n3eight

So the video in previous post is our presentation during the Nextlab event last week. The presenters for our team were Yulia Surya and Prashant Paliwal, and the whole team, Boling Jiang, Rajeev Koz, and Sunish Gupta, tended the booth all day, explaining our mission and vision to the attendees. As usual, we were very happy to see and chat with many visitors to our booth who were excited about this platform.

This event marks the end of Spring semester. The n3eight team accomplished many of the goals that we set for the semester, but there are more works to be done to bring our vision to fruition. With no conflicting classes this Summer, this platform will receive full-time attention and the plan is to have an alpha version of the website ready by the end of Summer. This website will be an integration of process and technology that makes the incubation of mobile applications for developing countries more streamlined. Stay tuned and please feel free to leave any feedbacks!

Come and browse through the projects from this semester’s Nextlab course. Details here.

A little bit about Mobile Monday Boston @ MIT on April 7th……… I know this is an overdue post, but we’re extremely busy setting up the incubator, so your understanding is appreciated .

On Monday April 7th, Mobile Monday Boston held its regular gathering at MIT campus. With over 400 attendees, it was a rather exciting event. The detail can be found here.

There are more than 10 booths, and about 5 of those booths belong to Nextlab’s projects. One of the booths was the Next Billion Networks (NBN) itself. We were surprised by the overwhelming level of interests expressed by the people who visited NBN’s booth. Many of them wanted to get involved with NBN in general, or contribute in specific projects. Some wanted to offer their technical skills, technology reuse, etc. Others wanted to offer specific expertise such as healthcare. They wondered if the initiative is restricted to MIT community.

The answer to the last question is no! And that is exactly why we’re here developing this incubator platform & process, tailored for mobile technology development for developing countries.

During the event, we had to inform people that for now, they have to manually email Jhonatan to get involved. One of the goals of this project is to allow such passionate individuals to have easy access to the programs that NBN is working on. So stay tuned for our incubator platform!

Please post your helpful suggestions to our project here.

Some of us had a meeting on Wednesday with Alexis Kopikis, co-Founder of Apperian.

We really enjoyed the meeting and learned a lot from him. He has tons of experience in technology entrepreneurship, and particularly technology incubator process.

Our project is making good progress. We’re pretty much done with the high-level requirement. We’re now working on the technical aspects of the project and continue to build lower-level business and system requirements. We look forward to present our progress to the class and receive feedback from everybody.

Lastly, we would like to also congratulate Hammock and Dinube teams for making it to the MIT 100K Semifinal.

ITU has released the ICT Development Index for 2009 – a study that looks into “level of advancement of ICTs in more than 150 countries worldwide and compares progress made between 2002 and 2007“. It has received a fair amount of online coverage and somewhat limited dead tree media coverage.

The results are pretty amazing- there are over 4 billion mobile subscribers globally, a penetration rate of 61.1% . The details for mobile telephony growth are even more intriguing:

009 figures for Global Mobile penetration (Source: ITU)

The devil is of course in the details – how sustainable and equitable it is, specifically what are the factors that drove this growth, etc – but mobile telephony in the developing world has never looked so good.

This presentation outlines our strategy for this project

Any comments are gladly appreciated

Take your pick from the lot  -  OLPC’s XO , NVidia’s Tegra on Android, FreeScale/Pegatron’s Linux Netbook or even the more capable x86  netbook lineup, one thing is fairly certain – before we know it, the retail price for an entry level computing device will dip into the <$200 bracket.

A sub-$200, powerful, energy efficient  mobile computer – especially running a fully featured FLOSS software  connected to the internet cloud is big news for consumers. It’s even bigger for the next billion users of ICT. What is particularly interesting to me is to understand how an ICT for development strategy can work with these mobile computing trends to effectively complement the ever widening reach of (mobile) telephony in the developing world.

And lest we forget, all of this probably started off right here in the Media Lab.