Inside UP : Events

“Phone First” in Boston

jamesu — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:41:58 GMT

Last month I had the opportunity to attend NextLab 2008: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users. It was a one-day conference at the MIT Media Lab involving projects from an interdisciplinary class there focused on how to apply cell phone technology to help create social and economic opportunity for poor people throughout the world. In UPG, we call these “phone first” applications, and it is an area of keen interest to us. I was invited by Sandy Pentland, one of the faculty advisors of this class; he also works with the Next Billion Network at MIT.

There were seven projects showcased at the conference, ranging from supply chain distribution to healthcare to the seemingly-ubiquitous “use a phone to help a farmer get crop prices” scenario. All of these projects featured a combination of the creativity and energy of students paired with the real-world requirements of an NGO. The projects were conceived and designed in the fall and are going into pilot in the spring. You can learn more about the class here.

My favorite project is the “Boston Baby Blog”, an application where health care workers use an SMS based notification network to share baby care information with low income families who don’t necessarily surf websites on PCs but who definitely use text messaging. It’s the sort of application we talk about deploying in places like Africa, except it is being deployed right here in the US! Rashni Melgiri, a second year student at Sloan, explains the project:

Another project called MoCa involves the use of cell phones as a diagnostic tool to extend the reach of doctors and nurses well beyond a single medical clinic. Here is Clark Freifeld explaining how it works:

As part of the class, each team of students had to create a video explaining their project. I’ve embedded a link to each project along with a brief description of each as well. Most of these are just now entering field trials, and it is too early to determine the long term impact they will have. But if you are interested in ICT4D, and in particular the use of cells phones in this field, then you will be hard pressed to find a better collection of scenarios that demonstrate the promise that phone-based applications can have as a tool for advancing social and economic opportunity.

M-Commerce
This project involves an application that enables a small store or reseller in a village in India to use a cell-phone to reorder commonly stocked goods from a wholesaler or distributor. It consists of a little database on the phone and an SMS fulfillment system.

Final Video from Kady Buchanan on Vimeo.

MoCA
”Mobile Care” is an application that enables field medical workers to record symptoms on a phone using forms, voice annotation, and photos, and then submit them to a health clinic for a nurse or physician to review. It is similar to a project UPG piloted with midwives in Uganda.

Final Video from Elliot Higger on Vimeo.

Fighting Farmers
This is an agricultural extension application being tested in Zacatecas, Mexico. It enables farmers to upload crop pricing data in order to access a database of historical and local pricing information and trends.

Final Video from Paul Moore on Vimeo.

NextMap
This is an application that lets people use an SMS message to report a locally occurring incident, and the report is then uploaded to a server where it mapped. Key scenarios for this include disaster response (e.g., “the people upriver are reporting flooding!”) or the tracking of environmental incidents. This project is similar to Project Butterfly from the students in Indonesia who won the Image Cup UP award last summer. And parts of NextMap run on Windows Mobile!

Disaster Management and Innovgreen Overview from Disaster Management on Vimeo.

Fellows Forum
This is a web and SMS-based social network for college students who have received grants from the Telmex foundation. Almost all of these students are poor and from developing countries, and the application gives them a way to connect with each other.

Final Video from Julianne Palazzo on Vimeo.

Multi-Level Marketing
This is a microfinance application in Ecuador that uses SMS as a networking and customer acquisition tool in a loan application process.

Get New Money Demo Video from Josh Kirchmer on Vimeo.

The Boston Baby Blog
My favorite application at the show involved a solution targeting a problem right here in Boston Mass. The Boston Baby blog is an SMS texting service that enables the city to communicate information around important parenting and healthcare milestones to low income parents of newborn children. They observed that many low income parents in Boston didn’t have computers or visit websites, but they all seemed to have cell phones and use text messaging. It’s a great example of a phone first scenario right here in our country.

Baby Blog Final from Javier Smith on Vimeo.

Innovative Teachers, This Time in Hong Kong

jamesu — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:33:15 GMT

It’s time again for Microsoft’s Innovative Teacher’s Forum (ITF), an annual event where we celebrate the 100 or so coolest teachers from around the world, all who are doing great things in terms of integrating technology into their classrooms. This year the event is taking place in Hong Kong. You can learn more about ITF here, including a list of the conference winners. But in my opinion they are all winners.

I attended last year’s event in Helsinki, and thought it was the best Microsoft show I’ve been to in a long time. I am in India this week doing consumer research and cannot be in Hong Kong, but my colleague Andy Woolnaugh has provided me an update on what is going at this year’s conference.

