The Week in Geek – Nov. 9, 2008

Following the Trail of Toxic eWaste
eWaste is the fastest growing component of the municipal waste stream worldwide. We throw about 130,000 computers in the US each day, and most are a toxic cocktail of cadmium, mercury, lead, and PVCs. Over 100 million cell phones are also discarded each year. 60 Minutes tracked eWaste collected by a firm that advertise it would be ‘recycled properly right here in the US’. Where did it end up? Guiyu, China; arriving there in violation of US, Hong Kong, and Chinese law.

Desperately poor workers in Guiyu harvest the tech via acid baths, open-air burnings, and with detritus streamed in the ground & rivers creating the highest levels of cancer causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies are 6 times more likely to end in miscarriage, and that 7 of 10 kids in the region have too much lead in their blood. As 60 minutes was reporting, thugs jumped them and tried to steal their cameras and did steal the soil sample they collected. A recent government sting from Federal Government Accountability Office found that 42 American recyclers were willing to sell eWaste illegally to US Hong Kong brokers.

Commentary: This is heroic reporting by 60 Minutes and the story needs to be told. At BC, we’ve been teaching the example of Guiyu for years in an effort to create responsible managers who understand not only the promise of Moore’s Law, but also the challenges and ethics of managing tech product end-of-life. THIS IS WHY I’ve created a free textbook, available online and to all.  Management education fails when students aren’t taught to think deeply and critically enough to consider these issues. For more on Guiyu, see “Moore’s Law and More” at https://gallaugher.com/chapters. Please share this content with others. And profs, if you use this content in classes, please let me know. Thanks!

Upward Mobility
Citizens that that are ‘unbanked,’ or very badly banked, represent 70 percent of the world’s population. Without banks, many in need of cash fall to the mercy of loan sharks that charge 2 to 10 percent monthly interest. A Bangalore startup called mChek is leveraging mobile phones to support microfinance, with half a million people using their mobile phones to pay their phone bills and purchase a goods and services as diverse as airline and movie tickets. Cheap phones and the right software could be a financial lifeline to hundreds of millions. Great Multimedia, including a field report on mobile banking in India and an interview with venture firm DFJ’s Indian executive director (see side bar in article).

Propelled by Internet – Obama Wins
The Week in Geek is non-partisan. BC seniors have had the good fortune to have seen both Obama and McCain speak on campus. But one really has to marvel at how deftly the Obama campaign leveraged technology – all campaigns will be different from here on out and the Net will play a vital role.

The role of technology in politics had been growing. The ’00 McCain campaign was the first to run targeted banner ads. Howard Dean raised record bucks online in ’04. And don’t forget that Karl Rove was a former database marketer who brought his tools to the GOP. But the Democrats not only learned from Rove, they wrote a whole new playbook (much of it built from Boston’s own Blue State Digital). The breadth of tech leverage in the Obama campaign was staggering. The campaign hired Facebook founder Chris Hughes to strategize for my.BarackObama.com. The site helped supporters organize, participate in calling campaigns, fundraising, and neighborhood canvassing. Wired points out that using My.BarackObama.com,  “Supporters created more than 35,000 groups clumped by affinities like geographical proximity and shared pop-cultural interests. By the end of the campaign, my.BarackObama.com registered over 1.5 million accounts.” Much of the $600 million raised by Obama came through the Web, and as testament to the breadth of the effort, the average contribution was less than $90. The Obama camp regularly sent highly-focused e-mail appeals, most of which embedded a video (BarackTV) that offered campaign updates, challenged opposition ads and claims, and combated the latest Internet rumors. Obama’s VP pick was announced via text message. Supporters were coached on texting during the Denver DNC. Election day text messages encouraged supporters to knock on doors to ensure neighbors had voted. It was also tough to surf the web without seeing an Obama ad. Some were highly interactive, like the ones challenging users to compare how they’d fare under the McCain vs. Obama tax plans. The campaign even bought ads inside 18 video games targeting 10 states that allowed early voting. Obama has more Twitter followers than anyone else, by far. And the Obama campaign’s iPhone application would scan your contacts for people you know in swing states (even measuring how you contribute vs. other callers), offer info & maps to local events, campaign news, and more (photo at left).

On top of this consider tech’s broader impact: there was primary debate sponsorship by Facebook, while other debates took questions from YouTube. The left-leaning blog, The Huffington Post rose to be a larger website than the web-arm of all but a handful of US newspapers. New rock-stars like Nate Silver with FiveThirdyEight.com were created. The will.i.am video was viewed by well over a million times. The Net was not just mainstream in this election – it became a powerful political force for reshaping politics. PoliSci majors with campaign aspirations of their own had better start taking Information Systems classes.

Hard Times? Not for iPhone Developers
Craigslist is loaded with iPhone developer job listings. Of course, working for someone else has to compete against going it alone. Steve Demeter, who developed the game Trism, brought in a quarter of a million dollars in just two months. No overhead, no marketing, no inventory. Steve just wrote the app, uploaded it to Apple, and waited for the checks to roll in from Apple at $.70 on the dollar. The developer of the $1 DrumKit app reports bringing in about 500 downloads a day – not bad. He left Facebook Apps (which were quickly adopted, but brought in no money) for the more reliable income stream from the AppStore. Apple recently launched iPhone University, giving schools free resources and software to teach iPhone development.

The iPhone is huge. In case you missed it – Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones last quarter. That not only puts it ahead of the Blackberry, it accounted for 39% Apple’s $11.6 billion in revenue – more than Mac sales! And Apple is selling a LOT of Macs. A few years ago you’d be hard pressed to find any Macs toted by my students – now incoming BC students choose Macs at the rate of 56% over Windows machines.

Personal Pod Transport is Coming
As a guy who can’t drive (bad eyes), I love this idea. Personal pods are battery-powered, driverless cars, supporting as few as four passengers. Cars wait taxi-style at stops, just get in and you’re taken to your destination without having to stop at each station (a second lane whisks pod cars past without delay). Closed-circuit television will keep tabs on the pods to prevent mishaps — not that any are expected. Sure there have been experiments. As Wired points out “A five-station PRT system in Morgantown, West Virginia (population 29,361) has ferried people between downtown and the West Virginia University campus since 1979. It carries as many as 16,000 people a day and has never experienced a major accident.” But now in Europe “More than a dozen cities are planning pod-car systems as part of the country’s commitment to free itself of fossil fuels by 2020.” It costs from $25 to $40 million per mile to build a this kind of system. Expensive, but potentially a bargain compared to the $100 to $300 million per mile for light-rail.

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