The Portable Light is a self sufficient and sustainable source of power that can be easily folded and transported. Designed by KVA MATx, each portable light unit generates about two watts of electricity and about one hundred lumens of white light, enough to read a book or do domestic tasks by. It can even be used as a power supply to charge a cell phone, or used in conjunction with other units to increase its power supply so it can charge medical equipment or laptops. This breakthrough technology is great news for the 2 billion people in the world who live without electricity.

The Portable Light is on display at MoMA Feb 24 – May 12 as part of their Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.

For additional images and video of Portable Light adapting to a variety of different uses, click here.

To hear Sheila Kennedy at Pop!Tech discussing the inspirations for Portable Light, click here.

Courtesy of KVA matx

Peggy Shea Andrews

What’s the net impact of Pop!Tech?  I’ve been thinking about my time in Camden, Maine a lot lately - never more so than while I attended the 2007 Net Impact conference this past week in Nashville (see, pun very much intended.)  In all seriousness however, my trip to Tennessee prompted the following questions: what is the impact of Pop!Tech and what will it do next?

These questions are not accidental; the Net Impact conference’s theme this year was, in fact, What Will You Do Next?  With 1800 attendees and up to 16 sessions at a time (!) there is no one answer from Net Impact.  Despite the wide variety of experiences among attendees, the conference managed to communicate a clear theme: get it done. 

Part of that theme stems from the fact that Net Impact attracts mostly MBA students - they are all about starting a business or at least working with organizations that address social and environmental problems.  I saw MBAs eager to be the next Claire Broido Johnson (of SunEdison) or Paul Hudnut (of EnviroFit) - two perfect examples of people who are “doing it next” through their work. 

(Side note: check out Paul’s excellent blog, What’s a BOPreneur? and his report from Net Impact.)

Pop!Tech, on the other hand, is just beginning to dip into the “get it done” arena.  This year’s conference, The Human Impact, seemed to be a departure from previous events.  Quite a few attendees described previous Pop!Techs as gadget-fests, featuring the latest innovative products and concepts.  This year’s conference, on the other hand, gave a lot of stage-time to problems, mostly environmental degradation and persistent poverty.  I’m not sure the old-school Pop!Techies were happy with this shift, even though the conference did a marvelous job pointing out the innovative tools, models, and ideas that are indeed changing the world - and featured some great “get it done” types, like Jessica Flannery and Van Jones (among others.)

So, getting back to my original question, what is Pop!Tech’s net impact?  In many ways, it remains to be seen - it depends how the Pop!Tech Accelerator and the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative work, among other things.  These two initiatives are forays into the “get it done” space.  If they are successful, then Pop!Tech’s impact will grow.  If they hit some roadblocks, however, Pop!Tech may have jeopardized its hardcore audience in its effort to take its program to the next level.  (Side note: I’m confident that Andrew and co. can make it work.)

What will it do next?  For starters, Pop!Tech can continue its excellent programming.  I’d like to see invites to next year’s meeting go out to folks like Paul Hudnut and Claire Broido Johnson, for starters, as well as other get-it-done speakers at Net Impact - Cindy Cooper, Tim Prestero, Ben Powell, Cleve Justis, etc.

Ultimately, these are two vastly different conferences, but they can learn from one another.  Net Impact, in my opinion, can take a page from Pop!Tech’s book and sharply reduce the number of sessions and speakers - quality over quantity!  Not only that, but mandated, controlled networking - like Pop!Tech lunches - are the sorts of things that sets a conference apart from a series of lectures interspersed with a bag lunch.  Can you do Pop!Tech for 1800 MBAs in 2/3 of the time at 1/3 of the budget?  No - and I’m not asking Net Impact to.  But as Pop!Tech can learn from Net Impact, it goes the other way as well.

by Robert Katz, World Resources Institute

In today’s program, Andrew Zolli, announced the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative. This initiative is the second iteration of our commitment to being “carbon negative”. This is not your parent’s carbon neutrality. The idea of being carbon negative means that you are offsetting in excess of your carbon emissions.

Representatives of each benefiting project in Pop!Tech’s listings are participating in this year’s Pop!Tech conference as “Pop!Tech Carbon Fellows.” Fellows include:

* Robert Freling, the Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), an organization dedicated to helping rural communities in the developing world power a brighter future through innovative uses of solar energy. SELF is bringing solar powered irrigation to Benin’s Kalale District in West Africa where over 80% of the villages do not have a source of surface water. The villages are provided with a source of clean renewable energy, eliminating the need for diesel & gas powered pumps.

* Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, the Executive Director of Paso Pacífico, a non-profit organization seeking to build wildlife corridors along the Pacific slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. She is currently working on the restoration and conservation of endangered forest ecosystems in the Rivas Province of Nicaragua. This project also reduces the vulnerability of local communities to extreme climate events while improving ecosystem services and the viability of endangered species.

* Stefano Merlin, the Director of Ecologica Network and President of Instituto Ecologica, which coordinates several socio-environmental programs including the Bandeira Switching Non-Renewable Biomass Project in the North of Brazil. This project addresses the problem of deforestation and reduces the quantity of biomass decaying which, in turn, cuts down on green house gas emissions.

When you visit the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative website, you can input some information to get your annual carbon footprint. The average American’s carbon footprint is 9.44 tons of CO2. Mine was 14 tons and to offset that amount towards Paso Pacifico would work out to be only about $77 dollars)

How do you compare to that average?

Also, Mark Anderson of Wired Magazine just wrote a story about the program as a part of Wired coverage of the event.

There is so much content out there on the internet now, however, less than 1/3 of the material is available in any given language. So we partnered with an amazing company called dotSUB, to translate the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts in eight highly-relevant languages in the hopes of removing language as a barrier to globalization. The eight target languages (Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Swahili, Farsi, Arabic, French and Spanish) were picked because they represent vital areas of the developing world.

We’ve released a preliminary batch of subtitled Pop!Casts including:

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and best-selling author; Bunker Roy, one of India’s most successful social entrepreneurs; Jesse Sullivan and Dr. Todd Kuiken, the world’s first bionic man and the doctor who helped him become so; Carolyn Porco, who leads the imaging team on the Cassini missions to Saturn; Zinhle Thabete, a front-line warrior in the battle against HIV in South Africa; and Richard Alley, the renowned paleoclimatologist and climate change expert.

Don’t worry — more is on the way!

dotSUB was founded by Michael Smolens, who has a lifetime of experience doing business in high risk emerging economies. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders went to work creating a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, ‘wiki’ type environment. This tool gives both professional and amateur viewers the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the video file. The same tool facilitates captioning video for the hearing-impaired. You should definitely check out dotsub.com to see the amazing array of videos that they have subtitled into more than 48 languages.

BusinessWeek has also written up an article about the Pop!Tech/dotSub Inititative which can be seen online.

To see the Pop!Casts, please visit www.poptech.org.

Pop!Tech “Artifact” Project Nominated for Best of Design in New England.

Last year at the 2006 Pop!Tech, we defied time, conventions and perhaps logical thinking to produce The Artifact.

The Artifact was a full-length book documenting the three-day Pop!Tech 2006 conference. The theme, Dangerous Ideas, inspired our objective: capture the essence of the experience. Immediately. And do that on-site, in collaboration with graphic designers and a Pop!Tech guru, and, oh yeah, print and ship the book on a deadline that tailed the close of the conference by a day or two. Could we do it? Crazy, but why not put our talent to the test, work around the clock and deploy some state-of-the-art technology. Why not?

Throughout the conference, an army of contributors (drawn from the 500-plus truly creative and insightful Pop!Tech participants) invigorated us to pull 304 pages together in real time. Participants fed us a constant stream of raw content in the form of wiki comments, blogs, digital photos, scanned notes and tablet PC sketches. Professional photographs and illustrations added an extra wow factor. At last, the complete book was pointed toward the digital printer, an HP Indigo Press 5000 with the variable printing technology to make each copy unique. Then voila! Let’s get this baby shipped to our Pop!Tech attendees—if they take the scenic route home, the book will be there when they arrive.

