Cal Berkeley ICT4D

January 29th, 2010

Had several great meetings at Berkeley with Eric Brewer, George Scharffenberger, Kentaro Toyama and Tapan Parikh. We look forward to collaborating with them in the coming months in field trails, research and funding.

Seeking what?

January 22nd, 2010
My day job is Publisher/Editor at www.videomaker.com
<http://www.videomaker.com> , a for-profit company that I founded in 1985.
This has taught me how to make money and allowed me to build some
personal wealth.
I became a good capitalist, seeking profits but I lacked fulfillment.

In 2008, I founded a non-profit charity named Polder. Our most important
initiative is One Media Player per Teacher. www.ompt.org
<http://www.ompt.org>Since I am not skilled in winning grants (yet), we
generate some income by selling audiovisual gear to NGOs. We do this via
a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of Polder.
Neither Polder nor the wholly owned for-profit subsidiary allow anyone
(including myself) to build personal wealth.
As a social entrepreneur I am now seeking social benefit rather than wealth.

Echoing Green has selected OMPT

January 18th, 2010

This year, Echoing Green received close to 1100 applications for our 2010 Fellowship.  Based on these initial submissions, we have invited 350 projects to submit phase 2 applications, which is only around 30 percent.

We are working on a formula that you may find helpful in considering solar recharging.

January 15th, 2010

The formula will tell us how many square inches of solar panel/hours are required for every lumen/hour of projection brightness

We found a tiny audio PMP that seems fantastic.

January 15th, 2010

It seems like a tiny version of a CD boombox but uses far less power and the name of the file appears in the display.

CES Report

January 15th, 2010

Portable media players are smaller, cheaper, faster, louder, brighter and use less energy.
We saw about 20 projectors at CES that run on DC. The mini-projectors are over 100 lumens and the small projectors are over 200 lumens.
Only the Pico projectors (under 100 lumens) have an internal battery.
The mini-projectors and the small projectors use a laptop power supply which converts AC to DC.
None of them are intended to run from batteries because they require a battery about the size of a scooter battery. This is impractical for the business presentation market.
Any of them work well when connected to a scooter, automobile or UPS battery.
None have more than 1GB internal memory.
Most can connect to external speakers.

We are currently testing a Samsung projector.
http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/UM/200910/20091030192951875/BP59-00092F-06Eng.pdf

The SP-P410M is 170 lumens (17 times brighter than a pico)
It uses lots more energy, 49 Watts.
There is no internal memory but it plays from USB sticks.
The internal speakers are very loud

There is a direct relationship between battery weight and lumen hours.
Brighter projectors or more hours require more amp/hours.

What we do

November 16th, 2009

OMPT is advocating, adapting, providing and teaching NGOs how to use low cost technologies to extend the reach of capable teachers

Hoping to complete our hand cranked projector prototype

November 9th, 2009

Visiting these folks tomorrow  http://globalrecordings.net/ to learn about their hand cranked audio players.

first post from the Droid

November 5th, 2009

Working on articulating

November 5th, 2009

the “New Idea” succinctly; a clear vision of the needs we’ve identified, our goals, methodology and evaluation method.