What is especially cool about the examples I am highlighting is that they all use a combination of PCs and cell phones to deliver a great learning experience regardless of where the students are located. These are exactly the sort of scenarios that Ray Ozzie and team discussed at the PDC last month, sort of a “Life Without Walls” but it is taking place in classrooms today.

In Northern Ireland, Tom Fitzsimmons and Ciaran McLaren have developed a project to teach vocational engineering to students entirely using online channels and tools that the students use themselves in everyday life. The project is also being shared with schools in Wales, Scotland, England, Germany and Austria. The students design formula one car models, and then use video conferencing, live webcasts and other online communications to speak to Silverstone Formula 1 engineers and Royal Air Force aerodynamics experts to discuss their designs, learn new techniques, refine their projects and get first hand training from the experts. The aim is for students to build and race their model cars. Lesson materials are entirely online, hosted on websites, and students can download workshops as video onto PDAs and smartphones, or onto MP3 and MP4 devices as podcasts so they can listen outside of school. (Live Mesh anyone?)Therefore physical lessons are more interactive and are used to collaborate with each other or external experts helping with their projects. Learning and attendance rates at school have improved and, in an area of relatively high unemployment, the children learning important vocational skills. AND they get to play with race cars!

In New Zealand, Nathan Kerr, an Onehunga High School geography teacher discussed a project that allows him to deliver teaching material to students via their cell phones. I like this project because it is an example where the students taught the teacher about new ways to apply technology to the learning process.

“What happens is that students go on field trips and collect digital images using camcorders or their cell phones. I supervise what they need to take images of so it’s relevant to what they need to know for their end of year exams. When we get back to school the images are collected and stored on a shared drive and I get them to make movies of their field trip. The data is then compressed and transferred to their cell phones through Bluetooth or USB. Their cell phones essentially become notebooks that can take up to 100 little narrated movies on them,” he says.

Kerr says a lot of credit for the mLearning tool needs to go to his students, who raised the idea in the first instance when they heard cell phones could store computer files. Since then they have played an active role in the project, giving Kerr feedback and passing on their extensive knowledge of cell phone and communications technology to Kerr, who admits he was largely in the dark on such matters before he took on the project. While he says the technology to create his mobile learning tool has been around for the better part of a decade, it was his students’ familiarity with such technology that made the project possible.

“This project was completely student-driven. I just mapped out the process for transferring the data and they would look at it and critique it – it was like being graded – and I’d go away and tinker with it a bit more and they’d have another look at it. We’ve now refined it to a point where it’s at a stage where the process is very simple,” he says.

Kerr says the development of the mLearning tool has had a noticeable effect on his students. Not only have they developed an enthusiastic interest in the technological side of the project, they have also become keenly interested in the teaching material itself. He says that before the project, pass rates were at the 50-60% mark. Now they are 80-90%.

“Technology is about teaching students on their terms. Not only do they work harder, smarter and faster, the results are better.”

“They’ve really been getting into the technology and the geography. They seem to be absolutely fascinated with the idea that they can carry around their lessons or projects in a little phone and view their movies any time they want,” he says.

“And, because they can download anyone’s clip, they have been critiquing each other’s material without my prompting. I’ve come across a few lively debates and it’s really exciting to see them getting so involved in the topic.”

Finally, Sarietjie Musgrave is from Bloemfontein, South Africa and is running a project with her students who are using a mixture of desktop and mobile applications to offer help to people in the local community with disabilities, and also to spread awareness of how the community can help people with disabilities. She thought it was important for the children not only to develop theoretical solutions to help the disabled community, but that those solutions had to be practicable, and unique to the person they were helping. So from one project, around 60 mini-projects evolved. For example, one of her students used Clicker to help Julius, who could not speak or use a mouse, to click on his preferences to communicate what he would like to do – and in Afrikaans. Another student wrote an application to help a disabled girl in a rural farm to learn basic shapes and colors in her home. The students were able to develop animations to send to mobile phones to the local community to help raise awareness of their work and the disabled agenda.

These projects used PCs and phones in a way that demonstrates how technology still has the potential to transform lives in new and innovative ways. This video where Sarietje describes her students’ work is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. I am serious. Check it out:

Beyond Stories

jamesu — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:00:24 GMT

Yesterday I attended AMD's 50x15 partner summit in Sunnyvale, California. 50x15 is AMD's equivalent to Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, with the idea that 50% of the world's population can achieve access to the Internet and computers by the year 2015. In attendance were representatives from technology vendors (HP, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, Google, Sun, Microsoft), some NGOs, and even the guy who played Janice Soprano's narcoleptic boyfriend on season three of the show. (More on that later.)

