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(Ed. note: This post was contributed by Amie Vaccaro, who writes about social innovation for Triple Pundit and other publications.)

At Socap I sat down with Nigel Waller, Founder and CEO of Movirtu to learn more about his work. Movirtu has created a way to dramatically reduce the cost of cell phone access to the 1 billion living below the poverty line who both use mobile services and don't own a phone. And they've done so while maintaining a strong business case for their immediate customers, cell phone carriers. Designed in collaboration with Frog Design, Movirtu's Cloud Phone enables an entire family to share one phone while maintaining their privacy.

PopTech is a global network of innovators anchored by an annual fall conference in Camden, Maine. Not exactly about social entrepreneurship, not exactly about arts or technology, its strength is in the diversity of the actors it convenes. The third class of PopTech Social Innovation Fellows reinforces that fact, and will bring together exceptional changemakers in areas as diverse as mobile credit, conflict resolution and promotion of the sciences for a training program later this October.

The Social Innovation Fellows program began three years ago as an ancillary offering to the three-day conference. For about a week before the big event, the Fellows are treated to workshops and lectures across a range of issues, from measuring social impact to presentation style. At the event itself, each Fellow gives a five-minute presentation to the whole crowd -- and at last year's conference, more than one person told me they thought these speeches were the highlight even in an ocean of great content.

The program has already supported some of the most promising social entrepreneurs in the world, including the founders of Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, Catapult Design, Global Citizen Year, and a host of other organizations regularly featured on this blog. Some of the past fellows have returned this year as faculty for the current class. All of this means that this is a group worth watching.

Even in the diversity, there are a few trends that spring up across the 17 ventures represented in this fellows class. There are a couple organizations focused on promoting science in different ways, including Seeding Labs -- a program that helps skills, knowledge and IP transfer to scientists in the developing world. Keeping up a tradition from past years (not to mention employing a specific expertise of the PopTech network) there are a set of mobile-focused companies, such as ChildCount+ which helps use mobile phones to enable health workers to better track patients. This year's class also features two organizations focused on conflict and violence prevention, including innovative Chicago-based CeaseFire.

One of the other trends is not so much about an industry vertical but about a particular approach to opening up access to services that are the pillars of a functioning economy. Samasource creates a gateway for workers in Africa and India to do micro-tasks for international corporations and builds their job skills through support and training. The Syngenta Foundation is a fascinating addition to the agriculture development space, insuring farm inputs against both drought and excessive rain, all via mobile. FrontlineSMS:Credit is trying to make it easier than ever to access basic credit via phones.

This is a pretty tremendous class, and signals both the diversity and strength of PopTech's network as well as the innovation in the social space more broadly. Keep track of these organizations.

Photo credit: poptech

FrontlineSMS is an application that turns any laptop into a mobile communication gateway without any internet required. Using only locally available technology, the tool has been used for everything from helping rural healthcare workers access far away patient records to monitoring elections. Yesterday's launch of FrontlineSMS:Legal not only expands the family of custom products built on top of the platform, it reinforces the power of technology platforms in general in shaping the next century of development and emergency response.

For those unfamiliar with the technology, FrontlineSMS is a free downloadable software program that makes it easy to turn any laptop into a communication hub for a large number of people. It allows for easy one-to-many messages (for example, a nurse messaging an alert about cholera to all field health workers in a specific region with just one text), as well as the ability to customize responses for different types of queries or different groups of users who text back.

The tool first debuted a few years ago, and since then has been used in hundreds of deployments - many of which had nothing to do with the original use cases imagined by the founder of the organization, Ken Banks. One of the earliest uses that pushed the tools to new areas was the experiment of a Stanford student, Josh Nesbit, who used the platform to dramatically shift how a rural health clinic in Malawi interacted with its rural outlying patients. The project enabled community health workers to travel farther and return less frequently, saving the clinic time and money.

The project was successful enough that it created momentum for the first FrontlineSMS spinoff, FrontlineSMS:Medic. The idea of the group is to build off of the core architecture of the FrontlineSMS software to customize the platform for use by local clinics around the world. Not long after that, a group started thinking about how they could use the one-to-many, no-internet-needed platform to help power credit exchanges and get regular people access to quick cash, and FrontlineSMS:Credit was formed. Soon, an education version called FrontlineSMS:Learn will begin testing.

The annual Social Capital Markets conference takes on the ambitious task of bringing together a sector that exists in many different variants in an array of industries. This year, they're trying to help people find their place in the conference by organizing content into expert-curated thematic tracks ranging from Tactical Philanthropy to Food Systems.

