There is a Social Enterprise Conference at HBS this weekend on Sunday, 3/1.  For those in the Boston area, it looks like they have lined up a great set of panels and speakers.  Including the CEO and co-founder of Endeavor, Linda Rottenberg, who I’ve been told gives a great talk.

Dimagi (specifically Dan and Cory) and Unicef’s Innovation group have been working on a lightweight application for Android that can act as an SMS server.  The goal is to be able to parse a view incoming SMS “forms”, such “bednets lusaka 13 29.”  The presentation can be found here.  This solution is highly portability, as it just runs on the Android phone, so is ideal for situations where deploying a stable server + phone is a difficult task.

For more information and screenshots, see the main project page.

Our developer page has some interesting tidbits with regard to some of the design and coding obstacles we had to go through

I recently spoke on a panel at Harvard Business School at the Africa Business Conference.  The conference had a very good mix of attendees, with many students and many folks from industry.  Interestingly, during the panel, there were many questions comparing the US Healthcare IT issues to developing settings scenarios that we responded to.  After the panel, Mina Hsiang, the panel organizer and a student at HBS, raised a very interesting point: Experts can talk with credibility about capital markets and access to capital as the developed world has set up a functional, efficient system (although that appears to be up for debate more recently).  However, particularly in the US, we can’t claim to have done a good job with the US healthcare system and healthcare delivery.  Therefore trying to determine the similarities or models from the US that could be translated to developing settings could be an ill-advised approach.