I made it over briefly to the Innovation for Global Health at Harvard today today where I chose the Water Quality and Global Health breakout session lead by Dr. Colleen Hansel and Dr. Mark Koopman. It was very interesting discussion that raised a couple of interesting questions. One particularly salient one is that water quality seems to have dropped off the map as a major issue for social and developmental entrepreneurs.
Collen and Mark started off talking about an interesting case that I didn't know about. Apparently, in the 1970s, the World Health Organization drilled wells all over Bangladesh to tap groundwater. It turned out the water table in Bangladesh has naturally occurring arsenic, leading to the biggest mass poisoning in history. Oops.
Water can of course be contaminated by many things - micro-organisms, metals, industrial bi-products, etc. One especially interesting one discussed was pharmaceuticals - especially anti-biotics, which causes an increase in antibiotic resistant germs. The problem is, there isn't one single test for all these things, and they all require different remediation techniques.
There is a need for improved diagnostics and remediation, but innovation seems to be incremental in this space rather than rapid as we see in other areas of developmental entrepreneurship. While people like Colleen and Mark have some very neat technologies they are developing, there is not the same snowball that we see with other areas like mobile phones or microfinance.
Colleen and Mark asked for ways to get people interested in the issues. Short of the inevitable war over water rights or new Bond movie stimulating interest, a couple interesting ideas were generated. One of the problems is that water quality is a fragmented problem - there are lots of problems with water (from the pollutants to access to drought to sanitation issues), not one major one to deal with. People interested in various issues invariably intersect with it because of the tie-in with health. For instance, Grameen Bank insists on recipients of their loans boiling their water and creating latrines before being eligible for loans - the decreased rate of health problems increases the likelihood the micro-loan will be re-paid.
I thought that an X-Prize for water diagnostics and purification might be of interest. Colleen even suggested so much that if they could miniaturize a Raman spectrometer and reduce the cost, that would be close an acceptable solution for the diagnostic side. Essentially, an X-Prize would help frame the problem in a compelling way and make it an exciting one for innovators to try to solve.
In any case, a very worthwhile afternoon spent talking about an issue I profess to know little about except for the times my dalliances in corporate social responsibility and global health have inevitably run into issues related to the management of precious resources like water.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Water Quality and Global Health
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Verizon VP Anthony DiMaso on the Transforming Telecommunications Industry
Anthony DiMaso, Verizon’s Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development stopped by at MIT Sloan today to give a talk about his perspectives on what is going on with the rapidly transforming telecommunications industry. The talk was sponsored by the MoMIT club.
Three primary forces impacting the global telecommunications industry are globalization, demographics and technology. This means accelerated development, increased complexity, increasing fragmentation to go along with intensifying fragmentation.
Convergence is a challenge with a national group (Verizon Wireless), Verizon Telecom (regional in 28 states and DC) and a global business. Global innovation, scale and distribution are good, but it means frequent business model disruptions, competition from global players and increasingly complex logistics.
DiMaso laughed about how when they broke up Bell, AT&T took long distance, then considered the best business and left the local lines. Within a space of 20 years, long distance has become a lousy business. These types of paradigm shifts are accelerating.
Telecoms are in a challenging position keep building network to meet increased bandwidth for devices that are now always on and connected. Said DiMaso, “You can’t think of yourself as connectivity provider, but an ecosystem enabler and creators of seamless platforms – smart homes, compelling user experience, and content delivery.” This is where Verizon’s innovation is focused. Four specific areas Verizon is focused on are FiOS broadband and video, mobile broadband and content, enterprise managed solution and unified platforms and services.
DiMaso argues that there is no more “mass market”. Each user wants a customized user experience to fit their needs. He continued on to say that in the frame of the rapid paradigm shifts, Verizon must continue to create value for its customers by investing in areas that new business models and technologies are enabling.
Furthermore, growth in certain demographics means change. For instance, growth in mobile usage by the elderly means that telecommunications and health care will be more integrated in the future because of customer demands. DiMaso sees change like this as an opportunity. He hinted that Verizon had product offerings like an ADT security offering and a emergency alert system for the elderly (it sounded similar to the "I've fallen and I can't get up" product with integrated continous monitoring).
