The PopTech Blog

In the U.S., today is known as “Black Friday,” a day of shopping. Many are also spending time today supporting projects and organizations doing important work.

We hope you will consider supporting the amazing PopTech Social Innovation Fellows this season.

Ways to support their projects are below, and leave us a comment if you have questions—we’ll help you find ways to help the Fellows!

2009 PopTech Social Innovation Fellows, cc photo by whiteafrican.

Hope Phones

HopePhones.org supporters can donate via the Web site and request phone drive supplies.

FrontlineSMS:Medic

For those who’d like to be involved in FrontlineSMS:Medic (e.g. software development, hardware, funding), please use their site contact page.

Catapult Design

Catapult Design is running a “Startup Campaign” for seed funding.

And, Catapult has just received a matching grant from ASME/Engineering For Change for contributions received — so donations will be doubled! (Start here.)

Also, Catapult has two private events in the Bay Area in December for individuals who’d like to play a role in building Catapult. For more information on those, contact Heather directly heather [at] catapultdesign [dot] org.

Vittana

Vittana’s lending page has in-depth student profiles.

You can purchase student loans as gifts for friends and family during the holiday season.

You can donate directly using the links below:

Donate to I-MAK

Donate to Project H Design

Donate to Komaza

Donate to Energize Clinton County

To be involved with Movirtu, send an email to info [at] movirtu [dot[ com.

To be involved with Re:char, use their contact form.

Let us know if you have questions in the comments.

Thanks for supporting the excellent work of the 2008 and 2009 PopTech Social Innovation Fellows.

Editor’s note: This guest post was originally scheduled to be posted yesterday—we are thankful for Frank’s post below, and hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving had a lovely holiday. Read more below about ways we, as a community, can create ripples of thanks.

With Thanksgiving and the holiday season fast approaching, it is a time for reflection and gratitude for many. If this year was tougher than usual due to illness, physical or mental pain or financial struggle, it’s even more important to focus on what you have.

Studies by thought leaders Robert Emmons at University of California Davis and Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami have shown that gratitude is the “forgotten factor” in happiness. Through highly focused studies they shed some scientific light on the nature of gratitude, its causes, and its potential consequences for human health and well-being.

As a co-founder of Shiny Heart Ventures, I recently launched Thankfulfor.com, a social online gratitude journal providing a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being. People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter, extending the good vibes far and wide.

We believe that through the use of social networks we can help spread more positive feelings and in some way, help improve many people’s daily lives. This approach has been validated by 2009 PopTech speaker James Fowler, professor at University of California San Diego, who studies the intersection of social and natural sciences and referred to this phenomena as “emotional stampedes”.

Emotional states like happy, unhappy and neutral spread through online networks despite location. For instance, an overseas friend who shares their thanks for a delicious home cooked meal can inspire you to experience similar feelings of joy after reading their post and reflect on things in your own life. Through Thankfulfor.com and its growing community, we hope to inspire waves of contagious gratitude moving through people’s personal networks.

For the holiday months of November and December, Thankfulfor.com is hosting a Gratitude Challenge inviting everyone to try Thankfulfor routinely and then report back with stories of how the experience may have impacted their lives. We’ve already received this thoughtful story of the use of Thankfulfor in a preschool by a teacher in Boca Raton, Florida.

We invite you to give it a try and send us your unique experiences of Thankfulfor in your life.

You may have noticed certain avatars around the Internet looking a bit more hirsute than usual. While it’s true that winter’s coming and folks tend to get a little scruffier to stay warm, there’s actually a method to this mustache madness, or at least a good reason for the facial hair season.

We’re in the midst of “Movember”, an international effort to draw attention to men’s health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer by encouraging folks to grow mustaches. Movember participants are encouraged to register, then grow and photograph their mustaches as they unfurl. The ability to form teams adds a competitive edge, and women are encourage to join in the fun as “Mo Sistas” (that’s my company BatchBlue’s team BatchStash up there and yes, we are looking good!)

Started in Australian in 2003, Movember had nearly 180,000 participants last year. They’ve partnered with the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Live Strong (Lance Armstrong’s foundation), who split the funds evenly at the conclusion of the event.

So how does sporting big, beautiful mustaches help with fundraising? Well, just the sight of a mustache on a ordinarily nude lip can spark a conversation with friends and co-workers. From the Movember website:

“As an organization, we have a goal to change the attitude men hold toward their health. The moustache is the symbol by which we generate the necessary awareness and funds in order to be able to achieve this goal. It is a simple and effective way to achieve our number one objective – awareness.  The appearance of a new moustache opens up conversations, making the Movember participants a walking billboard, promoting men’s health for the whole month.” 

The rise in popularity of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have helped give the project even more exposure. You can follow the hashtag or official Movember account on Twitter, join their Facebook group, or check out their Flickr stream showcasing mustaches from past years’ events.

But it’s not all fun and facial fur. So far this month, Movember’s raised over 20 million dollars internationally — that’s a lot of mustache wax!   

If you or someone you know has been affected by prostate or testicular cancer, please consider donating to this cause. If you just want to come out in support of mustaches, there will be Movember Gala Parties taking place across the globe in early December.

Remember: sometimes a mustache isn’t just a mustache. It’s an attractive facial hair embellishment that can save lives. Read more...

Three new videos this week, two from writer Anthony Doerr (you can find his books on Powell’s Books) and one from Robert Guest, the Lexington columnist for The Economist.

Fiction writer and memoirist Anthony Doerr is the author of The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Here’s “Am I Still Here?”, about how networked technologies can alienate us from nature and the things that matter most. Read the text on the Orion site.

And in his beautiful “Butterflies on a Wheel,” Doerr’s narrator recounts having “traveled the great unspooling latticework of American interstates,” leading to a chance encounter between migrants in western Wyoming.

More:

Anthony has essays in McSweeney’s #32 and the upcoming #33, a full color newspaper.

Locate his upcoming appearances on his personal site.

Next summer, Scribner will publish his fourth book, Memory Wall, a collection of six stories.

Robert Guest covers American politics and culture as the Lexington columnist for The Economist. Despite some predictions otherwise, Guest suggests that America is uniquely positioned to be the world’s next hyperpower because the country has an unparalleled ability to attract immigrants from all over the world.

“America’s greatest strength, in my view, is that people want to live here.”

More:

Learn about talent clustering through the CEOs for Cities Talent Dividend Tour.

Contribute to better cities with the just-announced Code For America.

Read Robert’s “Coming Out of the Dark” essay from The Economist The World in 2010 print edition.

What do you think about these videos? Let us know in the comments.

This morning, President Obama announced Educate to Innovate:

“… a campaign to improve the participation and performance of America’s students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This campaign will include efforts not only from the Federal Government but also from leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies to work with young people across America to excel in science and math.”

The “Educate to Innovate” campaign page lists the goals:

- Increase STEM literacy so that all students can learn deeply and think critically in science, math, engineering, and technology.
- Move American students from the middle of the pack to top in the next decade.
- Expand STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and girls.

The President also announced partnerships with private companies, non-profits, universities, and foundations, citing an initial private sector investment of $260 million, which he expects to grow.

PopTech is partnering with Time Warner Cable (TWC) as part of the “Educate to Innovate” campaign for TWC’s “Connect a Million Minds” initiative.

We are excited to have PopTech’s video archive used to promote STEM skills with a younger audience, and this effort joins our work on the new PopTech Science Fellows program (you can nominate a Science Fellow).

What PopTech videos in science, technology, engineering, and math would you recommend we include in our offering? Let us know in the comments.