ICTworks by Inveneo

The cost of electricity is a huge barrier to ICT adoption in the developing world. Rolling blackouts are common in cities, while in peri-urban and rural areas, there's no gird electricity infrastructure - its all solar or generator power. Yet petrol or diesel generators are hard to maintain and solar power is expensive - $10+ per Watt.

In an effort to make every Watt count, Inveneo develops low-power computers that are highly energy efficient. We've brought down the power draw of a Inveneo Computing Station to 17 Watts thanks to custom LCD screens and Intel Atom chipsets. But what does that really mean for an end user?

Let's compare and Inveneo High-Efficiency Computing Station with a traditional desktop computer:

To be truthful, even we were blown away by the difference. We knew the Dell would burn through the standard deep cycle battery pretty quickly. It lasted only 3 hours. But we didn't expect the Inveneo Computing Station to last for 60 hours - 20x longer.

For everyone from a cybercafe owner to a school to a microfinance institution, this should be an immediate "wow!". With Inveneo you can go 1.5 weeks on a single charge, reducing dependency on grid power or generator usage. And your solar power costs will be 1/10th or less than a traditional computer.

Learn more about Inveneo Low-power Solutions

.

The WiFi hackers at Inveneo, famous for their long-distance network in Haiti, are piloting a new Internet connectivity solution that they hope will bring Internet access to currently unreachable corners of rural Africa. Deploying collar-mounted wireless transceivers on a herd's worth of goats, they've created a mobile, self-healing, self-configuring network they've dubbed the Goat*Net.

Rural WiFi challenge

Rural Africa suffers from two distinct disadvantages that hinder the easy and affordable provision of Internet access - long distances between users and no electrical infrastructure. One possible solution to these challenges often employed by Inveneo is long-distance WiFi.

Even WiFi has its limits, though. On a recent trip to Ethiopa, Inveneo found rugged terrain and highly mobile populations would make a standard WiFi deployment difficult or impossible. Transient herdsmen rarely stop at one location for an extended period of time and often wander in and out of coverage areas of traditional networking solutions.

The hairiest ISP you've ever met

The challenge became how to give these herdsmen access to the same benefits of information and communication technologies (ICT) as Africa's more stationary populations.

Goat*Net: Bleating Edge Rural WiFi

While conducting a site survey of the environment and ICT needs of Afar goat herders in the Ethiopian Danakil Desert, Inveneo Project Engineer Andris Bjornson was hard pressed to come up with a traditional WiFi solution that worked:

"The rolling hills and many tall trees were making it difficult to find lines of sight that would make the network feasible"

One hot afternoon while pausing for a mishkaki snack, Andris had an intriguing thought - why not build a mobile WiFi mesh network using goats? This was the start of Goat*Net.

A mesh network is different from more traditional networks because each mesh node acts as an independent router. A mesh network continuously reconfigures or "heals" itself - finding ways around broken or blocked paths.

Inveneo paired Ubiquiti PicoStations mounted on the collars of goats with stationary Ubiquiti Airmax sector antennas to form a grazing, wandering, self-healing mobile network. As goats wander from ridgetops to valleys, the network continually adapts routing to find the best paths back to the stationary antennas and eventually to the Internet.

Goat*Net Mesh Topology

Currently, the PicoStations are powered by long-life rechargeable batteries, but Inveneo is investigating a biogas power solution, enabling the devices to be powered by waste methane produced by the goats.

Goat*Net has had a huge impact on the lives of Afar goat herders, bringing the community into the modern world. As one was quoted as saying:

Goat*Net has brought real change to our community. We can now get CBOT spot prices for nyama choma

Inveneo is excited to push this new technology even further as part of its Goat Ahead Program^TM to bring technology to ewe. According to Inveneo CIO Mark Summer:

"We've already been able to do so much with just 50 goats in a network, but that's just a start. We have plans to scale up to a full 1 kilogoat next year. As wireless radios shrink further and prices come down, the dream of a full megagoat network could be realized within 5 to 10 years."

Dix jours après le violent séisme en Haïti, deux techniciens d’Inveneo, CIO Mark Summer et Andris Bjornson, sont arrivés sur place pour le déploiement d’un réseau wifi longue distance dont bénéficieront les organisations partenaires de NetHope situées à Port-au-Prince. Ce réseau permettra à ces organisations humanitaires d’accéder à l’Internet, d’utiliser la téléphonie VoIP, de collaborer et de partager l’information.

