PopTech: Day 1 – Reimagining and Beyond Imagining

Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited [...]

Phone Riff: Hope Phones, Healthy Texting, Conflict Minerals, Ecological Intelligence, Blue Sweaters and Doing the Right Thing

Hope Phones is one of those “Gosh, yes!” ideas:

Get people to donate old cell phones to a recycling company
Get recycling company to assign each phone a value
Use value to trade for refurbished phones
Donate refurbished phones to clinics in developing countries to use for sending health-related text messages
Good begets good

Stanford student Josh Nesbit, who came up [...]