Pieter Peach

The entire audience was silent after watching Sunitha Krishnan’s powerful TEDIndia talk on the issue of child sex trafficking in India in November this year.  People needed time to digest her message.

She spoke about the organisation Prajwala she began almost 15 years ago in Hyderabad, India, and its mission of helping trafficked children.  Prajwala finds, extracts, and supports women who are trafficked into prostitution as children. I visited her and Prajwala in Hyderabad after the conference to speak to her to understand more about it.

In conversation she displayed an intense, resolute determination, and selfless pride in the activities of the organisation.  She described a multipronged approach aimed at helping these children by providing equal parts psychological support, civic support, and vocational support. She made it clear that none of these approaches alone could achieve the desired outcome, which was full reintegration into their community.

Her organisation worked to table, and have civic compensation legislation for trafficked children passed through Andra Pradesh state parliament to enable their civic rehabilition.  This, she described, was crucial to having the children recognise themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, and crucially, have that same mindshift occur in the communities they were re-entering.

In addition, Prajwala has set up seventeen schools, educating the children through all stages of primary and secondary education.  I visited one of these schools and spoke to a few of the teenage girls, one of which was now in university completing a Bachelor of Commerce.

On the same grounds, they had vocational training workshops in metalwork and woodwork, and were running a printing enterprise. One of the most difficult aspects to deal with was the fact that approximately one out of three girls had contracted HIV prior to their arrival at Prajwala, and medical support was a significant challenge.

Sunitha has suffered both threatened and real physical abuse from the vested interests in child trafficking.  She has been attacked in fourteen separate incidents, and at the time of our meeting, was waiting for an operation required to fix her hearing, from a recent attempt on her life.

The consequences of Prajwala’s work is inspiring.  Over 3,500 children have received support, 600 of which have gone on to marry and have 46 children, who she affectionately described as her grandchildren.  This, by anyone’s standards, is a big achievement.

Watch her talk above to hear it in her own words.

Furniture made by the women at Prajwala

This is concentrated lesson juice from the 10 First To Market Products That lost out to Latecomers from Business Insider.

“1. Friendster took money from a number of large venture capital firms very early on. They promptly filled the board with VC all-stars who had grand visions for Friendster’s future, but little concern for the technical problems of its present. (Friendster vs Myspace/Facebook)

2. Even when you’re a market leader, keep iterating and improving your product. Don’t just make your next product better than your last one, but dream big, and make it better than anything your rivals could come up with. (Palm vs iPhone)

3. If someone bigger and stronger decides to enter your market, you may need to radically alter your strategy. Don’t pretend you can out-muscle them. Find your niche and shore it up. (Netscape vs Microsoft)

4. Always be thinking about whether there is a better way to do what you do. You can be sure someone else is. (Webcrawler vs Google)

5. If your product is popular, but could very easily be merely a feature of someone else’s, you have a problem. Find a way to stay relevant, or convince the makers of the uberproduct that the cheapest way to incorporate your technology is to buy you. (Tivo vs DVRs)

6. If you are selling a platform for content, it’s incredibly difficult to compete with someone who can sell that content to users directly. If you can’t do the same, get out of the way. (Rio vs iPod)

7. Consumers might have a different plan for your product than you do. Adjust your design to fit their needs, not your ideas about what the product should be. (Betamax vs VHS)

8. Keep innovating. Especially if you are in the technology sector, you can’t kid yourself that your product will stay appealing forever, or that serious competitors will never come along. (Atari vs Nintendo)

9. Sometimes your customers’ needs won’t sit well with you; what they want just isn’t the sort of product you wanted to make. If you can afford to fail, stick to your guns. Otherwise, get with the program. (Everquest vs World of Warcraft)”

This is inspiration, purified. Pick a root cause of much of India’s beaurocratic and economic pain, and wrap a simple business model around providing a solution to it.

What you get is a company providing anti-corruption services to people experiencing roadblocks in their dealings with bribery ridden government departments.  This is gold.

