There is a new guest blogger in town, Ndesanjo Macha. Nedsanjo was one of the distinguished Sun Fellows from African that joined us at Pop!Tech 2005 and we are thrilled to have him join the blogging team.

Here’s a bit of background on Ndesanjo..

Ndesanjo Macha was trained as a lawyer and a journalist in Tanzania, East
Africa. He received his Masters in Sociology (focusing on social
informatics) in the US. He is the leading figure in Swahili blogosphere. He
single-handedly built the largest blogosphere in an African language,
Swahili. He started the first blog in Swahili in 2004, which has inspired
others to blog in African languages. He blogs for Jikomboe(Swahili),Digital Africa(English) and maintains a Swahili blogging guide. He also writes a weekly column on politics, technology, culture for a Tanzanian daily paper,
Mwananchi.

Ndesanjo is a very active Swahili Wikipedian, helping to build the first
Swahili encyclopedia. He is the co-ordinator of Katiba Huru/Hai Project
(Open/Living Constitution), a project to collaboratively re-write the
constitution of Tanzania on a wiki platform. He is a board member of The
People, Yes Project, a citizen media project.

His main interest are: technology and development in Africa, open source,
citizen journalism, collaborative democracy, and multicultural cyberspace
(decolonization of cyebrspace). He is currently working on a book, a
blogging guide for activists, journalists, and citizens in Africa.

Farecast is a new site that launched in beta mode this week. Using data-mining algorithms, Farecast will look at trends in airfares over the past 90 days and predict with the airfare to your desired destination is likely to go up, remain the same or go down based on your travel dates.

Unlike brokering sites like Orbitz or Travelocity, Farecast collects the data from the major airlines and directs you to the airline site to purchase the ticket. The site also shows you difference in prices by airline and time of day.

Farecast is also a committed to using open-source technology and grid technology, meaning the vast amounts of data mining and number crunching is accomplished by using the combined computing and storage capacity of a network of computers on the internet. The site features a very good explanation of how their siteworks.

This exceedingly useful service was created as computer science project at the University of Washington lead by professor and search technology expert Oren Etzioni.

source: GigaOM

Emeka Okafor, one of last year’s Sun fellows and co-founder of the Caranda Ventures, parent company to Caranda Teas, has just launched its new coffee line Caranda Coffee.

Caranda Coffees along with all Caranda properties is dedicated to the promotion of traditional and contemporary African culture, human rights, education, and medical aid donations through their partner Project Momentum.

10% of all profits from their coffee sales are donated to aid organizations such as Africa Services Committee, Direct Relief International, Project Momentum, and UNICEF.

Fun Fact: The Caranda Coffee family has also adopted a 17 year old Mountain Gorilla named Charles with the help of the African Wildlife Foundation, to which Caranda donates monthly.

Fun Fact 2:The birthplace of coffee is in Western Africa where the coffee plant originates. Legend has it that a herder from Ethiopia noticed his goat become particularly active after eating the red berries of an the indigenous shrub. He tried some himself and found he had renewed energy.

The Dutch artist, roboticist and engineering polymath Theo Jansen wow’d Pop!Tech 2005 (and PBS audiences who saw Alive from PopTech) with his incredible, evolving robotic creatures that walk on the wind. And now, his work has been featured in a terrific new BMW commercial that captures the essence of his work and spirit:

Congratulations, Theo! (And thanks Mark!)

We’ve recently enabled comments on the Pop!Tech blog. Feel free to comment on any of the posts. We’d love to hear about what you think of the various topics that we cover and add your expertise to the mix.

To post a comment click on the permalink tag at the bottom of each post. That will open up the blog post in a new window and you can post a comment from there.

Looking forward to making this a conversation.

Last year, at Pop!Tech 2005, we collaborated with the United Nations and Sun Microsystems to bring 10 young pan-African thought-leaders, technologists and social activists to speak with us about their work and dreams for the future of Africa.

We’ve asked these alumni fellows to give us an update, to continue sharing their stories with the Pop!Tech community. Some of the fellows will also be guest blogging about technology and social issues in Africa that they find intriguing.

So check back, we’ll have new updates regularly.

Congratulations to Victoria Hale! The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation has named Victoria one of its distinguished fellows. Each year,the foundation awards fellowships to individuals who demonstrate exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work.

Victoria is founder and CEO of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company with a mission to develop affordable drugs to treat diseases that plague the world’’s poorest communities.The institute recently received approval for and brought to market its first drug, paromomycin, a low-cost antibiotic cure for visceral leishmaniasis, which afflicts approximately 1.5 million people worldwide, primarily in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sudan. Research to create paromomycin was largely funded by a grant of $10 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Treatments underway for malaria, diarrheal disease, and Chagas disease hold the potential to save the lives of millions more.

We are thrilled to have Victoria join us this year in Camden to share with us her amazing work and future developments in global health care.

The R&D team at the East Japan Railway, in collaboration with Keio University, is testing a new system where passenger traffic in the station will be transformed into electricity as a supplementary power source for the station.

The subway turnstiles will be fitted with panels under the floors with a series of piezo electric generators. When a passenger steps through the turnstile, the pressure and vibration of the step will set up a reaction that produces electricity.

Currently, the system is being tested in reception area of the main office building of the JR-East in Tokyo. Each time a visitor passes through, a light bulb illuminates to show that electricity has been generated.

If this system proves to be successful, it would be an ideal model for clean energy production for mass transit associations around the world.

There is a new format war at hand. Like the epic battle between VHS and Betamax we find two new contenders for the title of The New Video Format.

In one corner we have the HD-DVD, able to hold between 15-45 GB of High Definition video and data content. And in the other corner we have Blu-Ray, similar optical storage technology supported by Sony.

But HD-DVD is the favorite to win, especially now that the pornography industry has chosen sides. A Japanese company by the name of GLAY’z has just released the very first adult HD-DVD. It’s no secret that it was the adult entertainment industry that hoisted VHS on its shoulders leaving Betamax in the dust. The porn business has always been at the forefront of technology, looking for ever faster, cheaper ways to distribute their content. We can also thank them for popularizing cd-roms,pay-per-view television and online secure payments.

Hollywood has started releasing dual DVD/HD-DVD’s and Mission Impossible III will be the first film to be released on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray simultaneously. But with supporters like Microsoft, Intel, Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures and now the Adult Entertainment Industry in the HD-DVD camp, I think we have a winner.

TIME recently published their annual list of the 50 Coolest Websites. Well, now that they have been labeled as cool, are they really cool anymore? That’s an ontological discussion for another day.

They have compiled some of the top sites that have become a part of our tech-vernacular such as YouTube and MySpace. PopTech friend Blurb also made the cut as the best online self-publishing service.

This list is a nice cheat sheet for when we ask you what your favorite website is this year at PopTech.

hint: the correct answer is the PopTech Blog.