PopTech Blog

We’re thrilled to announce the newest group of presenters for PopTech 2011: The World Rebalancing. We hope you’ll join us in Camden, ME from October 19-22 to see them take the stage.

• Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development, argues in his recent book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, that China has already become the most economically dominant country in the world in terms of wealth, trade, and finance.

• Alison Klayman, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker, began shooting her debut documentary feature, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, while living in China from 2006-2010.

• Patrick Tresset, a French artist/scientist currently based in London, uses what he calls "clumsy robotics" to create autonomous cybernetic entities that are playful projections of the artist.

• Frederic Fol Leymarie, a professor of Computing, is the co-director and co-founder of the post-graduate program in Computer Games and Entertainment at Goldsmiths College.

• Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson is the fifth President of the Republic of Iceland.

• Gale McCullough, a former nursery school teacher and old-fashioned naturalist, delighted the 2010 PopTech audience with the story of how she identified a whale that had journeyed an unprecedented 6,000 miles from Brazil to Madagascar by examining photographs on Flickr.

• Jonathan Rothberg is best known for inventing high-speed, massively parallel DNA sequencing—an idea that came to him after his infant son was rushed to intensive care and he realized how critical individual genome sequencing was to human health.

• Matt Jones is a principal at BERG, a London-based design consultancy that works hands-on with companies to research and develop their technologies and strategy.

• Bhagwan Chowdhry, Professor of Finance and Faculty Director of the Master of Financial Engineering program at UCLA Anderson, recently proposed a Financial Access at Birth (FAB) Campaign in which every child born in the world is given an initial deposit of $100 in an online bank account to guarantee that everyone will have access to financial services in a few decades.

• Daniel Kish, blind since he was one-year-old, can navigate his bike through traffic-filled streets of southern California, trek through the woods solo, or locate a building over a thousand feet away—all using a click of his tongue and a technique he calls FlashSonar.

Learn more about these recently announced presenters - and everyone who will be on stage at PopTech 2011.

We’ve recently announced our Class of 2011 Social Innovation Fellows and we’re excited to share the diversity of their world-changing work with the PopTech community. To learn more about this new crop of Fellows, we posed one question to each of them: In one sentence, what is your work's projected impact when it reaches scale?

We’ll be highlighting one Fellow’s response per day for the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!

When we reach scale, our franchise model will provide guaranteed clean drinking water to tens of millions of people daily in a self-sustainable way. The ultimate objective is to keep scaling until everyone has access to clean water.

-- Sameer Kalwani

Image: Sarvajal

Many persistent industrial chemicals accumulate in marine life and in our bodies. But we've had problems predicting which industrial chemicals will persist in the environment. Artist Perrin Ireland (working with PopTech friend Peter Durand's Alphachimp studio) collaborated with Amro Hamdoun (2010 Science Fellow) to explain how current research in cell biology might be used to to prevent this problem of accumulation from continuing to happen in the future.

We’ve just announced our Class of 2011 Social Innovation Fellows and we’re excited to share the diversity of their world-changing work with the PopTech community. To learn more about this new crop of Fellows, we posed one question to each of them: In one sentence, what is your work's projected impact when it reaches scale?

We’ll be highlighting one Fellow’s response per day for the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!

At scale, farmers will trust our insurance, allowing them to invest in their production and fulfill their professional potential.

-- Rose Goslinga

Image: Kilimo Salama

We’ve just announced our Class of 2011 Social Innovation Fellows and we’re excited to share the diversity of their world-changing work with the PopTech community. To learn more about this new crop of Fellows, we posed one question to each of them: In one sentence, what is your work's projected impact when it reaches scale?

We’ll be highlighting one Fellow’s response per day for the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!

That everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to opportunities to earn an income and to world-class healthcare.

-- Krista Donaldson

Image: D-Rev

There's always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week's highlights follows.

• The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, a new book by Richard Dawkins (PopTech 2006) will be released in October. The Magic of Reality, with its explanations of space, time, evolution and more, will inspire and amaze readers of all ages. 

• Radiolab host Jad Abumrad (PopTech 2010) was always a genius in our eyes, but a MacArthur Fellowship makes it official! 

• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a new book by preeminent psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker (PopTech 2007).

If you'd like to receive a stream of these updates (and more) throughout the week in real time, follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the PopTech blog.

Image: The Magic of Reality

We’ve just announced our Class of 2011 Social Innovation Fellows and we’re excited to share the diversity of their world-changing work with the PopTech community. To learn more about this new crop of Fellows, we posed one question to each of them: In one sentence, what is your work's projected impact when it reaches scale?

We’ll be highlighting one Fellow’s response per day for the next couple weeks. Stay tuned!

Local Orbit will build a more efficient, equitable and sustainable food system, support independent farmers and local economies, and make healthy, locally produced food widely available and easy to buy.

-- Erika Block

Image: Local Orbit

PopTech is proud to announce the Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2011!

This year’s Fellows are spearheading a compelling set of solutions to global challenges. They are reconnecting refugee families, helping people become “makers” of their own technology, improving local food production and distribution, and getting to the heart of measuring true impact. They are helping girls access education and healthcare, building community through music and architecture, and using a combination of high-tech and good business to get clean water, sustainable energy and appropriate medical devices to those who most need them.

