In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. Millions of people were in severe need of help. The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims.

When we look at a map of Los Angeles, or London it is hard to believe that as of 2005 only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geocodable level of detail. The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world’s populous faces: not having detailed maps.

But help was coming. At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. And it took them four days. The new software they used? Google Mapmaker.

Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store.

Maps matter. Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Bangalore, Computational Geometry, Cyclone Victims, De Las Carreteras, Desastres, Detailed Maps, Developing Countries, Gesture Recognition, Google, Hernando De Soto, Kilometers, Level Of Detail, Liftoff, Local Businesses, Logistics, Map maker, Mapmaker, Mapping The World, Mundial, New Software, Nobel Prize Nominee, Rivers, Store Maps, Trillion, Video Stores

Four years ago, on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. And because of that announcement, we got a big article in the New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention, and me deciding to become CEO of that company — whereas I was just an adviser — and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring.

One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey, and a year later we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo, and Jack presented an idea he’d been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends. We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together, and in early 2006 we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Business, communication, Culture, Entertainment, social change, social media, Technology, TEDTalks, web development

It’s amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, “What is your most precious natural resource?” — they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you.

(Video): We’re traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we’re dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years.

The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don’t have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don’t go to school. And I don’t mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don’t go.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Colombia, educación, education, laptops, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, TEDTalks