The meeting format was a day-long roundtable with about 50 people in the room. I have to confess after the first couple of speakers I was really worried that it was going to be a bad day. It's not because Tom McCoy or Dan Shine were poor speakers with little to say, it was just the opposite. They were interesting, with heartfelt and inspiring stories about ICT projects AMD had sponsored in emerging markets around the world. Great stories told with flair and LOTS of photos. AMD is doing really cool work.

It's just that AMD's stories are pretty much the exact same stories that Microsoft tells, that Cisco tells, that Nokia tells, that Intel tells, that Qualcomm tells. I was worried that that I was going to sit through a day-long meeting listening to different vendors going through variations of the exact same storytelling approach we (I) use in UPG: sponsor pilot in remote location; go there and take pictures, tell the story, hope it spreads, and potentially accrue some goodwill for your company. Instead of being involved in a coordinated effort of "Doing well by doing good", by seeing for the first time what other vendors in this space are doing, it made me wonder ... are we all engaged in an exercise of "Feeling good by doing good?"

That's why I was worried it was going to be a bad day.

Don't get me wrong, these pilots have huge impact in the communities they serve, and you can see it in the faces of the people we film. Maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was bummed with the realization that the work we were doing in UPG wasn't necessarily that original or unique.

But what I realized yesterday is that the emphasis on storytelling by vendors masks the two huge problems we need to address if we, as an industry, are going to move beyond stories and drive these programs to scale to achieve the true impact we all hope for:

We need to figure out which projects actually work
We need a better way for ICT vendors to work together

The first point is quite significant. The ICT4D community doesn't really have a systematic, objective, and agreed-upon way to measure the true outcome of these projects -- whether it's the design approach for a telecenter or a project for rural Internet access or a BOP student computing architecture -- that helps us determine if the project is scalable and sustainable. During the afternoon of the AMD summit there was a panel discussion that called for the creation of an online community to help share ideas around best practices or even ratings of different ICT4D projects, and this would be a good starting point. (We have kicked around the idea inside of Microsoft of starting one of these, send me a note if you are interested or would like to participate.) My gut feel is that ultimately market forces will pick what works, but the market may need some help in at least sharing ideas on what is out there in a consistent and accessible way.

On the second point, I wonder if we need some sort of industry manifesto or consortium to better integrate the efforts of different vendors involved in this space. A starting point might be some voluntary standards on how to document and report on the investment, shape, and outcome of these pilot projects we are all doing. This might be hard given that many of these projects are incubations for future products that will compete in the market (because emerging markets are in the end, well, markets) but if the technology industry can agree upon standards for measuring claims of system performance, we should at least be able to agree upon standards for measuring claims of social performance. The last thing we need is some heavyweight standards type effort that slows down our work or even worse sucks up resources that we could instead be spending in the field, but there are so many vendors engaged in these types of projects that there is clearly an opportunity for synergy. Perhaps this is an area where the Clinton crowd can help.

In the absence of wide-scale and repeatable successes driven by closer levels of cooperation among participants in this space, all we have to rely upon for the time being are stories, and what ultimately made it a great day yesterday was that the quality of stories told at the summit were very, very good. The actor Turk Pipkin (the Sopranos guy) spent an hour going through the Nobelity Project, which centers around a documentary film he created involving interviews with 9 Nobel laureates discussing ideas on how to improve the world. (Attendees got copies of the film, and I may write a review in the next day or two.) Mathew Chetty (right) from AMD described some of the Learning Labs his company has in place in Africa, and it was great to hear the passion of an African describing ICT successes in Africa. Kristin Petersen, the founder of Inveneo, walked us through some of the projects her company is doing. Inveneo is interesting because they are essentially a non-profit systems integrator that does turnkey communication and computing solutions for NGOs, mostly in Africa. They also have created a skills certification program that will be the sort of thing we will need to sustain these projects from within local communities, especially in rural areas. Joe McCarthy from Nokia did a fly-by of some of the great projects his company is doing. This is clearly an area where I would like to learn more (I also plan to post pointers to the different slide decks people used.) Finally, Kate Stohr from Architecture for Humanity described how her group took a simple idea -- volunteers doing architecture and design work in emerging markets -- and scaled it with minimal overhead to a mass phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of participants. She also had some sample chocolate bars from one of their projects in Ecuador that she handed out to the crowd.