That’s 600 one-of-a-kind books with content created almost neck-in-neck with the experience. Got a couple more days? Edit. Print. Ship. And make dust of a dangerous deadline. (from AHA’s website).

Well, all that hard work and dangerous thinking did not go unnoticed. Pop!Tech’s Artifact has been nominated for the BoNESHOW7, AIGA’s Best of New England design competition.

The Artifact, along with the other nominated projects will be showcased at a gallery opening on June 7 2007 at MassArts’ Bakalar Gallery in Boston.

Here is a look at the book that made its way to YouTube (thanks to Aaron from Designverb for posting it!)

Finger’s Crossed! and Congrats to everyone that worked on this project!

Everyone here at Pop!Tech is excited to let you know that today we released our first twenty-two Pop!Casts, freely available online video and audio presentations available in both streaming and downloadable formats, on our newly refreshed website.

Available at www.poptech.org/popcasts, the Pop!Casts feature some of the very best presentations from the 2006, 2005 (and eventually 2004) conferences, and we’ll be releasing new ones ever two weeks throughout the rest of the year.

The first set includes fabulous recent presentations by:

Thomas Friedman — Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times Columnist.
Serena Koenig — Global health leader and Director of Haiti Programs for Partners in Health
Richard Dawkins — World renowned biologist and evolutionary theorist
Zinhle Thabethe — Renowned AIDS activist from South Africa
Sinikithemba Choir Performance — South African Choir of Zulu men and women who provide support to persons with HIV/AIDS
Bunker Roy — Founder of the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India
Carolyn Porco — Chief Imaging Scientist on the Cassini Mission to Saturn
Erin McKean —Editor-in-chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and self-proclaimed “word geek”
Juan Enriquez — Leading futurist and bestselling writer on the future of nations
Neil Gershenfeld — Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms
Jonathan Coulton — Singer/Songwriter and the official Pop!Tech Balladeer
Thomas Barnett — Strategist and expert on national security and best-selling author
Jesse Sullivan and Todd Kuiken —Jesse Sullivan and his doctor, Todd Kuiken, work together to make Jesse the world’s first bionic man
Martin Marty — One of the most prominent interpreters of religion and culture
Chris Anderson — Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail”
Theo Jansen — Dutch “kinetic sculptor” who creates wind-powered robotic “animals”
Marcia McNutt — Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute director
Reggie Watts - Human Beat-Box Polymath Musician and Comedian
Marianne Weems — Artistic director of the new media theater ensemble The Builders Association
Homaro Cantu —Inventor, entrepreneur and molecular gastronomist
Lester Brown — Preeminent environmentalist and head of the Earth Policy Institute
Kent Nichols — Co-Creator of the wildly popular website and podcast AskaNinja.com

The Pop!Casts are being made available to the public with the help of our friends at Lexus with production support from Yahoo! To encourage their distribution, we’re releasing all of these as open-source, non-commercial Creative Commons licensed content.

You can also subscribe to Pop!Casts within iTunes. With one click you can get them delivered to your iPod automatically!

VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Jakob Trollback for designing the Pop!Cast opening titles, Betsy Henning and AHA! for their beautiful written descriptions, Hamilton Hughes Design for their as-always elegant design work and visual refresh of our website.

Tell your friends, neighbors, colleagues — these are truly worth sharing with anyone who appreciates the innovative ideas and people that change the world.

Great news! The installation of the solar panels in Benin, made possible by the Carbon Negative initiative from Pop!Tech 2006, will commence in the next few months.

Robert Freling, Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund, has sent us some wonderful pictures from Benin, where 44 villages that are currently off the grid will receive clean, renewable energy to homes, schools, health care clinics thanks to the partnership between SELF, Lexus, and Pop!Tech.

The first image is of Bona Kida Setamou, the mother of Mamoudou Setamou, the person who first introduced Freling to the Benin Project opportunity. Note that she is holding a soon to be obsolute kerosene lantern.

