deploying a long-distance WiFi network across Port-au-Prince for NetHope, bringing high-speed Internet access to 14 major humanitarian relief organizations and their staff.

Note: This is a San Francisco event, at mission*social, the Inveneo offices on Mission Street in SoMa

Disaster Response - Lessons from Haiti
April SF Technology Salon
Thursday, April 8, 8:30-10am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Fransisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited. So the first fifteen (15) to RSVP will be confirmed attendance and then there will be a waitlist.

In what has become an annual tradition, we're honored to have Terry Kramer, now Regional President - Vodafone Americas, return to the Technology Salon and update us on Vodafone's continued efforts to bring mobile technology to the developing world.

Note: This is a San Francisco event, at mission*social, the Inveneo offices on Mission Street in SoMa

Terry Kramer of Vodafone

Vodafone in the Developing World
March SF Technology Salon
Thursday, March 25, 8:30-10am
mission*social Conference Room
972 Mission Street, 5th Floor
San Franscisco, CA 94103 (map)

We'll have espresso and donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited. So the first fifteen (15) to RSVP will be confirmed attendance and then there will be a waitlist.

And while Terry organizes his thoughts for this year's discussion, be sure to review his talk last year where he issued a m-Development Challenge from Vodafone.