Carlos Miranda Levy's blog

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr talks at TED 2007 about the impact of businesses on the environment and their potential of wise, profitable investment to revert the trend, based on lessons learned and group focus with experts, entrepreneurs and scientists from multiple fields.

Given enabling environments for social entrepreneurship, both individuals and institutions will have similar incentives (beyond their social motivation) to innovate, explore, pursue and develop solutions, goods and services for their local communities and global markets.

The first step would be to understand the local ecosystem and its stakeholders and to become familiar with existing and similar experiences, their successes and failures, both at a local level and in other places. This would keep us from duplicating efforts, repeating mistakes and would allow us to learn from such experiences and to identify local partners and others with relevant experience.

There is a unique opportunity to improve people's awareness of their own culture, strengthening their identity and valuation of themselves and their communities in a non-discriminating way. Through equal access to both local and global content and culture in different places and enabling communication and interaction among such experiences, people's identity could be built at the same time as their appreciation and acceptance of other cultures and values, thus promoting a true global culture of tolerance enhanced and enriched by local values and elements.

A friend recently consulted me about streaming media and video-on-demand solutions available to satisfy the requirements of a distant learning initiative to be implemented by one of his customers. While explaining to him the many options available I realized that not many people are aware of how much the streaming media ecosystem has changed in the last few years and that there are several open source platforms and solutions available for streaming audio and video over the Internet, lowering the cost of such endeavors and making the implementation of pilot and fully functional initiatives much more affordable and accessible to all kind of organizations.

For quite some time now, a group of well known personalities from the mobile, advertising and business worlds have been working to give shape to an initiative that may change the mobile communications market in dramatic ways. It may even have a huge impact on advertising both on-line and on any other media.

A few days ago when I blogged on Blogging and War: Can Technology change Social Processes?, I chose not to address the issue of ethics involved in journalism and the unbiased report of happenings from the field.

As part of my research as Google sponsored fellow at the Reuters Digital Vision Program, I developed a series of visual representations of processes, frameworks and ecosystems supporting the Knowledge Society and Human Development through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT4Dev).

There's been a recent hype around the use of mobile technologies to "empower" people to submit reports "from the field", take action and change the course of society...

Somehow, just like we were promised that TV would educate people and that the Internet would free us all, we've heard it all before, yet we have to see it happen.

It is not volunteerism that we need. Not even social responsibility.

What we need is community engagement and tangible benefits for each and every party involved. Only then can a project prosper in the long term, long after the unique champions who push them are gone.