NextLabbers,

Monday we’re having a discussion on the five papers on Interfaces we’ve designated. For those in the audience, please come having read the papers, since we’re looking forward to a lively discussion.

This class’ papers (and presenters) are:
- Design studies for a financial management system for micro-credit groups in rural india (Prashant Paliwal)
- Designing an architecture for delivering mobile info services to rural developing world (Oliver Wilder-Smith)
- Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate PC Users (Scot Frank)
- Speech interfaces for equitable access to information technology (Anastasios Dimas)
- Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users (Ted Chan)

See you then.

Hi all,

There’s a talk today that should be quite interesting …

WHO: Asheesh Advani, President and CEO of Virgin Money
WHEN: Thursday, October 16th from 2:00-4:00pm
WHERE: E15-209 (Wiesner Room)
WHAT: CFB Seminar Series
SEMINAR TITLE: From CircleLending to Virgin Money: The Past, Present, and Future of Social Banking

BIOGRAPHY:
Asheesh is an egghead among cool kids and a cool kid among eggheads – and that’s how he likes it. He founded Virgin Money USA and helped develop the vision of building a company that is unlike any other in the crowded but staid financial services industry. Asheesh pioneered the business of managing person-to-person loans between relatives and friends as the CEO and Founder of CircleLending, which launched in 2001 and jazzed up the industry. The company grew at rates exceeding 25% per quarter and established the new product category before attracting the interest of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

Asheesh is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and commentator on financial innovation in the media. He has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Time magazine, and highlighted in broadcast segments on PBS and NPR. Asheesh was named one of the Boston’s Top 40 Entrepreneurs Under 40 and authored Investors in Your Backyard (Nolo Press), the first book on the topic of raising money from relatives and friends, which Business Week called “as indispensable as a calculator” for small business owners seeking financing.

Asheesh began his career as a management consultant at the Monitor Group, a strategy consulting firm, and subsequently worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and from Oxford University, where he received a Commonwealth Scholarship.

As we approach the end of Milestone 2 (“Needs Assessment”), you have probably noticed that Project Partners often do not respond to your questions according to our time frames, or have other, more important priorities, or often do not know the answers themselves. Remember that many times these are capable people who, like us, are trying to do good, but are themselves figuring exactly how. Add that often times they have developing country-related constraints, and if your are not careful, you could spend most of the semester “waiting for answers”.

Please recall what we mentioned in class last Wednesday: to avoid that stagnation, your team must set internal deadlines for receiving outside input, and once past that, you must leverage the insights gained from your own research of the problem at hand to make educated assumptions and move forward. As much an effort as NextLab makes to bring you interesting, on-the-ground problems to solve, do not, for a minute, make the mistake of thinking that they will come as discrete, clearly defined matters that you can quickly grasp and address as though it was a quantitative problem-set on a sheet of paper. These are mostly social, not technical problems, so you must think how to address them as such using technology, not the other way around. And learn to deal with the many shades of gray you will encounter, to make decisions, and to learn from them whether they turn out to be the right or the wrong ones. We feel that that’s one of they key skills you should develop at NextLab.

In sum, stop waiting, start defining. You must be readying yourselves for Milestone 3 by now.

NextLabbers,

This is to remind you that teams that have a viable, well-advancing prototype may apply for travel to their local communities in order to test it under real-life conditions during IAP. We have funds to send committed, well-defined students, so we really encourage you to work hard during the semester so that you can take advantage of this real-world deployment opportunity.

You need only submit one page describing what you would do during the IAP, why it is important, and how you will collaborate with your local project partner. We will evaluate all applications on a case-to-case basis. The deadline to apply for NextLab IAP travel funds is Friday, November 14th.