Started by a serial entrepreneur from Boston, right now they're building tools to help NGOs reach people in abject poverty, and they have some really big ideas for the future.
They're based in the Philippines and actually are currently looking for developers to come over on 6-12 month fellowships to experience life there and contribute to the core product. If anyone is interested, I can link you to the relevant posting.
(not affiliated, just think what they're doing is awesome)
Thank you for mentioning engageSPARK! Here's a quick summary of what we're building: Our first product empowers organizations to dramatically extend the reach and impact of their pro-poor programs. A not-for-profit business, we're building the easiest to use self-service cloud-based solution to easily and quickly launch comprehensive messaging, surveying, curriculums, and decision tree programs focused on developing countries via SMS, USSD and Voice Calls (roughly half of world’s poor are illiterate) in 200+ countries. engageSPARK will also be the first platform custom built for software developers in developing countries – they will utilize APIs to easily and quickly integrate into multiple telecoms across multiple countries for basic building blocks such as SMS, Voice, USSD, and Mobile Money. To understand the problems we’re solving, please read http://engagespark.com/blog/is-sms-really-solution-change-vo... .
Their mission is to give everybody in the world an address. Something that people in the West take for granted, but isn't available for most of the globe's citizens. This is also a major opportunity business-wise of course and if I could invest, I would.
As someone who spent the majority of this year living in Kenya I have to say that this was one of the weirdest things I had to adjust to. I was maybe living 10 minutes drive from the centre of Nairobi and no one could agree on what my actual address was. Directions were always given as references and as for receiving mail well good luck
"We built the first community cellular network in a rural village in Papua, Indonesia, in early 2013, with support from USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies. That first network is still running today, and today we continue to add new networks, constantly bringing connectivity to new users and communities worldwide."
Haven't met the rest of the team, but the CTO, Shaddi, is an awesome guy.
You seem proud. Slap yourself on the back from me, too. Such great work! And lay one on for Shaddi. What a dude.
Not.
This is ... centralized, US-led, heavily geopolitically partisan communications networks sold with vague economic development overtones. Any realistic evaluation would find it hard to conclude other than that such networks will chiefly be used to justify further US and Australian meddling (eg. extreme communications interception... such as the Indonesian president earlier this year) in this region.
I work at Akvo. We build open source software which we run as a service. Our services are used primarily to combat poverty. We team up with hundreds of NGOs as well as UN organisations and country governments. We have a great team of 55+ people in fourteen countries, with hubs in Amsterdam, London, Stockholm, DC, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Delhi, Bangalore and Denpasar.
I'm not directly associated, but one of my friends was an early employee who worked on some of the early prototypes and helped set up a location in India. They make a cheap (a few thousand dollars vs tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars) and compact (Read: portable) eye-exam device that interfaces with a smartphone for its camera and processor. Think of a traveling doctor bringing eye exams to patients in remote villages. Pair that with some of those cheap adjustable glasses (http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid...) and you've got a means for providing first-world eye care to the rest of the world.
I think the company is still based in Cambridge, MA.
Electricity is generally seen as going the way of telecommunications where it will skip a wired grid and go straight to wireless (in this case, distributed solar). Here's three startups I know are trying to make distributed energy happen in developing world:
The company is building a mobile based care platform for patients with diabetes or at risk of diabetes along with a Square equivalent device for diagnostics. While cost is one of the issue for patients, it is not the only one. Quality of care varies significantly across a city and the moment you step outside a major city, there is little to no specialized care for chronic conditions that need some form of training for managing the condition. A mobile phone with some form of internet connectivity is ubiquitous these days. So leveraging that to reach as many people as possible makes sense. There are over 80 million people with diabetes in India and another 80 million are expected to develop it over the next decade or so. Add to this the costs and quality of life of patients who have to suffer the complications (kidney failure, amputation, etc), and any improvements that can be made to these numbers with technology is worth the effort and makes business sense too.
The problem isn't India specific. China, US, Europe and the Middle East have similar or higher prevalence rates. It is just that India makes sense as a place to start doing things.
It's been a few years that we have been working on this. We mostly operate out of Bangalore but we have an office in Boston too. Feel free to drop by!
