Chile relief efforts coordinated from Kenya, using online mapping tool

Within an hour of the massive earthquake in Chile, relief efforts were coordinated from as far away as Kenya – 12,000 km from the location of the quake. How is that possible? The answer is a crisis group called Ushahidi and its effective online mapping tool, reports BBC.
Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was [...]

Communicating after the earthquake

Phone lines collapsed soon after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, but large parts of the network infrastructure was actually intact. This led many people to use the internet and social networks to try and contact friends and relatives and get information about their condition.
According to a BBC article, Facebook, Twitter, and e-mailing were widely used [...]

Twitter creator reveals Square mobile – pay device

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey Wednesday gave the first public demonstration of his hotly-anticipated latest venture — a device to allow credit card payments by cell phone — and revealed it would be given away for free.
Its too early to predict about the consequences but probably this application has enormous potentials and this is a big [...]

Women and climate change – new UNFPA report

Women bear the biggest burden of climate change, but despite this fact their role have been largely ignored in the debate so far. That was the conclusion of the State of the World Population 2009 report, released yesterday. “With the possibility of a climate catastrophe on the horizon, we cannot afford to relegate the world’s [...]

National Educational Technology Plan – Yes We Can

The U.S. Department of Education is developing a new National Educational Technology Plan to provide a vision for how information and communication technologies can help transform American education. A draft plan is expected in early 2010.
The plan focuses on four areas in which technology has the potential to transform education including
- Learning: Providing unprecedented access [...]