Below the pictures is the original letter from Mamoudou. It’s a wonderful account of how SELF first got involved and it is always so rewarding to see the faces of those who are directly benefiting from these types of initiatives.

Dear Friend of SELF,

Mamoudou Setamou, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Citrus Entomology
Texas A&M University – Kingsville

We recently received an update from Neema Mgana on the amazing Ipuli Medical Center project. There are some really exciting developments. Neema writes:

Dear all,
Greetings from Dar es salaam, Tanzania! The weather has been very irregular and we are currently suffering from extreme heat and humidity. I have been doing some traveling and a lot of writing about the project in Ipuli village and wanted to give you an update on where we are.

First the most recent news. The Iramba district (Ipuli falls into this district) has now been divided into West and East (for political reasons). We just found out that the main governmental district office for both regions will be built just next to the Medical center. This means that there will be additional infrastructure (roads, electricity, etc) to the area and we very much suspect that the government will welcome the Ipuli Medical center to be a district hospital. If that is the case, then the government would cover all expenses (including the purchase of drugs and supplies, staff salaries, etc) for the medical center. This is a decision that we have to make if this is the direction that we want to go towards. The attraction would be that funding would be provided but the other side of this is that we want to guarantee the medical center will always strive towards quality in staff and services.
(more of the letter here)

The Iramba district (of which Ipuli is part) has been divided into East and West for political reasons. As a result, there will be two government offices built right next to the Medical center. This means that infrastructure such as roads and electricity will be created surrounding the medical center, making the center that much more accessible to those needing medical care.

Of course there is still much more work to be done and funds to be raised. Property owned by Neema’s family in Tanzania is being converted into a bed and breakfast which will create additional income for the project and serve as a place to stay for people visiting Tanzania or those making the trip from the city of Dar es Salaam to the Ipuli Village(which is a 2 day journey).

Another source of income is from the basket-making business started by the women of Ipuli. Below are pictures of some the crafts made by these women to support the project and can be purchased by emailing Neema directly at

nmagana(at)yahoo.com. And as always, we encourage you to visit the

Pop!Tech Giving

site where you can donate to the Ipuli Medical Center as well as the many other amazing projects that were presented at Pop!Tech last year.

It also looks as though the center is generating some media noise and sources have been interested in the Ipuli Medical story. We can’t wait to hear more updates from Neema as those develop.

For more information on the project see the link to

Architecture For Humanity.

The environmental blog TreeHugger has written about “AntiBabel“

You can see the post here.

On December 18th, in the mind-blowingly beautiful Soho loft of world-class designer, Cheryl Heller, our friends and NYC neighbors gathered to celebrate the very first music release from Pop!Tech.

Pop!Tech CEO Thomas LeVine and Producer Beth Cohen

Andrew started off the evening speaking about Pop!Tech and how this amazing project came together. Losang Rabgey, director of Machick - the charity to which 100% of the CD price is being donated- offered a few words about the work that she and her organization do in rural Tibet. And then there was the much anticipated live performance of Yungchen Lhamo and Reggie Watts. Completely improvised and completely amazing, the two artists unique sounds filled the loft space.

Reggie and Yungchen perform live

Projects like “AntiBabel” and Pop!Tech Giving (A website to make donations to the many amazing organizations featured at this years conference) help us to carry out our mission to “amplify weak signals” as Andrew put it. Pop!Tech is dedicated to supporting and calling attention to organizations that are enforcing real change in our word. We encourage you to purchase an “AntiBabel” CD for yourself, your friends and family. Also visit Pop!Tech Giving to make a tax-deductible donation to any or all of the featured charities.

amshied Sharifi, Yungchen Lhamo, Andrew Zolli, Reggie Watts and Losang Rabgey

Thanks to Yungchen Lhamo, Reggie Watts, Jamshied Sharifi, Larry Braverman, David Meinert, Ben Arons, Andy VanDette

And a special thanks to the generous financial support from Banana Republic and Etymotic Research, Inc.

Photos by HeuiChul Kim