Based in London and Nairobi, they've built a Bitcoin-based service that enables migrants & expats to send money quickly and safely back to their relatives (called remittances in FinTech parlance). I'm not directly associated with them, but we've met many times at Nairobi's monthly Bitcoin meetup.
Doubt it. Since when is their fee a flat 50c btw? Afaik they're free now (beta) and going live next month at 0.5%.
And let's not forget, they have a presence in North-America, Western-Europe and Australia. Not even e.g. Japan. And hell, they're in beta in all of those countries except five.
But more importantly, they're not a remittance company. So I really doubt we'll see a remittance product from them anytime soon.
But who knows. It's a legitimate business venture. If you can process a payment in bitcoin and pay out in a local currency and do remittance that way, you can process a remittance 'payment', too. The problem isn't really the technical or business part though, it's that it brings up a lot of KYC/AML responsibilities that facilitating retail shopping doesn't. So unless you want to really build out a remittance product, you can't just do something like this 'on the side'. And Stripe is way too focused on payments to jump into remittance properly anytime soon.
Especially when there aren't any deep liquidity pools for bitcoin in Africa (i.e. a lack of exchanges). Phillipines, India, all of that could feasibly happen soon (not by Stripe, but other companies), as liquidity does exist (and they're big remittance corridors), but undercutting Bitpesa anytime soon is unlikely. Bitpesa itself is already hustling to make this work with a local presence and its a bit of a mystery to me who their liquidity provider is atm.
Do you have any idea of the type of volume / growth they're getting? They're definitely one of the most exciting bitcoin projects to me, but it's awfully quiet.
Gecko Landmarks - makes location based services work where addresses are not available and people cannot read maps. Basically a reverse geo-coding service that work everywhere and for everyone.
Jola Venture with ties between Boston and Cameroon is working on bringing modern innovations to rural and impoverished communities. They haven't scaled like a "Startup," but they operate like one. http://jolaventure.com
Is search platform (as a service) for e-commerce websites to boost on-line sales through a complete and manageable integration. We are providing Amazon search experience for small/medium e-commerce web site. With advanced UI components and analytics.
Pangea (http://gopangea.com) is looking to help the underserved communities send money. Generally, remittances are from high GDP to low GDP countries.
Pangea was part of the first class of Impact Engine (http://theimpactengine.com/), a for-profit social venture accelerator originally run by Chuck Templeton (found of Open Table).
Outernet https://www.outernet.is
We're building a global broadcast data service to provide a basic level of news, information, and education for all of humanity.
Yelp for low-income people in the developing world. They just did a pilot in Hyderabad (India), and helped pregnant women living in slum areas discover hospitals around them offering better, cheaper care then they were receiving elsewhere (some were having to pay bribes to get care at government hospitals).
My friend is the founder, working in Ann Arbor with an amazing group of aeronautical and electrical engineers, medical researchers, and others. They're building hardened VTOL drones to take medical supplies, samples, tests, back and forth from hospitals to rural India. They have a great team and deep relationships with the NGO and health sectors in India.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadStarted by a serial entrepreneur from Boston, right now they're building tools to help NGOs reach people in abject poverty, and they have some really big ideas for the future.
They're based in the Philippines and actually are currently looking for developers to come over on 6-12 month fellowships to experience life there and contribute to the core product. If anyone is interested, I can link you to the relevant posting.
(not affiliated, just think what they're doing is awesome)
http://www.okhi.com/
Their mission is to give everybody in the world an address. Something that people in the West take for granted, but isn't available for most of the globe's citizens. This is also a major opportunity business-wise of course and if I could invest, I would.
is another very clever effort aimed at solving the same problem
http://matternet.us
Surely in most cases the distances are too long?
"We built the first community cellular network in a rural village in Papua, Indonesia, in early 2013, with support from USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies. That first network is still running today, and today we continue to add new networks, constantly bringing connectivity to new users and communities worldwide."
Haven't met the rest of the team, but the CTO, Shaddi, is an awesome guy.
Not.
This is ... centralized, US-led, heavily geopolitically partisan communications networks sold with vague economic development overtones. Any realistic evaluation would find it hard to conclude other than that such networks will chiefly be used to justify further US and Australian meddling (eg. extreme communications interception... such as the Indonesian president earlier this year) in this region.
