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Samasource to host GiveWork Gala in SF

Guest — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:01:52 +0000

The Bay Area nonprofit Samasource will host the first GiveWork Charity Gala on Nov. 12 at the University Club of San Francisco, bringing together writers, luminaries, and some of the most influential women entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

The event will feature a live auction, with items for bid including a conversation with Nobel Prize laureates George Akerlof and Myron Scholes, a secret challenge with “The 4-Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss, and a date with Bollywood actress Vida Samadzai (Miss Afghanistan 2003).

The gala aims to raise funds for Samasource, a nonprofit social enterprise that creates computer-based work for women, youth and refugees living in developing countries. Samasource provides technical training, then connects workers with clients, like Stanford University Libraries and Bookshare.org, that need to outsource data jobs.

The core concept behind the service is what is called “microwork.” Samasource founder and CEO Leila Chirayath Janah says, “These little bits of labor that can be performed anytime and anywhere can add up to a real livelihood for people in many parts of the world. The driving force behind Samasource is knowing that hard-working people in places like refugee camps in Kenya and women in rural Pakistan can get life-changing work opportunities through the Internet.”

The gala’s silent auction, which hopes to raise enough funds to create work programs in two new refugee camps, will be designed Auctionomics, the auction-design firm created by Stanford Professor Paul Milgrom, the world’s most recognized expert in auction theory. Gala co-organizer Silvia Console Battilana, an Auctionomics co-founder, met Janah at the unveiling of the Her Code Report which was released by Orange Labs earlier this year. That study showed that fewer than 9% of Silicon Valley companies have a female board director, and only 3% of venture-funded companies are run by women.

Janah presented the topic of microwork at the conference, and Console Battilana was immediately impressed. “I saw an opportunity to address several challenges at once — poverty, education, and female empowerment,” she says.

With that in mind, the gala will also bring together many of the Bay Area’s leading women entrepreneurs. The event has garnered support from women such as Adriana Gascoigne of Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania, and Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook, with whom Samasource has recently partnered.

“It’s great that the work Samasource is doing on Facebook Platform is also giving all these opportunities to people in some of the world’s poorest places” Zuckerberg says. Samasource has developed a platform that allows application developers to outsource the testing of their products to workers in Africa and Asia.

Janah is scheduled to speak at the Nov. 21 gathering of TEDx in San Francisco, an independently organized offshoot of the international TED conference. The large overlap in attendees between the two events has given the GiveWork Gala the distinction of being the “unofficial pre-party” for TEDx. Tickets for the GiveWork Gala are now on sale at samasource.org/gala.

Source: Samasource and Girls in Tech

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing (Socialbrite)

• Harnessing the crowd for social good (Socialbrite)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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GoingGreen: Innovations in green tech

Guest — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:38:35 +0000

Photo by Salem Kimble

By Salem Kimble
East Bay Green Tours

Earlier this month, amid the picturesque backdrop of the Cavallo Lodge in Sausalito, Calif., a flurry of venture capitalists and industry innovators came together at the GoingGreen Conference from AlwaysOn. There were all manner of industries represented, from cement that absorbs carbon (Novacem) to low frequency wireless technology for long range monitoring (On-Ramp Wireless) to completely architected materials (Nanosys) and everything in between.

In fact, there was so much going on, let’s break down a few of the more intriguing elements.

Smart designs for buildings

Project Frog, a slick and friendly outfit from San Francisco, showed off their super quick building construction from partially pre-fabricated buildings that minimize waste during construction, save 50 percent in energy once built, and go up in an incredible six weeks’ time. Their smart designs take into consideration the building process and include things like designing doors and walls to fit the size that the wall material is when sold. Their flagship installation is at Crissy Field in San Francisco.

Buildings are important, but perhaps more intriguing are the people who are re-engineering the building blocks themselves, as Novacem has done. They have an alternative to Portland cement (standard material used in the majority of construction) that has a lighter carbon footprint at the outset and over the long term. Says Novacem’s Stewart Evans, “The big win is that Novacem has the potential to not only remove the 5 percent [of carbon] from creation [of the cement] but to take out 4 percent of carbon [from the atmosphere] over time.”

Electric cars: From sports cars to ‘bicycles’

Tesla Roadster

The state of electric cars is surprisingly advanced, with enterprising companies Coda, Aptera and Tesla on the scene. Coda is a company jointly working in China and the US on both the battery development and the electric car. According to CEO Kevin Czinger, they will have electric cars available to the public as early as fall 2010 with a 100-mile distance battery life and competitive price point of $30,000.

