Makerbot has released an inspiring video about how a group of hackers built 3D-printed hands for children and adults who are missing fingers or entire hands. The project aims to take the cost and complexity associated with hand prosthesis out of the process. It is working.

The blog post is here but, in short, the Robohand project is an effort to release the plans for a completely open-source, 3D-printable hand. The fingers close when the user bends his or her wrist and the parts can be printed on any 3D printer. It’s perfect for kids because, as they grow, caregivers can simply upgrade the hand with a few mouse clicks.

“We scale it up and print him another one,” said Richard Van As, a carpenter who lost four fingers in an on-the-job accident. Van As, who lives in Johannesburg, learned of the Makerbot when he teamed up with prop designer Ivan Owen. Owen and Van As collaborated on the project over the past year and have helped folks with amputated or missing digits get the proper prostheses.

You can donate to the project here or just enjoy the video. I would equate this project to the effort to give out glasses to children in the developing world. The fact that two Internet buddies solved the problem of hand prosthetics in their spare time, however, is amazing and inspiring.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Who needs governments? The ongoing mobile/social/crowdsourcing trend(s) have led to a wealth of new community-based resources that support or supplant traditional civic and government services. Think Kickstarter instead of the NEA or Canada Council. Or consider the new Circle of 6 app, which is intended to help prevent violence before it happens, by letting users reach out to friends when dicey situations arise, instead of calling 911 after they get out of hand.

Circle of 6 is the brainchild of health educator Deb Levine and anti-violence activist Nancy Schwartzman, who have found that it’s often easier for people to reach out for help via a screen, and that it’s important for groups of friends to offer concrete strategies for supporting each other. It’s already won the White House’s Apps Against Abuse challenge, and racked up tens of thousands of iPhone downloads. “We are working to get the app in the hands of Android users as soon as possible,” says lead developer Christine Corbett Moran (an astrophysicist with a double-major Physics/CS degree from MIT, who develops apps in her copious spare time.)

Apps like Circle of 6 are the thin edge of a really interesting wedge. In the rich world, apps that obviate or replace the need to call in the authorities are merely useful; but in the developing world, where competent authorities are much poorer and more thinly stretched, such services are far more disruptive. Community-sourcing apps won’t replace government services that already exist, at least not anytime soon. But where those don’t exist at all, these new services can be downright revolutionary.

Some concrete examples: I Paid A Bribe (which I’ve written about before) helps Indian communities fight the scourge of corruption. Ushahidi maps crises where governments are too poor or paralyzed to do so themselves. A few years ago I helped build the EpiCollect app for Imperial College London, which anyone can use to collect, store, and map their own data; veterinarians used it to track the spread of diseases in East Africa. Ulwazi collects “community memories” — ie cultural knowledge — in South Africa. Esoko helps African agribusiness entrepeneurs share and gather data that is tracked by government statisticians in the First World, but not necessarily by theirs.

As smartphones continue their relentless conquest of the planet — in particular, as the price of a decent Android phone drops below $100, and more than 50% of the poor world has access to one, a mark that I expect will be passed in the next few years — these kinds of community-sourcing apps will grow ever more important. In the same way that the developing world bypassed wired phones and jumped straight into mobile, they may bypass certain forms of top-down hierarchical government services in favor of crowdsourced resources and resilient communities. (More on that last concept in my forthcoming interview with John Robb.) That’s going to have some very interesting ramifications … and I predict that some startups that target this shift ahead of the curve will ultimately make a killing.

Image: Circle of 6 app

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman … and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the coming years, the real moving and shaking will happen elsewhere.

“2011 will be the year Android explodes!” cried a recent headline, citing a new Broadcom chipset that will reportedly make sub-$100 unsubsidized smartphones ubiquitous. Maybe so, but I second MG’s skepticism: North American carriers will fight this tooth and nail, and even when they lose, we’ll still have to wait for the three-year contracts that are status quo here to finally die. If that chipset is real, though, the headline’s not wrong; Android will explode … in the developing world, where virtually all phone service is pre-paid. (As, ahem, I predicted 20 months ago.)

There’s a larger trend here. Mobile phones and 3G service became ubiquitous in Africa so rapidly in part because they never had to compete with landlines. Kenyans flocked to mobile-phone money transfer services, because they had no consumer banks: now M-Pesa, the largest, handles money equal to a mindboggling 10% of Kenya’s GDP every year. (The US equivalent would be $1.4 trillion/year. By contrast, PayPal handles less than $100 billion/year worldwide, of which mobile-phone payments are but a small fraction.) Now much of Kenya is quickly adopting distributed, flexible, resilient solar power, largely because their monolithic, sclerotic, vulnerable grid doesn’t reach much of the country.

As the poor world grows richer, we can expect more of the same: unencumbered by entrenched customs, regulations, special interests and legacy infrastructure, they’ll make the most of new technologies far faster than us laggards in the West. Why does cable TV still exist, in this BitTorrent era? Because the cable companies are like tapeworms in our economies’ guts, sucking life from their hosts as they die with agonizing slowness. Why are universal electronic health records so hard to implement? Because the multi-trillion-dollar health industry is set firmly in its antediluvian ways and has no incentive to change. But these parasites and foot-draggers are far less established in the developing world, and that’s why the future will increasingly happen there, not here.

This doesn’t mean they’ll be better off – we’ll be vastly wealthier for some decades yet – but they’re using their blank-slate advantage to evolve far faster. if you want to see the world’s real hothouse of change, or build a business that can change the lives of (or make money from) many tens of millions in the space of a few years, get ahead of the curve and aim at the 70% of humanity who live in Asia, where they already get new smartphones first, or Africa, which despite its Dark Continent reputation is rapidly growing wealthier.

“May you live in interesting times,” says the alleged ancient Chinese curse. If only. Here in the First World we’re increasingly trapped in yesterday’s tedium. In the 21st century, it’s the rest of the world who will live on the bleeding edge of the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch