Sense Substitution

Two interesting products from the field of neural interfaces.

Both of them leverage the fact that our sensory organs are just transducers which give inputs to a really flexible and remarkable signal processing system called the brain. This makes it possible to use one sensory organ to achieve a similar result to that of another. Sensory substitution.

In a very indirect way, sign-language or braille could be considered as external sense substitutions. But these two instances that I came across thanks to Engadget and Google, a few months ago, are much more direct. Interestingly, this article from HowStuffWorks seems to suggest that folks have been trying this since the 1900s!

The first is called BrainPort (their corporate site talks about a more clinical use of their product).
Essentially, here vision is being substituted by taste!
Do watch the following video:


And heres the second one.
Check out this browser screenshot to know how I came across this ;-)

I think this (seeingwithsound) is a way cooler solution. The interface is much more natural and amenable to daily use. Well, here, vision is being substituted by stereo sound - almost sonar.

In case you want to try what this feels like, just download their free windows software winvoice, plug in your web cam and put on a stereo headset. Definitely has room for improvement, but I like the ease and simplicity it offers (they even have j2me, winmo and android mobile phone app versions!).

The best part - both of them are non-invasive, non-risky and do not cost a lot. I hope this helps a lot of people who really need it now. Certainly good news.

Eko rebranded

If you'd noticed, Eko has changed its colors and its logo over the past few days. Instead of orange, it now sports an earthy green and has a tail-piece (lets call it 'slash dash') added which makes it identify itself with the way most Indians sign off a cash amount while writing it on paper.

So adieu ol' logo

And a warm welcome to the new one

How do you find our new logo?

William Kamkwamba: Building a windmill

The following is the 2009 TED talk by William Kamkwamba who simply set up a windmill in his backyard. Inspired by two library books (more by the cover on one), from a really constrained background, with a scrapyard for raw materials and despite the local skepticism and superstition, William did what he set out to do.

His simple message - to never give up. Do also scroll down to view his 2007 TED appearance.



And heres his TED appearance in 2007:



TED is simply amazing!

I think it would be great to have a TED equivalent on prime time media in India instead of some of those really crappy shows and weepy soaps. Imagine how many little sparks this could ignite across a country like ours (and indeed in many other countries as well). This enthusiasm needs to be made infectious.

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]

Bokode arrives! Move aside RFID, Goodbye BarCodes

This is super-duper cool! Every once in a while comes along an invention so simple yet so elegant that it literally melts the innovator in you :)

Bokode = some id printed on paper + a small plastic lens blob.

The word Bokode was derived from 'bokeh' (jap.),".. which refers to the round blob produced in an out-of-focus image of a light source"

I guess it would look like a drop of transparent wax fallen on a paper with micro-printing.
Amazing. Awesome.

For more dope head to:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/barcodes-0724.html

Hats off to these dudes at MIT. The website says: Ramesh Raska, Ankit Mohan (lead), Grace Woo, Shinsaku Hiura, Quinn Smithwick. And guess what? the work was supported by grants from Nokia, Samsung, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. So, you see where this is heading :)

"Poor aren’t lifeless bricks"

I am borrowing this caption straight off this article on LiveMint "Poor aren’t lifeless bricks".

For a good part of our history, folks seem to have focussed on exclusively on charity as a means to uplift people out of poverty. While in some cases, this benevolence might be essential, in most cases it is counter productive. I still remember one of dad's church sermons based on the proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.".

Poverty, in each of its grim shades, is undoubtedly a crippling condition. While it gags and bogs down, it finds itself fighting hard against the basic human instinct for survival, upliftment and reaching a state of equilibrium with his context. A lifeless brick definitely cannot do that. The fact is that inherently anyone who has fallen wants to rise and the risen want to fly. The key is to simply enable them. All that they need is inclusion - social and financial; to an infrastructure that could help them help themselves.
(pic: A Sattu "powdered baked gram, a high energy giving food usually mixed with water or with milk" vendor in Bihar.)

There are many whose knowledge about poverty starts and ends with reading about it on the Wikipedia, or watching 'Slumdog Millionaire'. Communicating with them is disheartening at times because they tend to stereotype the poor as somehow second rate. It is at times difficult to convey Poor NOT EQUAL TO Stupid. While it is a fact that the poor have lesser opportunities; that is simply the side-effect of a 'state' they were/are in and can be enabled to get out of.

Another misconception is equating 'Rural' with 'Poor'. Both are entirely different realms in themselves. There are the urban poor too and their problems are just as daunting! This is more a difference in contexts.