Aptera is a company with an entirely different strategy that currently has them legally classified as a bicycle — a car designed with only three wheels. Aptera’s strategy has been to tackle aerodynamics first and foremost in design so that less energy is needed for transport in the first place.

Tesla, the most widely known and covered in the press, strikes one as the equivalent of an Apple — emphasizing value beyond price and design focused development in which they build all their own software. Their most recent project, the upcoming roadster, is being created from scratch, which will allow a clean slate for the chassis and battery to have greater efficiency.

The less sexy but very economically savvy Bright Automotive, Inc. is tackling the commercial fleet market of delivery vans. They might seem ho-hum, but as an investment at scale they provide the highest economics savings, says Bright Chairman Rueben Munger. As investments, electric fleet vehicles “are price positive on day one,” he said.

Energy: Biofuels and geothermal

There were quite a few biofuels folks. It appears we’re more than fine when it comes to the availability of fuels as there is no shortage of biofuels solutions. Jatropha, the miracle plant of SG Biofuels that is easy to grow, doesn’t compete with food crops. They say they could produce cost-competitive biofuels at a price point equivalent to oil’s $42 a barrel. Similarly miraculous, Rentech offers “synthetic fuels for jet and diesel engines [made from] trash, sewage sludge, forestry and agricultural waste, energy crops and fossil resources.”

Then there’s the perennial grass feedstock Miscanthus from Mendel Biotechnology. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were engineered so effectively as to walk off the field and pump our gas for us.

Geothermal is something I haven’t heard much about lately as a feasible option, but Potter Drilling, backed by Google.org, is working on a patented technology that would allow much deeper drilling than is currently possible, which suddenly makes geothermal a viable option in many more regions. They are beyond the first stages of research and are working with a physical prototype.

There were also a few gasifer companies, including Sierra Energy and Zeropoint Clean Tech. Sierra Energy has an added bonus of focusing on tying in existing steel mills into their business design to revitalize old steel towns where many jobs have been lost.

As far as efficiency solutions and carbon tracking, the contenders in the field at this conference included Joule Labs, Greenbox Technology and FirstCarbon Solutions.

Technology: data collection applications

One of the striking presentations came from San Diego-based On-Ramp Wireless, a company with technology that harnesses uses and prices for wireless that don’t currently exist on the market. In simple terms, their technology harnesses low-frequency (non-regulated) wireless and allows for data collection within a range of up to 10 or 12 miles. That data collection application can be used on everything from finding a leak in a tube under city cement to automatically sensing that a farmer’s field needs watering.
Another technology leader was Nanosys, a San Francisco company with a vision for architected materials to become the modern equivalent invention of assembly lines.

Some applications of their work have shown up in reduced data center power consumption from (using higher density Nano Flash drives) and improved battery performance (re-engineered battery anode material) and remote phosphor for blue LED backlights. One of their intriguing materials is an engineered substance that when separated into various sizes in tubes causes the tubes to reflect light from an LED pointer in the colors of the rainbow. Unlike others in their nano-tech field, Nanosys has been working on technology development that is designed with the eventual large-scale production in mind from the beginning.

Altogether, it was enough new technologies to leave one’s head spinning, but in a hopeful direction. The overlap of sustainability and profitability is undeniable, especially when it comes to natural resources and large industries. I was surprised by the impression at this event that the greatest challenge lies not in innovation and creation of new technology, but in how those inventions and improvements can create a pathway to market and eventual widespread use.

Salem Kimble is operations manager of East Bay Green Tours. This is her first article for Socialbrite.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing

JD Lasica — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:45:58 +0000

Samasource from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Leila Chirayath, founder and CEO of Samasource, has been popping up at nonprofit events everywhere lately. Samasource is a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that connects small and mid-size businesses with individuals and firms in the developing world that can perform outsourcing work (such as data entry) in a socially responsible way.

They now have pilot programs in Kenya, Nepal and rural India, and their goal, as their website says, is “to catalyze sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation by creating a thriving, active market for socially responsible outsourcing to developing regions.”

The 4-minute interview was conducted on a very windy day at the 2008 Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in San Mateo, Calif. (though I do need to get a fabric microphone cover). I caught up with Leila a few minutes before her jam-packed talk. As Leila says, there’s a lot of misinformation in the media about outsourcing, and Samasource can help you sort through the best options.

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