Overall, Verizon’s markets are growing – broadband and global wireless markets are expected to increase substantially. Global broadband will increase from $138 billion to $250 billion and wireless revenues $784 billion to nearly $1.3 trillion. However, with rapid innovation occurring in this space and big players like Apple now in the game, how the pie will be sliced up is key. DiMaso seems to have a good handle on the types of innovations that are necessary to keep telcos from becoming dumb pipes.
I posted a slide deck I created outlining potential strategies for mobile network operators which I thought would go along nicely with this post.
Speaker Bio
Anthony J. (Tony) DiMaso is Vice President – Corporate Strategy & Development for Verizon Communications. In this capacity he has responsibility for corporate business strategy, the development of major business partnerships, the negotiation of agreements that support key corporate objectives, and the identification and assessment of industry and technology trends, issues and opportunities.
Mr. DiMaso was previously Vice President, Global Sales for Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions Group. In this capacity he had responsibility for sales and customer support for Verizon’s largest business and Federal Government customers.
Mr. DiMaso began his career in New York Telephone Company in 1981 and moved to AT&T Information Systems in 1983. He joined NEC America in 1985 as an Account Manager and was Director of National Distribution and Director of the Major Systems organization prior to taking the position of Director, Strategic Marketing for the Private Switching Group in 1989. Mr. DiMaso joined TeleSciences Inc., a developer and integrator of telecommunications support systems, as Director of Marketing in 1990. In 1994 Mr. DiMaso was recruited as Branch Manager for the Upstate New York region of NYNEX and in 1996 was named to head the firm’s largest branch in New York City. Following the NYNEX/ Bell Atlantic merger he was named Vice President-Market Management for Bell Atlantic’s Enterprise Business Group with responsibility for development and management of the organization’s go-to-market strategy.
Mr. DiMaso has an MBA degree from C.W Post as well as a Bachelor’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University. He and his family live in Northport, NY.
Mobile Network Operators and the Future of the Mobile Internet
Here's a deck I put together on mobile network operators and what I believe their strategies to avoid the fate of the ISPs suffered in becoming dumb pipes.
Ted Chan - Mobile Network Operators and the Future of the Mobile Internet
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Demand aggregation in utility computing
This is a section of a working paper for the MIT Sloan School of Management. I am interested in further discussions with anyone who has an interest in the dynamics of pricing utility computing services.
Key to the value proposition offered by utility computing is the ability to share resources across multiple users. If the peak computing requirements of a customer are not correlated, then the total peak demand will smooth out. In G.A. Paleologo’s paper, he illustrates the phenomena with a simple example. Imagine a customer whose demand oscillates between 5 and 10 service units per day, with an average of 7.5. If the customer were to build their own computing system, they would need 10 service units per day to meet the peak demand. The average utilization of the system is 7.5/10, or 75%. If there are 8 customers running the same system with the same demand profile, a utility can aggregate them. The total demand would be smoothed, and the capacity required would be 66, to serve an average demand of 60. The average utilization is 60/66, or 91%, a 16% gain. (Paleologo, 2004)
Businesses with Variability: In modeling businesses that do have variations, there will be gamut of profiles. Obviously, a relatively established business will differ from a new business (for example, venture backed startup). In stochastic modeling, the potential large variation in demand that goes hand-in-hand with some of the dynamics of the Internet must be taken into account.
Constant Demand Profiles: A substantial portion of the demand for computing services will have constant demand profiles without the peaks and valleys of typical business users. These users include bioinformatics processing and other scientific simulations that will run around the clock. Sellers of utility computing services would do well to segment these customers out and offer them lower prices. First off, since their demand is easily forecast and stable, the value proposition of being able to smooth out demand peaks does not apply to these customers. As such, their willingness to pay should be lower per unit of computing power. They will still benefits shorter time to deployment, disaster recovery and other benefits of utility computing. These customers offer a significant potential advantage for utility computing vendors – they will provide consistent utilization at lower demand times of the day and year. In many cases, they may be able to shift their usage to maximize capacity utilization (for example, some customers may need X units per day performed and are indifferent to whether that is one processing node running all day or a number of them running in parallel during off peak hours.
Pricing for Utility Computing
Pricing for utility computing services will be challenging in a number of ways, particularly as the service matures. In traditional pricing models, demand is forecast, the cost of meeting that demand at an optimal level is gathered, and a certain markup is applied. (Hall and Hitch, 1939; Paleologo, 2004) Demand will initially be difficult to forecast, and it will take times for economies of scale and demand smoothing from having large quantities of customers to be realized.
