Connections
Now that we have one foot (ok, two) in the blogsophere, we'll "hip" you to interesting blogs we come across. Below is an entry (verbatim) from Bruno Giussani's blog Lunch Over IP. Our friend and colleague, the brilliant and masterful commercial arbitrator and mediator Deborah Rothman turned us on to Fast Company's 100 Next Best Blogs where we found Giussani.
Thanks Deborah. For everything.
Giussani is a business writer and author in Switzerland who blogs about connections among a wide variety of sources, from Marx to Formula One pit crews, to illustrate how consumer-generated content is challenging the old notions of media, as "a thin layer of structure is put on an expanding boiling pot of ideas."
You'll need to click on the link below and then scroll down to view the great video of Quadir that is mentioned her.
Iqbal Quadir and the real power of the cell phone
Iqbal Quadir is the founder of GrameenPhone, the company that -- with the help of microcredit pioneer and recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus -- brought cellular telephony to rural Bangladesh, and which is now the country's largest operator. I've told his story in my book "Roam. Making Sense of the Wireless Internet", and invited him to speak at TEDGLOBAL last year in Oxford. Here is his newly released full TEDGLOBAL speech (16 minutes) in video, where he tells about living in a village as a kid and having to walk for hours to alert a doctor just to discover he wasn't there, and about a similar experience years later, working as a banker in New York, which brought him to realize that "connectivity is productivity". He also discusses the triple impact of bringing phones to villagers - mostly women: "it provides the woman with a business opportunity, it connects the whole village to the world, and it generates over time a culture of entrepreneurship which is key for any economic development". It's a great, inspiring story.
Iqbal, who's now at MIT, is currently working on using a similar approach for dotting developing countries with local micro-generators for producing electricity.