This approach is another piece of evidence for the argument I made in a post yesterday, which is that "social entrepreneurship" is maturing as a series of related by distinct industry and field verticals. Although not all of the SoCap tracks are industries as they're normally defined, they're all coherent fields with their own best practices, experts and knowledge systems that successful entrepreneurs within those fields must know to thrive.

Track: Tactical Philanthropy
Curated by: Sean Stannard-Stockton
Overview: This track is meant to recognize the important place of nonprofits and philanthropic capital in the larger social change marketplace. The content will revolve around topics like "Decriminalizing Fundraising" and going beyond metrics in assessing the success of nonprofits. Speakers will include notables like "Uncharitable" author Dan Pallotta and the CEO of Charity Navigator, Ken Berger.

Track: Mobile Technology
Curated by: Alison Bloch, mHealth Alliance
Overview: The track explores the implications and opportunities created by the massive explosion in connection via mobile devices around the developing world. The track will profile some of the existing leaders in the space, as well as identify emerging investment opportunities for the interested. Speakers include representatives from design firms like IDEO and frog design, as well as leading mobile startups like Ushahidi.

Banks ripe for disruption, better startup pitching, Wall Street Journal makes boring critiques of CSR (big surprise), and the potential for mobile technology to change justice systems around the world. All this and more in this week's weekend entrepreneur links.

In Hard Times, One New Bank (Double-Wide): The US consumer banking industry is waaaaaay up there on my "ripe for disruption" list. This article shows just how little space there has been for new actors to come in and change anything, recently. It profiles the only new bank to get new approval to operate in 2010. While there are interesting opportunities in creating entirely new banks, I actually think the first steps to changing the industry are going to be through companies that simplify and optimize certain parts of the banking experience, for example, Banksimple.net. Their whole value proposition is that they keep as many parts of the consumer banking experience free, only making money from two key revenue streams, which means a better overall experience.

5 Lessons from 150 Startup Pitches: I've watched a lot of pitches this summer, and performed a few myself, and one thing I can say for sure: no entrepreneur has the perfect pitch, and most of us (particularly in the social space) could use some work. This set of posts have been around for a while, but I've recently been re-engaging with these tips from Jason Cohen of Smart Bear Software. The lessons are definitely more directly relevant for web entrepreneurs, but have lots of great insight for social ventures, as well.

"Bah! Humbug!" in the Wall Street Journal: Matthew Bishop and Michael Green use their Philanthrocapitalism blog to combat a set of recents pieces appearing in the WSJ. The first piece they sought to refute argued that the "Giving Pledge" was causing billionaires to focus on the wrong things when there would be more value if they just continued to make money. The second argued (poorly, in their estimation), that CSR was always going to distract companies and they should just give up, try to make profits as deviously as necessary, and have the government regulate. Not surprisingly, Bishop and Green have a few thoughts on both matters.

On the Potential of Mobile Justice: Stories about the potential of mobile technology to change health outcomes and improve economies in the developing world abound. Where there are fewer stories -- and as yet, fewer models -- is in how mobile technology can be used to help change the systems of justice that underpin free societies everywhere. This piece shares a few of the ideas and strategies that a working group convened by the State Department came up with this summer, particularly in the context of providing justice for rape survivors in eastern Congo.

Photo credit: The Consumerist

The general attitude in Silicon Valley about the ability of government to get things done is that, well, it doesn't have the ability to get things done. Ironically, the slow drift towards an evisceration of internet freedom by  internet service providers (ISPs) and their lobbyists -- a drift that most of Silicon Valley is diametrically opposed to -- has been significantly enabled by that prevailing dismissive attitude.

It's not hard to understand why, as a general rule, Silicon Valley would harbor many folks skeptical of Washington. In the web space, steam-rolling builders shape the world in their image (or at least, that's the story that gets told). The nobodies of one day build companies that disrupt historic industries the next. The pace of change is so dramatic and addictive, it's hard to be satisfied at the glacial pace of change that characterizes policy debates.

What many in the Valley forget, however, is that their ability to disrupt industries has had as much to do with historical accident as it has with their own much-vaunted entrepreneurialism.

Net Neutrality is fundamentally about keeping the internet an equal playing field in which all types of content have the same chance to be seen and experienced. Historically speaking, the internet has happened to be a place in which certain types of content are not discriminated against, slowed down, or limited by service providers because of a combination of disincentives and regulatory threat. That has meant that big players have not colluded to cut off the life stream of little players, and it has enabled the disruptive power that looms so large in our mythology.

But there is nothing other than the moral suasion of Net Neutrality advocates and the assertion of regulatory power on the part of the FCC that guarantees that any of that remains the case. Indeed, the Net Neutrality conversation is heating up because the economic advantages of creating tiered service in which certain content creators pay to prioritize their services against others are becoming clearer and clearer, exemplified by the fierce and growing battle for mobile affiliation and the increasing bandwidth burden on service providers as more people get on faster landline and wireless connections.