Meet this year’s Fellows:

• Erika Block created Local Orbit’s online tools to make local and regional food distribution more efficient, transparent and sustainable, support local economies and make healthy, locally produced food widely available and easy to buy.

• Krista Donaldson runs D-Rev: Design Revolution, which works with local partners to bring state-of-the-art, user-centric products to empower the lives of the four billion people living on less than four dollars a day.

• Rose Goslinga leads the Syngenta Foundation’s Kilimo Salama, helping increase farm productivity and food security through the first micro-insurance product available to smallholder Kenyan farmers.

• Sameer Kalwani helps provide clean drinking water to those without access through Sarvajal, a technology-enabled franchise business rapidly expanding in India.

• Christopher Marianetti and Found Sound Nation work with youth and communities to create original music projects that unlock creative potential and build bridges between cultures.

• David and Christopher Troensegaard Mikkelsen founded Refugees United to streamline the process of reconnecting refugee families through web and mobile technologies.

• Megan White Mukuria founded ZanaAfrica to address root causes of gender inequality across Africa and enhance girls' educational attainment through sustainable African-led innovations, beginning with the delivery of sanitary pads and related health information.

• Dominic Muren’s design lab, the Humblefactory, and design-sharing platform, Alchematter, help make object design and fabrication truly open and collaborative for communities around the world.

• Michael Murphy co-founded MASS Design Group to create well-built environments that help break the cycle of poverty through appropriate design, local investment and innovation.

• Paul Needham co-founded Simpa Networks, which sells high-quality solar energy systems on a pay-as-you-go basis to underserved people in emerging markets.

• Jake Porway launched Data Without Borders to match nonprofits with pro bono data scientists to solve problems using data collection, management, and analysis in the service of humanity.

• Nithya Ramanathan’s Nexleaf Analytics leverages the power of affordable mobile technology for health and environmental impact studies, facilitating quicker feedback and more effective solutions.

• Mohammed Rabah Salem provides locally built wind turbines and small-scale solar technologies to both Palestine and Israel, knitting together common needs in an otherwise deeply divided setting.

• Amy Sun created Fab Folk to extend MIT’s Fab Lab program, building local technical capacity that gives people the tools to innovate and turn design ideas into real objects.

The Fellows will be joining the program’s world-class faculty in Maine this October for a five-day training session and will then appear on stage at PopTech 2011: The World Rebalancing.

The Social Innovation Fellows program is supported by American Express, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Nike Foundation, PwC and the Rita Allen Foundation.

We look forward to connecting these inspiring leaders with the PopTech network and helping to accelerate their work!

Want a great way to get to know PopTech speakers and performers before they hit the big stage in October? Follow them on Twitter!

From physics professors to pop stars, almost everyone is on Twitter these days. Even if you're not an active participant in social media, you can follow folks on Twitter and see what they're thinking about, reading, and recommending to their followers. It's a fascinating way to glean a richer understanding of who they are and what their work is. Who knows? You might have something in common (Love of cocker spaniels? Relatives in Cleveland? A snowglobe collection?) that you wouldn't have known about otherwise. And nothing breaks the ice at a cocktail party better than saying "I saw your Tweet last night about narwhals, terrific stuff!"

Twitter is also a great way to navigate the social waters at the PopTech conference itself. I arrived a night early in Maine last year and wrote back to someone who Tweeted looking for a dinner companion. I ended up having supper with an enthusiastic young entrepreneur who was a first-time PopTech conference attendee. It was a great way to kick off the week, and I met someone I wouldn't have otherwise. To me, that's the real power of social media.

You can follow a curated list of PopTech 2011 presenters via the PopTech Twitter account. For a behind the scenes look at conference goings-on (and other wacky stuff), follow the PopTech staff list. And if your interested in seeing who's talking about or attending the conference in Camden this year, check out the hashtag #PopTech2011. I'm @mriggen and I'll see you in Maine! 

Image: DaniloRamos via Flickr

In Europe, cycling is a way of life, but wearing a bicycle helmet is not. Two Swedish industrial designers, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, are aiming to change this, not by designing a better bike helmet but by literally turning the problem on its head. Their idea? An airbag that deploys to protect your head in the case of a fall. But instead of a helmet, it’s stored inside a stylish collar that’s worn around your neck, preserving your vanity as well as your noggin.

The design duo just got a huge boost from INDEX, a Denmark-based not-for-profit that hands out the world’s largest cash design award. Their “invisible bicycle helmet,” known as Hovding, took first place in the INDEX award’s “Play” category. The INDEX jury wrote, “The team behind Hövding defined the problem, not as a design of a helmet, but as a solution to a problem”—that being the injury or death of 30,000 cyclists in traffic accidents each year, just in Sweden. 

The Hovding has been six years in the making. It evolved from a master’s thesis into an engineering feat. Basically, it relies on a system of sensors – accelerometers and gyros -- that track the motion of the cyclist and trigger the airbag in the event of an accident. In order to distinguish between normal and abnormal cycling movements, the Horving’s designers spent years gathering movement data from cyclists, stunt riders and crash-test dummies.

At $500 a piece, the Hovding is unlikely to transform the streets of Sweden when it hits the market this fall. But for a helmet-averse public, that might be beside the point. What it represents, according to the INDEX jury, “is a paradigm shift in the area of bike safety [that] hinges on the professional competency of designers, not the adaptive capability of the users....” That gets my nod of approval.

Image: INDEX