So in the end I'd like to thank Dan Shine and the AMD 50x15 team for organizing a great summit yesterday, because it got me thinking about what we need to do beyond telling stories, creating a systematic way to get the projects to scale without sacrificing the sense of energy and hope that draws so many different types of people into this effort.

Hanging With the APMs

jamesu — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:38:10 GMT

Academic Program Managers (APMs) are the people at Microsoft responsible for implementing the Partners in Learning program I wrote about yesterday. We have about a hundred APMs around the world, working with local schools and education ministries on various types of education projects. APMs are the equivalent of the technical evangelists Microsoft has employed for decades (I used to be one), but instead of targeting software developers, these people focus on teachers and students.

I had the chance to hang out with some of our APMs at the education conference in Helsinki I am attending this week, and I have to say they are very interesting people. Some of them are shown here. Vincent (on the left, and from Singapore) used to teach genetics; Suneet (India) used to work in rural computing; Darko (Croatia) was responsible for technology in his country's Ministry of Education; Michelle (Philippines) ran an academic institute, is the mother of 3, and is about to get her PhD as a side project; and Sanda (Romania) used to work in the film industry (and didn't know until today that she was listed in IMDB.)

One of the things the APMS discussed with me is the fact that some of Microsoft's least-known products are used extensively by teachers and students in schools throughout their countries. One example is Photo Story 3, a free download for Windows XP that makes it easy to combine photos, narration, and music into a multimedia report. Many of the projects demonstrated in the conference yesterday used this tool. Another example is Producer ("teachers love it"), a free download for Office 2003 that helps you make multimedia presentations.

South Africa provides some good examples of how the APMs impact their community. Reza Bardien, our APM there, described several projects where the team in South Africa takes a partnership-based approach with the Education Ministry, industry, and schools to get ITC curricula into the classroom. The idea is to do a pilot in a well-managed way with a series of partners, prove that it works, and then scale it in a manner so it is sustainable and repeatable. This is a multi-year process. One of these examples, involving the training of high school kids for jobs with a local mining company, was recently published as a case study. Reza also operates the "Africa Schools Technology Innovation Centre" (lovingly referred to as the "STIC") in Johannesburg. The STIC involves a consortia of 33 companies and government agencies and opened last April. It's mission is to provide a facility for ITC education research, training, workshops, and collaboration. (The STIC's manager, Angela Schaerer, wants to know when Live Writer will be available on phones. Don't know.)

A common theme across all of the APMs I am meeting here is a sense of passion for what they do combined with a sense of humility about the approach Microsoft needs to take in education. "We cannot come in and make it sound like we have all the answers" they keep telling me. They also understand the comparison I am making between technical evangelism and education advocacy, but in a good humored way are not sure if they agree with it. "We deal with people, not machines!"

3.6 Million Innovative Teachers Can't Be Wrong

jamesu — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:00:50 GMT

Helsinki, October 29, 2007

I am attending the Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum, a "Celebration/Competition" that Microsoft is holding in Helsinki as part of our Innovative Teachers Network, a grassroots community around the world that promotes and celebrates cool uses of technology in the classroom. It is a component of Partners in Learning, our core program for working with governments and educators to transform education. I wish as a company we could do more to let people know about the work we are doing here, because so much of our discussion on education seems to be about computer systems and not about learning. This show is all about learning.

And this is not, I repeat not, a typical Microsoft event. Sure, we have opening keynotes, in this case from Lauren Woodman and Dave Walddon (both shown at right, Dave is spectral) along with two educators from Finland. But the heart of the event is teachers. There are no customers, no buyers, no trade show vendors, and no salespeople. Just teachers -- about 260 of them from 40 countries -- all coming together to present and discuss 85 examples of innovative best practices. These 85 were the "winners" from about 100,000 submissions of lesson plans and course curricula from teachers worldwide. (Partners in Learning has touched 3.6 million teachers since the program started a few years ago.)

The show has the feel of a science fair, except instead of kids the participants are teachers who developed really interesting learning modules. And there is a competition, we will be announcing final "winners" at a dinner tomorrow night. But it is mainly a celebration of the great teaching demonstrated by all of the projects.

If you walk the show floor, you can see why. (I will try to post a list of all the entrants later this week.) There is a team from Thailand that had a project where the kids made claymation videos. The teachers had examples of the clay statues in their booth and were showing the videos on a Zune. It looks like something you'd see on television, except it was created by high school kids in Thailand.

A team from northern China had a project where they taught children about puppetry, an ancient art in their region. The children interviewed local puppet craftsman and performers, made a film about it, and then made their own puppets (a couple of examples are shown to the right.)