Instead, we should lobby for FirefoxOS to drop cellular as de-facto and embrace alternate link-layers, ad-hoc and mesh! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047
Akvo helps people bring international development to life, online.
I'm not directly associated, but one of my friends was an early employee who worked on some of the early prototypes and helped set up a location in India. They make a cheap (a few thousand dollars vs tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars) and compact (Read: portable) eye-exam device that interfaces with a smartphone for its camera and processor. Think of a traveling doctor bringing eye exams to patients in remote villages. Pair that with some of those cheap adjustable glasses (http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid...) and you've got a means for providing first-world eye care to the rest of the world.
I think the company is still based in Cambridge, MA.
1. http://angazadesign.com
2. http://powerhive.com
3. http://sunfunder.com
Building solar micro grids for remote villages in Tanzinia and Ghana. Amazing team and vision.
The company is building a mobile based care platform for patients with diabetes or at risk of diabetes along with a Square equivalent device for diagnostics. While cost is one of the issue for patients, it is not the only one. Quality of care varies significantly across a city and the moment you step outside a major city, there is little to no specialized care for chronic conditions that need some form of training for managing the condition. A mobile phone with some form of internet connectivity is ubiquitous these days. So leveraging that to reach as many people as possible makes sense. There are over 80 million people with diabetes in India and another 80 million are expected to develop it over the next decade or so. Add to this the costs and quality of life of patients who have to suffer the complications (kidney failure, amputation, etc), and any improvements that can be made to these numbers with technology is worth the effort and makes business sense too.
The problem isn't India specific. China, US, Europe and the Middle East have similar or higher prevalence rates. It is just that India makes sense as a place to start doing things.
It's been a few years that we have been working on this. We mostly operate out of Bangalore but we have an office in Boston too. Feel free to drop by!
http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/no-answers-in-sight-for-ind...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-07/india-s-deadly-diab...
Based in London and Nairobi, they've built a Bitcoin-based service that enables migrants & expats to send money quickly and safely back to their relatives (called remittances in FinTech parlance). I'm not directly associated with them, but we've met many times at Nairobi's monthly Bitcoin meetup.
And let's not forget, they have a presence in North-America, Western-Europe and Australia. Not even e.g. Japan. And hell, they're in beta in all of those countries except five.
But more importantly, they're not a remittance company. So I really doubt we'll see a remittance product from them anytime soon.
But who knows. It's a legitimate business venture. If you can process a payment in bitcoin and pay out in a local currency and do remittance that way, you can process a remittance 'payment', too. The problem isn't really the technical or business part though, it's that it brings up a lot of KYC/AML responsibilities that facilitating retail shopping doesn't. So unless you want to really build out a remittance product, you can't just do something like this 'on the side'. And Stripe is way too focused on payments to jump into remittance properly anytime soon.
Especially when there aren't any deep liquidity pools for bitcoin in Africa (i.e. a lack of exchanges). Phillipines, India, all of that could feasibly happen soon (not by Stripe, but other companies), as liquidity does exist (and they're big remittance corridors), but undercutting Bitpesa anytime soon is unlikely. Bitpesa itself is already hustling to make this work with a local presence and its a bit of a mystery to me who their liquidity provider is atm.
http://www.geckolandmarks.com/
ultra low-cost irrigation systems
Is search platform (as a service) for e-commerce websites to boost on-line sales through a complete and manageable integration. We are providing Amazon search experience for small/medium e-commerce web site. With advanced UI components and analytics.
The company is base in Riga, Latvia
Pangea was part of the first class of Impact Engine (http://theimpactengine.com/), a for-profit social venture accelerator originally run by Chuck Templeton (found of Open Table).
GramVaani provides crowdsourced news and other ICT4D services to the underserved.
Yelp for low-income people in the developing world. They just did a pilot in Hyderabad (India), and helped pregnant women living in slum areas discover hospitals around them offering better, cheaper care then they were receiving elsewhere (some were having to pay bribes to get care at government hospitals).
My friend is the founder, working in Ann Arbor with an amazing group of aeronautical and electrical engineers, medical researchers, and others. They're building hardened VTOL drones to take medical supplies, samples, tests, back and forth from hospitals to rural India. They have a great team and deep relationships with the NGO and health sectors in India.