Stanford Social Innovation Review recently posted a "sponsored supplement" about mHealth.  Mostly the article lists a variety of the mHealth projects we've all heard about: Text to Change, Medic Mobile, TracNet, and also DataDyne's own EpiSurveyor.  The point of the article was that we can and should identify the many innovations created in the developing world, and use them as models for innovation here in the US:

John Sauer of Water for Life has a great piece today at the Huffington Post today on estimating the real, ongoing costs of providing a WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) system -- the "life-cycle costs".

Just learned from the Apple website that Steve Jobs has died.  Incredible to think what a career he had, radically changing the fields of computing, music, animation, and communication, among other things.  

I've been thinking a lot lately about the field of "ICT4D" (information and communications technology for development).  As far as I can tell, almost all the really successful, highly scaled, and very useful software and hardware that is used in international development comes from the commercial side. From Microsoft Excel to Gmail to the mobile phone itself, the commercial technology sector seems to have succeeded spectacularly in providing terrific software and hardware capabilities to developed and developing countries alike.

At the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Have just heard someone say, for the 30th time in the last three days, that "mobile phones are leapfrogging landlines" in developing countries. Using my iPhone, as I do, for just about everything but making phone calls, I think we're missing something much more profound: mobile computers are leapfrogging laptops in developing countries.

As reported today by the Associated Press, the One Laptop Per Child project has announced that they are switching to tablet mode.  I have never been a big fan of this project, primarily because its main goal -- to produce a $100 laptop -- always seemed to me something that the market would inevitably produce with or without OLPC: consumer electronics manifestly get better and cheaper every year without any charitable intervention.

Catholic Relief Services held a 2 day innovation conference in Nairobi to define an approach to improving the quality of their programming efforts through the use and extension of ICT solutions.

DataDyne was one of the organizations invited to show case our EpiSurveyor application to the participants.  Unfortunately, a Cameroonian CRS team who were to give a presentation on their use of EpiSurveyor did not make it to Nairobi due to logistical problems.I would encourage all who are using EpiSurveyor in the field to share with us your stories.