When I started at DataDyne.org last April, we were just starting to test the MIP. We spent several afternoons sending and logging text messages. Imagine a room full of people talking to our developer via speakerphone and staring deliberately at their cell phones waiting for a
text message to come through.

Last week the COOPEUMO cooperative in Chile celebrated their 41^st anniversary. For a student of history that is familiar with Chile’s political turmoil over the past 30+ years will understand the accomplishment that the cooperative’s 41 years represents.

We here at DataDyne are excited to be teaming up with our Peruvian partners to use MIP technology to support their ongoing efforts to protect the health of children in Peru.

The GSMA, which represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry, and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, a charity that supports women entrepreneurs published 'Women and Mobile: A Global Opportunity'. The details of the report were reported by Forbes in this article.

Some of the interesting findings from the report include:

IT News Africa reported that Smile Telecom is launching an innovative new business model in Uganda.  It is a subscription service that allows consumers to buy minutes and receive a PIN that they can then use to make calls on a payphone handset. It eliminates the need to purchase a handset, which can be prohibitively expensive for some.

The public health community recently received some great news about child mortality rates, as reported by the New York Times: the child mortality rate, the number of deaths per 1,000 children under the age of five, has dropped 28% since 1990 according to a new report published by UNICEF.

It is extraordinary to see that, even in the most resource constrained environments, progress is being made in protecting children.

Recently The Lancet and University College London published a commission report on the effects of global climate changes and the threat to global health. The resulting report is a call to action that rings loud and clear.

There are several issues discussed that are important and interesting, however the discussion of food production and food security is particularly interesting to me.  Here is an excerpt:

The DatAgro Project was honored at the NetSquared conference as the winner of the Yahoo! Green Award and as one of the five laureates of the FACT Social Justice Award. Here are the announcements from Yahoo! and the French American Charitable Trust (FACT):

You can follow all of the exciting happenings at the NetSquared Conference through this widget:

I'm rounding out my second month as part of the DataDyne.org team at the NetSquared Year 4 conference in San Jose, CA.  I'm here, sitting in a room with 320 people who are all interested how mobile technology can be used to promote social justice.  John Zoltner, our partner in Chile, and I are promoting DatAgro.