Après une catastrophe naturelle, la restauration de la communication est essentielle et plusieurs organismes comme Inveneo sont en train de mettre en place leurs propres solutions TIC afin de soutenir les efforts de la reconstruction en Haïti :

• Dons par SMS : Les opérateurs mobiles dans différents pays ont lancé une collecte de dons par SMS en faveur des organisations comme la Croix-Rouge qui viennent en aide aux victimes du séisme.
• S.O.S. par SMS : Suite à une collaboration entre plusieurs organisations y comprises Samasource, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower et le départment d’Etat américain, les abonnés de Voilà, le principal opérateur de téléphonie mobile en Haïti, peuvent envoyer gratuitement un texte au 4636 pour appeler à l’aide.
• Recherche de Personnes : Google a mis en ligne un outil permettant de rechercher une personne ou de donner des informations sur une personne trouvée.
• Bénévolat Virtuel : Samasource recrute les bénévoles pour traduire les textes en créole vers l’anglais et The Extraordinaries a tenté d’utiliser les bénévoles pour identifier les personnes perdues dans les photos.
• Kijan mwen ka ede ou? : Comment est-ce que je peux vous aider ? Google vient de lancer son traducteur créole.

Qu’il soit une solution qui connecte les donateurs à l’étranger avec les organisations sur place, une solution qui connecte les bénévoles avec les actions humanitaires virtuelles, ou une solution qui permet aux gens de surmonter les barrières de la langue, les gens peuvent se mobiliser et répondre aux besoins locaux dans une façon informée et efficace grâce aux TIC. Malgré ses coordonnées géographiques, Haïti n’est surtout pas isolé.

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, like the earthquake in Haiti, the need to communicate is immense. From the search for loved ones, to coordination of humanitarian relief, to simple messages of "I'm alive," between family members.

In fact, Secretary Clinton mentioned the three highest proprieties for the US government efforts will be communications, electricity, and transportation.

But much of the telecom infrastructure in and around Port-au-Prince was severely damaged or destroyed by the earthquake. And the resulting information vacuum is hampering vital emergency relief operations and recovery efforts.

Into this gap, several ICT solutions are arriving:

• Ushahidi's crisis mapping is identifying places of need
• The Inventorisation Wiki and Sahana are coordinating relief efforts online
• Inveneo will be bringing Internet connectivity to local NGOs

Establishing networks like these are a cornerstone of good disaster relief, and will support additional ICT infrastructure and facilitate long-term ICT capacity building and reconstruction. Yet the task is not easy.

Just to send two staff and equipment, Inveneo worked through the weekend to prepare:

Learn more about Inveneo's response, by subscribing to their RSS, Twitter, or Facebook feeds.

As part of the Educational Technology Debate on expanding the role of women in ICT, I interviewed Kristin Peterson, co-founder and CEO of Inveneo.

I wanted to know how she was motivated to make a difference in the ICT field and how we might learn from her example to inspire girls and women in the developing world to use ICT in their chosen careers.

Interestingly enough, technology was not Kristin's first career. Watch the video to learn more:

Note that Krisitin listed the importance of parents & mentors in formulating her desire to make a difference using ICT. My favorite was her early mentor source: TV. Through this often maligned ICT, Kristin saw powerful women role modes to emulate and give her inspiration.

Back before there was One Laptop Per Child and the netbooks it spawned, we had to hunt for information on ICT projects. Finding low-cost devices or the initiatives behind them was a challenge only solved by infoDev's comprehensive Quick Guide to low-cost computing devices for the developing world.

From the beginning, we were proud to have the Inveneo Computing Station listed on the Quick Guide. Yet times have changed since it was first published. Inveneo has new products and other companies now have low-cost computing devices as well. So its time to help infoDev update their Quick Guide.

Using this handy form, submit the low-cost devices that you know about. You can even re-tweet the survey using this handy, short snippet:

Help update @infoDev's Quick Guide to low-cost ICT devices - please RT and add your favorite hardware today! http://bit.ly/ict_device_survey

.