Patient Capital - Sunflowers in the desert

The poor need tools more than charity.
People providing these tools need more support and capital than mere aid.
And most importantly, the folks supporting these people need
a deep understanding of social capital and delayed monetization.
Jacqueline appropriately calls this - Patient Capital.

Another great TED Talk by Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO Acumen Fund:
(Courtesy: Guy Kawasaki)

Related: "Poor Aren't Lifeless Bricks"

Aggregation of Senses

I like Nostradamizing the future of telecommunications. So, if you're in the mood for some etherspeak; read on...

One major hypothesis I have is that user interfaces will be neural in nature.

Here's another one: Services in the future will be about aggregation of senses.

Just look around- Blogs are an aggregation of personal journals. Social Networking is about aggregation of weak-relationships. Advertisement is about aggregation of perceived demand. Cloud Computing aggregates processing power. Malls and Shopping Centers aggregate sales. Indices aggregate performance. Cities aggregate people. Banks aggregate liabilities and assets, Cosmopolitanism aggregates outlooks. The list is varied and colorful. (Btw, a list aggregates items ;))

I think we intuitively like to see things bundled together.

So, what does aggregation do?
It:
-Hides complexities
-Introduces redundancy
-Eliminates single points of failures
-Massively empowers
-Still maintains individual identity
-Assumes positive outcomes for decisions made on/by scale ('all' cannot be wrong)

Heres what I mean by aggregation of senses.
In the far future, thanks to neural inter-networks, decisions, opinions and actions could be based on collective sensory experiences.

• It will no longer matter if a friend is visually impaired, because vision would already have been aggregated, he could easily see through the eyes of his willing friends or even his cellphone camera. Maybe, even the cellphone would no longer need a camera!

• When you drive (your futurecar), if you've subscribed to drive aggregation on the road, you'll be able to easily speak on the cell phone while you drive at 300 mph, because when you do, the necessary inputs and processing for avoiding mishaps will come from various people in your proximity and even electronic sensors within the vehicle and on the road

• Virtual people will have 'real' implications. Virtual worlds will exist seamlessly with the real world.

By the time these things come to pass, the human brain would also have evolved sufficiently to handle such large volumes of data. Information density per person in 2009 is definitely magnitudes larger than what it was in 1909 and the only way it is heading is north, unless the human race decides one fine morning to completely shun technology.

This is the kind of stuff, that I think the Googles of the future will be busy provisioning, the people of the future subscribing to and the payment companies of the future banking on.

Snap, snap... back to reality.

Cast your vote at Project 10^100

[Its been a case of blogger's block. The good news is, I seem to be on my way out of it.]

Last September, I had written about Google's 10 to the power 100 initiative.

Well, it seems the good folks inside googleplexes have had their super-fill of ideas which they've whittled down to 16 and now they want your vote on it. Do click the link below to cast your vote.
http://www.project10tothe100.com/vote.html

Interesting to note: "Build better banking tools for everyone" figures in as one among the top 16 needs. Folks have suggested using the reach of mobile telephony to do this. Hmm... sounds familiar! we've been trying to do that all along- glad to hear the world echo the thought :).

[Now you know why we're called EKO]