A teacher from Sweden demonstrated a project on the topic of biodiversity that involved a networked collaboration between her classroom and a classroom in Madagascar. This project had the added benefit of helping children in both countries learn English.

There were two strong entries from South Africa. One of the teachers built an "mLearning" system, complete with quizzes and online homework assignments broadcast to the students' cell phones (all of the 12th grade students in his class had one -- and as I've said before, there is more to our approach for using technology to transform education than simply deploying PCs). The other teacher built a module for his rural students called "Bright Lights, Dustbowl" that had the kids do all sorts of interesting activities ranging from visiting the local "city" to parsing songs by the Police to creating online and radio advertisements for local businesses. He even played some of the radio ads for us.

To me, this conference seems little different from Microsoft's software developer community events I was involved with in the 1990s, except instead of geeks showing off their Visual Basic applications, you have teachers showing off their geography lessons. And just as developers were always a core community for Microsoft in its first 30 years -- we never "sold" to developers, we always had to excite and inspire them to do cool and great things with our tools -- teachers are a core community for Microsoft moving forward. And it is great to participate in a showcase of what inspired teachers can do when they have the right tools.

UPG Launch in Budapest

jamesu — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:40:55 GMT

October 18, 2007

We held our big press event in Budapest on Thursday and Friday this week. With most Microsoft events, we try to hold on to some important piece of "news" that we unveil at the show in order to make it easier for journalists to write a story. In this case we did indeed have some news, but our main goal this week was to work with journalists to help establish some context on the overall approach we are taking with our Unlimited Potential strategy, with an emphasis on the impact we are making with our partners in specific countries in this region. We'll have to wait a few days to read what the press writes from the event, but I think the team in Europe overall did a good job in putting the launch together.

The keynote speakers were Nenad Pacek from The Economist Intelligence Unit; Steven Frantzen from IDC; and Will Poole and Vahé Torossian from Microsoft. Costas Andropoulos from the EU was also keynoting, but he had to appear via video. Nenad's speech was interesting, because he reinforced the point that government policy does matter in terms of driving economic growth; among other things he observed that Ireland and Greece had the same GDP 20 years ago, and Ireland's today is now twice that of Greece. Why? Steven Frantzen from IDC walked through country data from their recently released survey of IT spending in 82 countries, where they did an analysis of the impact of IT spending on national growth.

Will Poole provided a good overview of our global UPG efforts and included a video of the Romanian family I mentioned yesterday. Will also wrote an update to the UPG executive blog. Vahé (our VP for Central and eastern Europe, shown at right) discussed in more detail some of the specific programs we are doing in the region, and had an excellent guest speaker on the topic of "reverse brain drain": Bodin Dresevic, a former Microsoft development manager in Redmond who returned to his native Serbia to open a new Microsoft Development Center doing software R&D there.

When I joined Microsoft in 1995, I think there were only four places in the world where you could work for Microsoft as a software developer: Redmond plus three small satellite offices: Montreal (SoftImage), Silicon Valley (PowerPoint), and Israel (security and MSMQ). Now it seems as a company we are aggressively opening dozens of R&D centers wherever we can find pools of talented software developers, which is great for countries like Serbia because it enables them to develop local software economies.

The "official" news from the UPG launch event consisted of the following: (grouped together by focus areas)

Transforming Education

Family Education PC program in Romania (subject of the video mentioned above)
IT Academies
Microsoft Digital Literacy curricula

Fostering Local Innovation

Microsoft Innovation Centers (including one we opened in Budapest)
Release LiPs in new CEE languages (subject of a future post, this is a cool program for community-driven local language versions of Windows and Office)
EU Grants Advisor (EUGA) (making it easier for SMBs to receive EU digital literacy training grants)
IDEA Center opening in Moscow (here is a video that explains more)
Expand Microsoft Development Centre Serbia
Technical Computing Initiative in Russia

Enabling Jobs & Opportunity

IDC economic impact studies for CEE
Slovak Telecom Subscription Computing program
Investment of US$15M in local CEE ICT projects
40UP program in Slovakia
S2B (Student 2 Business) program rollout and impact
Microsoft Digital Literacy curricula

Most of these involved particular stories relevant to individual countries. I personally did interviews with journalists from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Greece, Latvia, and Slovakia. They all wanted to learn more about specific initiatives taking place in their countries to improve national competitiveness. So in aggregate what we were talking about today may not seem like "big news" like a major new product announcement, but for the countries involved our UPG programs appeared to be pretty significant.