This social enterprise is the brainchild of Shaffi Mather and his partners out of India, and I saw him present their idea at TEDIndia in November this year.  Shaffi’s legitimacy in this space includes his qualification as a lawyer, property developer, and founder of 1298 Ambulance, a cross-subsidy model social enterprise successfully making ambulance services available to the people of Mumbai.

He had realised that the cost of providing people with help in tackling bribery, utilising existing Right to Information legislation, was significantly less than the cost of the bribes being requested. Instant business model, with a ready market (~$1 trillion). Just add chutzpah.

Best part is this. On stage, his flippant remark “We could call it something like bribebusters.com…”, led to an email that night by an international paper requesting an interview with him about this “BribeBusters.com” they’d seen mentioned on the twitter backchannel of the TED event.  1. He hadn’t registered the domain name.  2. He didn’t know whether a company with this name already existed. 3. He immediately registered the (surprisingly) vacant domain name once he recovered from his brief panic, fearing a defamation suit from an existing company.

Whether it will be called Stop Bribery and Prevent Corruption, or BribeBusters.com, its a great story. Listen to his talk below.

On my way to TED India I was shown around the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement activities in Saragur, rural India, by an old friend who worked there as a paediatric surgeon. It was started 15 years ago by 4 medical students from Mysore and comprises two schools educating approximately 800 students between them, and a 100 bed hospital supplying free medical care to the local population.

Even though they were medically trained, they realised early that without education and nutrition they were fighting an uphill battle. The quality of the school was impressive, educating children from age of 2 through to highschool graduation, and boarding about 30% of their chidlren.  There were 30 computers in each school, and although one of the schools had access to the internet, as yet, the remotest of the two schools didn’t. I couldn’t help but think about the resources these kids now had access to through these computers that they used to have to rely on donated books for.

The founders were still working there fulltime as doctors/administrators.

Advice from the many corners of the web seems to be polarised on how free you should feel to talk to people about your “big idea“. Both sides make valid points and take an extreme position to prove a point. Is there a middle ground?

Share-widely camp.

1. Without the idea there is nothing, but execution is everything. There will be plenty of people in the world with the same idea, and success will come to those that have the passion, capacity, and persistence to execute on it. Also, beyond trying your smartest and hardest, much of a venture’s success will just be up to timing or dumb luck.

2. You’re idea won’t develop without talking about it. You need early validation, either from your customers (ideally), or peers (often not critical enough). You will reinforce internal biases if you keep on talking to nobody but yourself.

3. Don’t bother with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Investors won’t sign them anyway. They won’t take the liablity exposure by signing your NDA on the off-chance they’re already incubating the same idea with another one of their ventures.

Keep-it-to-yourself camp.

1. You’re idea is valuable and unique. If it wasn’t, then why hasn’t it been executed on before now? The answer may be that it’s a dud idea, it may be that it’s servicing an only recently realised painpoint, or it may be that the market/technology has just evolved sufficiently for it to work. Why risk letting someone else benefit from your ability to generate a good idea? Good ideas are not a dime a dozen.

2. Bother with NDAs. An investor who knows enough about your idea to be interested (and probably enough to realise they’re not invested in a similar space) will bother signing. Anyone else is not interested or serious enough and you should look elsewhere. Here is an example of a VC that signs NDAs, and why.

Devil in the detail?

There is undoubtedly a middle ground as there are plenty of examples where protected ideas have contributed to sustainable competitive advantage, and examples of valuable companies built on branding, story, and customer/distribution networks alone. Most straightforward web-startups with no novel technology to patent probably fit into the latter category and are much better off just getting on with it and executing.

If its not a straightforward web-startup, get questions about protectable intellectual property (IP) answered quickly. How protectable is it? How much will it cost to protect? Are you better off just spending the money on getting your product out? A brief chat to a patent attorney will likely help you get this answer (although consider their vested interest in the patent path).

Getting early advice from people more experienced doers that are currently doing in a related space will no doubt help you refine your idea. Should you lose faith if they don’t get it? No, just work on your pitch. If they do get it, listen and incorporate their feedback as objectively as possible. You will likely sound like an idiot at the beginning. Don’t care, you soon won’t.