G.A. Paleologo suggests a pricing-at-risk methodology. This model leverages stochastic modeling of the uncertain parameters involved in forecasting demand, utilization and adoption. Such a model would allow for a best and worst case scenario and run optimization models for the scenarios in between. The result will be a probability curve. Varying the price as the independent variable and using Net Present Value as the dependent gives a picture of how various scenarios would play out. The tricky part of this is that the elasticity of demand is not well understood. Paleologo’s model assumes a monopoly situation – we know that this will not be the case in the utility computing space.
Social Entrepreneurship Update
MoCa Update:
Leo Anthony Celi, our MD advisor from Harvard Medical School recruited new partners in ASEAN Centers for E-Health and Telemedicine as well as the following universities:
Universiti Sains Malaysia (Malaysia)
Institut dela Francophonie pour Medicine Tropicale (Laos)
University of the Philippines Manila (Philippines)
University of Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)
Ciputra Univerity (Indonesia)
Hanoi Medical University (Vietnam)
We're looking at deploying in the Phillipines in January through March and learning more about how MoCa can meet the needs of patients there. Things are breaking fast for MoCa - there seems to be a ton of interest in our solution.
Olive Arbor Update:
Olive Arbor is coming along as well. We've gotten a number of data sets in and certain companies are starting to fill up with interesting data. I wish that Claire and I had a little more time to move this forward quickly, but we're getting a few interns to help us over winter break. That should help a lot in terms of getting the data sets we need to provide a comprehensive views on a core set of companies and social criterion. There's got to be a re-design before we do a true launch in the spring, but the core components are falling into space.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Text-free interfaces for illiterate and semi-literate users
Here's a presentation that I recently gave about a paper written by Indrani Medhi, Aman Sagar and Kentaro Toyama about how to build text-free interfaces for illiterate and semi-literate users. This paper is valuable for folks like myself who are thinking about how to build systems and processes in the developing world where literacy rates are poor.
"Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Illiterate Users" from Nicole Prowell on Vimeo.
Here's the Powerpoint for anyone interested.
Text Free Interfaces for Semi-Literate Users
Text Free Interfaces for Semi-Literate Users
Apparently, someone cared enough about this presentation to Twitter about it, which throughly amuses me:
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Why Global Health in Africa: Warren Buffett and the Ovarian Lottery
This is an excerpt from something I wrote about why I'm working on Global Health Delivery projects. As mentioned, one project is Moca, an open-source mobile diagnosis and imaging solution for the developing world. Another, through MIT's Global Entrepreneurship Lab is with the Mass Development Association of Dar-es-Salaam, in Tanzania.
When I met the great Warren Buffett last year, he said something that really stuck in my mind. He told us to imagine it is the day before you are born, and there is going to be an ovarian lottery to determine what person you will be. You could be born rich or poor, mentally retarded or brilliant, healthy or diseased, in America or Africa. Mr. Buffett’s question to us was as follows: not knowing which lottery number you would draw, what type of society would you design? Answer the question, and this should define your views and priorities on what type of world we should live in and work to create. 
In this way, Mr. Buffett justifies both capitalist society and a progressive and humane one. He believed that capitalism meant “lots of stuff” would be created, making a bigger pie for everyone. It also means that though of us who were lucky enough to draw a good number have a moral imperative to do what they can to help those who are less fortunate. Since I believe in both the capitalist aspect, and the part about creating a more progressive and just world, it is important to me to be a part of projects like the Mass Development Association one in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania we will be working on, and the mobile imaging project I work on outside of class. This is not just about helping on a once off basis– it is about working to create a sustainable model as a part of long-term change to create a more just society globally.
Every person in Africa deserves a chance. This means living to a reasonable age, a chance at education and social mobility. The first and greatest stumbling block to providing this opportunity is health care. If you are not healthy, or you are infected with AIDS or malaria or tuberculosis, the roadblocks to becoming successful and having a chance at upward social mobility is extremely limited. Similarly, if your loved ones are burdened by these diseases, these are further challenges to overcome or may require a family member to focus economic work time and financial resources on care or feeding the family rather than education or a career or entrepreneurship.
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