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As the week winds down I wanted to share a note about a couple of interesting Web 2.0 ventures relevant to the base of the pyramid community. Two social networks have launched recently, aiming to connecting people and ideas around the role of business and entrepreneurship against poverty and inequality.

BOP Source is one of them. The brainchild of Jenara Nerenberg (author of a great blog that goes by the same name), BOP Source was launched just over a week ago. It will be interesting to see how the idea continues to evolve. I was personally intrigued by Jenara's vision of Web 2.0. tools in the hands of the base of the pyramid, as described in her guest post for NextBillion.net. She envisions BOP Source playing that role, as explained in the original press release, which you can read here.

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Brian McCarthy wants to live in a shipping container – seriously.  And based on what I’ve seen of his work, I would be thrilled to live in one, too.  McCarthy is the founder of PFNC, a manufacturer and provider of affordable housing. PFNC stands for Por Fin, Nuestra Casa – a Spanish phrase that translates as finally, a house of our own.  

In 2004, McCarthy made a visit to Ciudad Juárez, along the US-México border, as part of his executive MBA program. The city is home to more than 300 maquiladoras, which employ 1.1 million people.  Maquiladoras are factories that import materials and equipment duty-free for assembly or manufacturing and then re-export the assembled product, usually back to the originating country; most of their employees live in slums.

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The initial $100 price tag of the XO Laptop from Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) created quite a furor when it was first announced three years ago. At the time, the cheapest laptops were hovering around $400 to $500.

This subject has been rehashed many times in the press and the blogosphere, but reading a recent report on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for computers deployed in schools in India prompted me to write about the pricing debate and what can be learned from it. A longer version of the report can be found here.

The report was prepared by VitalWave Consulting, a firm specializing in consulting and research for technology companies growing businesses in emerging markets. They performed a study in India, funded by Microsoft, on the TCO of computers deployed in schools. They built a model that took various factors into consideration when estimating the total cost of owning a computer over a period of time.

Purchase cost, maintenance, support, training, replacement cycle, and electricity cost are just a few of the elements they factored in. They looked at desktops, laptops, and ultra low-cost laptops like the XO and Intel's Classmate PC. The report also compares the differences between TCO in India and TCO in a "global" model.

For those unfamiliar with the TCO concept, it is mostly used by IT professionals in larger companies who understand that the overall cost of a computer is not just the initial price and that variances can cause large fluctuations in the overall cost over time.

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Paul Polak is wearing a sweater vest.  This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s met him or seen him speak.  The man loves sweaters – cardigans, sweater vests, pullovers.  Hell, in Camden today – with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees in the midday sun – Paul’s sweater makes a lot of sense.  But despite his grandfatherly image, Paul is a truly a young, tireless innovator and entrepreneur at heart.  

Polak is the founder of the non-profit International Development Enterprises (IDE) and the author of Out of Poverty (review here).  He is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots. For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world to help design and produce low–cost, income–generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.

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Outside, it is grey and rainy, but inside, the Camden library is warm and inviting.  Today's special session merited an early arrival to Pop!Tech: Scaling the Bottom of the Pyramid, a 2-hour talk by longtime BoP innovators Paul Polak and Bunker Roy.

Bill Gordon, a Pop!Tech board member, kicks things, describing Pop!Tech's active social change mission – realized through its Accelerator and Social Innovation Fellows Programs.  He then introduces today’s speakers as the "heavyweights of the social enterprise world."  I, for one, don't argue with that description.

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Last July CGAP issued a new report about the main building blocks for any bank that is thinking about offering mobile phone financial services to its customers. (Shame on me for doing this post so late).

Banking on Mobiles: Why, How, for Whom? is, not surprisingly, a very good report. After all, these are the people currently in the forefront of research efforts to understand and develop mobile phone banking and the place to go for anyone interested in this market. An additional point in their favor is that their reports are "waffle-free" and go straight to the point.

The report takes the perspective of a small/middle sized bank or microfinance institution in a developing country that wants to start offering mobile phone financial services, but does not really know how or where to start.

First, how does your bank intend to use mobile phones?

1. Will you use it as a virtual card like any debit card?
2. Will you use it as a point-of-sale terminal to communicate with the bank to ask for transactions?
3. Will you use it combined with stores willing to join the system as an ATM?
4. Will you use it as an internet banking terminal? (More about this point coming in my next post).
5. … Or are you thinking about a combination between these four possibilities?

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Tomorrow morning, I return to Maine for the annual Pop!Tech conference.  For the second consecutive year, NextBillion.net will be live-blogging the event, which brings together 600+ thought leaders for three days of inspiring presentations, performances, discussions and declarations.  (I am humbled to be part of this small cadre of bloggers: GigaOM, Fast Company, GOOD Magazine, and White African.)  Here's last year's conference preview for a little bit of context and history.

After last year's Pop!Tech I wondered aloud what its 'net impact' would be in 2008.  Well, we're about to find out. 

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All good things must come to an end, including NextBillion.net's coverage of last week's Social Capital Markets conference.  SoCap was a 72-hour firestorm of ideas, conversations, impromptu meetings and a lot of blog posts – 22, to be precise.  But at the end of the day, what does it all mean?  I've been thinking hard on this, and have boiled it down to three key takeaways:

1. The tent is big, and growing
2. Measurement matters
3. Show me the money

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The final day of last week's SoCap event was, for me, the best of the 3 days.  It was the chance to meet with lots of other participants, hear their ideas, and get actively involved in the things that I really cared about and wanted to discuss.  The "strategically unstructured" format of the day was SoCap’s way to take the informal discussions of the hallways and expand on them.  It was also the place to find the people that were in the sessions on Monday and Tuesday who you never found the time to have a chat with.

I attended only 2 sessions that day, the first on franchising as a tool for scale and the second on China and development, but I actually spent the entire day on-site chatting with new found friends, old-found friends, and a whole host of compelling ideas.  The franchising talk brought together seasoned members of the community from organizations like VisionSpring one of the early adopters of microfranchising, and those that were just starting to look at franchising such as Rubicon. 

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Guest blogger Graham Macmillan is the Senior Director of VisionSpring (formerly Scojo Foundation). In addition to his work with the VisionSpring team, Graham is pursuing his Global EMBA as part of TRIUM, which is a joint program of London School of Economics, HEC Paris, and NYU Stern. He also holds his MSc in International Management from NYU Wagner and his BA in International Studies and History from Colby College.

By Graham Macmillan

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