There are a few who have got this understanding right - and they will no doubt be able to reap its benefits. The telecom companies for instance, have done a great job so far! Instead of just pitying the poor, they have gone ahead and launched (potentially profit making) services that addresses the communication inclusion part. This is definitely not charity! By ensuring that their services were tailored (packaged) for the 'poor' (Rs. 50 lifetime connection packs for instance), but not compromising on the service quality itself, they have at least started with the right step. The same networks host the communications of the richest as well as the poorest :). It is high time that all product and service designers are sensitized on these issues.

Also, do check out Universal Financial Access - India. It is a social network initiative which aims at financial inclusion started by Sanjay Bhargava who is also the Chief Mentor at Eko.

Welcome to the age of 'micro' revolutions that have macro implications!

Powering the next billion cell phones

Despite the state of affairs with the world economy, there seems to be a sense of a treasure hunt as far as mobile companies' approach to the developing world is concerned.

Considering all the 'little' insights seriously could go a long way in ensuring the viability of a product or service in such a challenging environment. In other words; I think that the best way to approach this market is with a clear sense of the opportunity it presents and a much clearer sense of its constrains.

From a recent trip to rural India undertaken as a part of a usability research team, I realized that the biggest constraint to the uptake of mobile phone there was not money. From our conversations with existing users, we found that almost all of them used really basic handsets, some even bought as second/ third hand refurbished devices where the cost was just a couple of hundred rupees ($4 or 5!).

Connectivity was also fast becoming a non-issue with major operators trying to set up really extensive rural networks and even competing with each other to offer 'lifetime' pre-paid connections for less than half a dollar! We even saw how local village stores (each, just about the size of a small car) had morphed into outlets there selling small value airtime recharges.

The major concern there was finding a means to recharge ones phone! and to find a phone that required shorter recharges and lasted longer. I'd like to share two interesting developments (thanks again to textually.org) in the past week give some hope here.

Solar powered phone.
Heres a launch news from Samsung and LG - earlier this year. I think these should become as ubiquitous as solar powered calculators. Rural India is blessed with enough sunshine to at least supplement the need for (non-existent) power sockets!

Ambient radio powered phone.
This is more interesting, though it sounds slightly more ambitious. I have always wondered why this could not be done! There is enough 'free' radio noise around to feed some power circuits. I remember having experimented with Crystal Radios (basically AM receivers that do not need power source) when I was into hobby electronics (the most difficult part I remember was getting the ear-piece right). All one needs to do is have a gazillion tuned circuits to harness the spectrum. Anyways, the good news is that Nokia allegedly has done just that!. This makes for an exciting powering solution for the mobile phone, especially in the Urban context.

I don't know if the news links are really trustworthy news sources, but I do know that these are relevant pointers in the right direction and at scale their cost should be really low.

On a side note, I think it is constraints that push the human ability to innovate and every era and region has its fair share of the same. If all was well with the stone age, I would have been engraving this blog post on a stone tablet now :) - Flintstones anyone ;)?

Lessons on 'context'. Kiva - Cats that donate

I've been reading about Kiva. Its an amazing project that can turn anyone online with a credit card into a micro lender. If you always wanted to be a part of an MFI but couldn't get yourself to move beyond the edge of your office cubicle, Kiva puts you thousands of miles away, just a credit card and CVV number away from the wallet of a micro-entrepreneur.

I admire the way Kiva has touched the lives of thousands of people. But heres a candid confession made on his blog that takes my respect for its founder Matt Flannery a notch higher. It is a lesson on the importance of 'context' and communication. Every product, solution or communication is usually made on the basis of its 'context'. Take things out of their intended context and plop 'em in another - suddenly a perfectly sane piece begins to sound bizzare.

Catfood and Commoditization. In this blog Matt observes how the simple (and innocent) act of a lender in America setting his pet cat as his online avatar on Kiva leads to (an equally innocent) confusion for its recipient in Africa.

I heard a story recently from a Kiva Fellow stationed in Africa who, when showing the entrepreneur his lenders, was asked the cat question. How does that work? Why has a cat lent to me? How can a cat lend to me? Does that cat really want his money back? (he looks pretty fat).

Funny but true. Even at Eko, our User Interface was made keeping in mind a context. The context is an unbanked majority in India who however have access to mobile phones. Dig a few layers deeper - a majority of these handsets are Ultra Low Cost Handsets. - almost all the users are just number literate - most of them are pre-paid mobile users.

Eko's interface that uses just number dialing fits this context really well. But the trouble starts when analyzed by and within the frameworks of smart-phone toting, iPod sporting executives like you and me, the interface appears hopelessly outdated, outmoded, complex and what not. I've just been back from a field visit to rural Bihar and I couldn't help but imagine how useless it might be to give an illiterate villager a special 'hard-bound' edition of 'The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid' - being hard-bound he can't even feed it to his goats!