As we’re repeatedly told, there is more to IP than patents, and there is more to a business’s value than IP.

The best advice nobody disagrees with? Just go out and do it already.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this. Any experiences to share?

Twitter @ppeach

With social media gaining traction since SARS (2003) and Avian H5N1 (2006), it will be interesting to see what role it might now play as a media tool in the current pandemic du jour.  The benefits of social media are clear, namely speed of communication, and monitoring sentiment.  The cost in accuracy is not insignficant, and it will be simply a matter of how to best use it.  Can new micro media services like twitter add anything useful? Will good information float well enough above the bad to make it worthwhile keeping track of?

I don’t think the question is whether people should, its a question of how they should. Twitter is just an open conversation tool, and people will use it to talk about issues important to them, and if swineflu/H1N1 does take hold, it will become one of those issues.

Access and distribute reliable information. Thankfully, several streams of information are available from official government and international agencies. (WHO -website & twitter CDC – Website, Twitter, Email).  The higher the official signal to unofficial noise, the better.  You could argue that it is often slower and more deliberate than other sources, but they have significant cost/benefit analyses to make with each official release.  Partially uncertain information is occasionally communicated, but only after due consideration.

Focus on facts and confirmed cases. Real numbers are much less than that reported in the media. If somebody publishes something without a link to either official or reliable press (eg. AFP) sources and you’re still interested, try looking for a pattern of multiple first hand accounts rather than a chain of retweets. Specifically with the current H1N1 Swineflu outbreak, “suspected” cases can be very misleading.  Once an “area” (eg. often a city) has a single laboratory confirmed case, everybody who presents to the emergency department, or general practitioner, with at least two of 1) runny nose or nasal congestion, 2) sore throat, 3) cough, 4) fever or feverishness gets labelled as a “suspected case”. This is all in the CDC case definition here.  You can imagine the number of patients with otherwise innocuous colds that come through like this everyday, let alone when the population is on heightened alert.

The next bit of information of interest to most people will be a change in the global pandemic alert phase which can be found here. For Australians, the federal government has a website up at http://www.flupandemic.gov.au/ with some information on pandemic preparedness with links to each state health departments. Its not the best, but at least its something local for both clinicians and the public.

The best source of CONFIRMED US cases are to be found here http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/

Below is an unofficial map from http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/ of human cases of H1N1 infection.

Know of any good, reliable sources of information people might find useful?

What a Saturday.  I had the chance to sit in on some interesting sessions at the inaugral Trampoline Melbourne, an unconference organised by Pat Allen, Melina Chan, and Steve Hopkins.  It was held at Donkeywheel, Melbourne’s newest social change projects venue.  100 people from various disciplines came together to speak about their biggest ideas.  I heard some interesting talks on complexity theory, persuasion psychology, trust systems as alternative economies, biomimicry, advertising and mass-collaboration, and missed out on hearing some apparently interesting talks on Zen IT and permaculture, personal prototyping, amongst others.  The format of an unconference is simple.  People turn up and the session agenda evolves as people put their hand up to speak.

I had a chance to present on future health, and explored the way technolology and open, accessible, data will have significant impacts on health outcomes when applied to the social determinants of health, namely, education, information equity, income, empowerment, and looked briefly at the potential of rapid learning systems to improve clinical processes and aid in clinical decision support.

Slides from my talk are below (it probably doesn’t make much sense as slides were only visual cues, but links to interesting sites are on slide 99), and video of the presentation here.

There will be another Trampoline in the future, so keep your ears out.

There’s a resurgence in an interest in Flow amongst the lively online community here in Melbourne.  Watching the ever-connected Ross Hill and Steve Hopkins at a roundtable discussion this morning reminded me of the most useful diagram I’ve come across in understanding the concept.  Its taken from Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s slide presentation at TED.

Humour detour.  @provoost just pointed me towards a peek at a future of less labour intensive aged care.

“…..as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home’s new human washing machine.”

I think it’s pretty self explanatory.  I think the manufacturers may have taken inspiration from Barbarella