TEDTalks: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on Africa

Credit: TED.com

I remember this stupid joke that one of my friends forwarded me; which was a typical stereotype that I came across often:

You think EVERY South Indian comes from ‘ Madras ‘ and is Madrasi

And it’s fine while it’s a joke. The problem arises when it truly truly represents our world view of the many different aspects coagulating as a single entity. For so many, (and including me initially !) , Africa was a homologous continent, as one type of people with the same problems of corruption, poverty, starvation and dictatorship. Hence, a blood diamond war in Sierra Leone meant Africa was messed up, wild-fire inflation in Zimbabwe meant problematic economies and the Rwandan genocide…well, murderous dictators traversed the entire continent. It was the neighborhood effect which was mentioned in Ngozi’s speech: If something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected.

But this speech from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala rips out this homologous facade of poverty, strife and misery and replaces it one of prosperity and progress in Nigeria. Ms. Ngozi was the first woman Finance Minister of Nigeria and also a director of the World Bank. I think it was the first speech below that made me realize how fast that country was progressing. From 4, 500 landlines in a 30-year period to 32 million GSM lines by 2007? (Hey! I’m a telecoms guy! It’s my index of progress and growth!). MTN made $360 million profit per year for atleast three years post liberalization? Nigeria was second fastest growing telephone subscriber base after  China in 2007? Who knew? You see this speech and you realize how badly those countries have been underestimated in terms of progress….it’s a brilliant speech by an extremely strong, charismatic, beautiful and courageous woman ! Fabulous ! It’s the first speech after which I started reading and learning more about telecoms business in Africa. The way mobile money has spread across various countries of the continent and the way they have utilized the basic telephony technologies to build so many various services and products makes me believe that Africa can really be the trend-setter in  a very different type of commerce based on telephony.

Favorite speech:

Other speeches on TED.com:

 

TED profile: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

TEDTalks: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

I know, I know. I really tried to add this to my previous post on Dan’s book. However, this an entirely different build-up on the premise he built in his book. While the book talks about the process of R-directed thinking, this talk is about rewarding them. Or more specifically motivating them. Interesting 18 mins.

TED Talks: Tim Berners Lee

An SQL query for the Internet? That’s what the Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposes to do with his concept of linked data. Tim compares the search on a complex protein between Google and  a search through his linked data architecture. Google- millions of results; not relevant, the linked database – 32 hits; all relevant.

While it is a little unfair to compare a generic Internet to linked data for such a specific query, the implications are pretty cool. Usually, when we come across tables, it is usually the summary of all the analysis performed. Or you get documents. Not DATA! Time demands raw data! Can you imagine governments putting up entire databases on the Internet – public domain information, obviously and then we can actually query that data for our own requirements. I remember downloading Excel sheets on Netflix rentals from the Long Tail blog to see if I could tease out some of my own inferences. It was pretty cool !

 The gap I see is the intent of people to “upload” raw data. I can’t imagine that even though you purchase a report from a research company, they would give you access to the entire database of data. But Tim takes this concept to an entire new level. That of linked data for relationships. He goes:

In fact, data is about our lives. You just — you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, “This is my friend.” Bing! Relationship. Data. You say, “This photograph, it’s about — it depicts this person. ” Bing! That’s data. Data, data, data. Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it — re-purposing it — and using it to make other people’s lives more interesting on the site. But, when you go to another linked data site — and let’s say this is one about travel, and you say, “I want to send this photo to all the people in that group,” you can’t get over the walls. The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it — tremendous frustration. The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. We need to do that with linked data.

 If this does work out, though, suddenly, the Internet will be a much richer source of information. See the talk here.

Edit: Finally, managed to get the video embedded. Check it below:

And this is the result, a year later: WOW !!

 

Neoteny – Don’t confuse childlike thoughts with immaturity

Interesting concept and just totally jams with Hugh’s concept of creativity. Am reproducing Joi Ito’s complete post here cos’ it’s all so important:
Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. Human beings are younger longer than any other creature on earth, taking almost twenty years until we become adults. While we retain many our childlike attributes into adulthood most of us stop playing when we become adults and focus on work.

When we are young, we learn, we socialize, we play, we experiment, we are curious, we feel wonder, we feel joy, we change, we grow, we imagine, we hope.

In adulthood, we are serious, we produce, we focus, we fight, we protect and we believe in things strongly.

The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative.

We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments.

It’s time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults.

Have to reproduce this excerpt from Hugh’s book as well:

So you’ve got the itch to do something. Write a screenplay, start a painting, write a book, turn your recipe for fudge brownies into a proper business, whatever. You don’t know where the itch came from, it’s almost like it just arrived on your doorstep, uninvited. Until now you were quite happy holding down a real job, being a regular person…

Until now.

You don’t know if you’re any good or not, but you’d think you could be. And the idea terrifies you. The problem is, even if you are good, you know nothing about this kind of business. You don’t know any publishers or agents or all these fancy-shmancy kind of folk. You have a friend who’s got a cousin in California who’s into this kind of stuff, but you haven’t talked to your friend for over two years…

Besides, if you write a book, what if you can’t find a publisher? If you write a screenplay, what if you can’t find a producer? And what if the producer turns out to be a crook? You’ve always worked hard your whole life, you’ll be damned if you’ll put all that effort into something if there ain’t no pot of gold at the end of this dumb-ass rainbow…

Heh. That’s not your wee voice asking for the crayons back. That’s your outer voice, your adult voice, your boring & tedious voice trying to find a way to get the wee crayon voice to shut the hell up.

Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. There’s a big difference. Your wee voice doesn’t give a damn about publishers or Hollywood producers.

Go ahead and make something. Make something really special. Make something amazing that will really blow the mind of anybody who sees it.

If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.

The wee voice didn’t show up because it decided you need more money or you need to hang out with movie stars. Your wee voice came back because your soul somehow depends on it. There’s something you haven’t said, something you haven’t done, some light that needs to be switched on, and it needs to be taken care of. Now.

So you have to listen to the wee voice or it will die… taking a big chunk of you along with it.

They’re only crayons. You didn’t fear them in kindergarten, why fear them now?

And this brilliant talk about kids and learning from Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at TED:

TEDTalks: Jacqueline Novogratz on patient capitalism

One of the reasons I have been quite interested in social entrepreneurship is that some of the more creative ideas have come out from work going on in that sector. Let’s accept that all our current business models whether its financing, service/ goods delivery or even marketing and pricing are quite thakela. The next business models are coming from the most undeveloped areas whether it’s m-Pesa in Kenya or this new concept of patient capitalism from Acumen Fund (See the second TED speech on alternative models of financing between pure market plays and pure philantrophy. Keen insights from the first show:

1. Dignity matters more than wealth.
2. Aid is a short term solution.
3. Proper investment (equity in start ups) leads to health, wealth, and human rights

From the second speech, a third way to think about capitalism:  the balance of philanthropy and pure capitalism. See the graph (around 3:26 into the show)

Other videos: Jacqueline Novogratz invests in ending poverty

Jacqueline Novogratz on escaping poverty

Kinda similar to Bill Gates’ concept of Creative Capitalism

Jacqueline’s book on patient capitalism available here

TEDTalks: Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology

Forget the tablets, forget the e-readers, just check this TEDTalk. Pranav Mistry really really changes the definition of integration between the real and virtual life with his incredible Sixth Sense product. And it all started with the analysis of the rollers that keep the ball in our normal computer mouse rolling. Mind-blowing !!