India

That's the team, or at least a small part of it.  Our team that has gotten us to this moment, just 3 days away from the Tech4Society event.

It's about 1am here in Hyderabad.  A group of us are sitting in our guest house working, on about our 18th hour of the day.  You'd think it would be drudgery but its not.  Everyone is so tired that at this point, everything is funny.  Everything is hysterical.  The fact that it was suggested that we have a fortune-telling parrot at our event made us laugh so hard.  (The parrot won't be there, just in case you were curious).

Our Keynote speaker, Fernando Flores, arrived tonight and was brought to his hotel safe and sound.  We have volunteers and event planners at the airport and a fantastic-sounding line-up of presentations and activities for our Market Place Evening on the 12th.

Our videographer has landed, as has nearly the whole team.

Now is the time when we move from plans to action, from well-thought-out lists to quick-response phone calls.

3 days until a year's worth of work comes to fruition and hopefully something even better.

Can't wait to share the ride with you all!

***

Friends, this is my second to last Road to Hyderabad post.  That means we are less than 2 weeks away from the opening of the Tech4Society event.

To be honest, it still feels very far away.  There are lots of last minute arrangements and decisions to make.  Long ago I naively believed I would feel like we were “almost done” by this point.  Ha! At this point 10 days feels like both an incredibly long time and an incredibly short one.  It will be bizarre to write this post next week when we are truly just days away. 

This past week was an interesting one.  I spent time cultivating relationships, drinking lots of tea and coffee and coke (my neighbor at the apartment likes to buy me cokes for some reason).   I wandered around the city, I thought a lot about the details.  I had my first Andhra thali and criss-crossed the city by foot and by auto.

On one hand, I can’t point to any real tangible progress that I made; on the other, I feel like it was important for me to just be here.

And the surprising thing:  I really like Hyderabad.  I’ve lived in India before, I’ve even lived in Southern India before but this city is far different than the last one I stayed in (Chennai). 

Image Source: Bindaas Madhavi

Well, I'm in Hyderabad.

You know what that means.

We are less than 3 weeks away from the beginning of Tech4Society.

Today I met my colleague Vishnu briefly, saw our venue at the Indian School of Business (ISB), saw the very beautiful Ista Hotel where some of our guests will be staying and later helped my neighbor in my guest house get on the internet.

I've got my Indian phone number at long last after multiple negotiations and photocopies and I'm realizing I better pick up some Telugu to be more effective around here. 

And what is Hyderabad like, you might be asking. 

Tomorrow I'll explore the city a little more but the part I saw today—Hi-Tech City—was fascinating.  It's all steel and glass rising out of rocks and dust.  Dozens of big tech companies have offices there and new construction is everywhere. 

This post contributed by Ashoka's Osman Ashai. The following is Part 3 in a case study series following Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi's collaboration with Microsoft to use mobile technology to educate the public and health care workers about Tuburculosis prevention and treatment.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/focus2capture/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Ashoka Fellow Hilmi Quraishi and his organization, ZMQ, are working to tackle Tuberculosis in rural India through technology. With support from Microsoft and using their software, Quraishi and ZMQ have developed a two-pronged approach:

First: increase Tuberculosis awareness among the public.

Image source: Gizmag

Here's another one from our friends at Gizmag:

ChotuKool: the $69 fridge for rural India

"Is this the world’s cheapest refrigerator? Launched by Indian conglomerate Godrej and Boyce, ChotuKool's $69 price tag is not the only reason it can be called super economical. The portable, top-opening unit weighs only 7.8kg, uses high-end insulation to stay cool for hours without power and consumes half the energy used by regular refrigerators. This is a product that has crossed several technological barriers and is designed to cross several social barriers as well."

This little fridge cools with a system like a fan in a computer and can be powered by batteries, which means it can be mobile.  It has way fewer parts than a traditional refrigerator--about 20, compared to 200--which could have positive durability and repair implications.  And its design and color choices were heavily influenced by its end-users.

The life of Marc Koska changed the day he read that HIV would spread via unsafe injections like wildfire and he decided to do something about it. That was back in '84. It seemed to him that if injections were the cause, then the spread was preventable.  Today his invention, a low-cost non-reusable syringe, is being widely used. And, more importantly, his campaign to raise public awareness about the dangers of reusing syringes have even led India to change national policy.

"The quest was to develop a syringe that could be made of the same materials... tooling and assembly equipment and used in exactly the same way as a conventional syringe – but with one minor, negligible cost modification that would make re-use impossible. The K1 was the result. And today, 17 years later, literally millions are used every week. Once only, so that every injection with a K1 syringe is sterile and safe". 

If you want to see the syringe, watch this video.