Put another way, the self-policing that so many in Silicon Valley wish to believe works perfectly fine is beginning to rub up against the fact that when startups grow into great big companies, they throw their power around to preserve and grow their piece of the pie, even (or in some cases, especially) if this means strangling the competition before it becomes competitive. Of course, this is anathema to the startups and venture investors whose business is rooted in big wins and disruptive power. The question is who has the power to preserve the balance?

In democratic societies, the answer to that question is: the government. Businesses and nonprofits do not have the power to determine personal or commercial rights and regulations. They can shape norms, but their ability to do so is a soft, not a hard power. The job of government is to codify norms that best benefit large parts of society into rules that create serious disincentives or outright blocks to business approaches that would undermine those norms.

The government's power to assert this influence, however, is entirely determined by how much authority they're given by citizens and key influencers in society. When entire influential groups of people (ahem, the Valley) talk as though government exists only to bother them, it influences how they (and how others watching) behave, and that behavior influences the actual ability of government to be powerful.

This self-fulfilling prophecy is being enacted in the Federal Communication Commission's seeming inability to stem the tide against the forces looking to dismantle Net Neutrality. While some of that is due to the particular decisions and shortcomings of FCC leadership and the weak federal support of their mission, it is also directly related to our hostility toward government in general.

We can't crap all over the idea of government when it doesn't particular matter to us, or when it's creating regulations that are economically disadvantageous to us, and then expect it to have full power to be there to regulate the norms we think are important when they become threatened by people who disagree with us.

This is a delicate line. Certainly this administration and our governing structures in general deserve skepticism, and often frustration.

But if we wish, in those times when we find ourselves on the same side of and needing the unique legislative and regulatory power bestowed upon government, we must assume that government also deserves our engagement, advocacy, and ultimately, our recognition of its importance in maintaining a just, fair, and free society.

Photo credit: David Paul Ohmer

Google. Please. Don't. Do. This.

In a piece that is being disputed by Google, the New York Times broke the news last night that Google and Verizon are poised to announce a deal and a proposal that would effectively allow service providers such a Verizon to create online pay tiers, in which certain content providers who were willing to pay more would receive prioritization and faster speeds.

Since a court decision in April that said that the Federal Communications Commission did not have the authority to determine whether broadband providers could speed up or slow down different types of content for different types of users, consumer advocates have been scrambling to figure out ways to preserve the open, free internet, while telecom lobbyists have been pushing aggressively to undermine net neutrality and create pay tiers that allow content providers who pay more to have an easier time getting their content in front of users.

What this would mean is that incubants in any space such as online video could pay to put any new competitors at a disadvantage in terms of the actual speed and convenience with which someone else could access their content. Practically speaking, it means that a company like Youtube would have a major advantage over any new company like Vimeo, not because their product or user experience was better, but simply because they had paid to be in the fast lane.

This is completely different than the entirely open infrastructure that has characterized the growth of the web thus far. The internet's disruptive power has largely been in the fact that the barriers to entry looked nothing like the old world of television media. On television, there were clear gatekeepers and no one could just produce a show and get it seen by millions of people. On the internet, anyone can create the next big thing because the gatekeepers have fallen by the way side and meritocracy rules. If you have the funniest show, the most interesting blog, eventually people discover it.

It's more than entertainment, however. The lack of global gatekeepers on the internet means that there is more space for opinions and perspectives outside of the mainstream to actually become part of the cultural conversation. Creating a tiered internet in which certain content providers could pay to move their content more quickly dramatically upsets that dynamic.

It also flies in the face of just about everything Google has ever said abou

I've spent the last few days in Boulder immersed in the world of the Unreasonable Institute. As I've been listening to some promising social ventures give their pitches, there have been a number of great articles about the changing nature of the venture space, innovation in global mobile money, some good news about conflict minerals, and more.

Obama Signs Legislation to Label Conflict Minerals: There is a growing awareness of the fact that many of our modern electronics include minerals mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. New legislation passed recently means that companies are now obligated to provide information about whether they're using parts derived from minerals that come from these places, and if so, what they're doing to ensure that they obtained legal and with regard to human rights.

A Mobile Payment Trifecta in Kenya: Erik Hersman is one of the leading voices in the story of Africa's mobile tech renaissance. In this piece , Hersman talks about three mobile payment companies showing how Kenya is actually arguably getting out ahead of many startups coming out of America and Europe that are working on these high-potential areas.

Idiocy and brilliance of American policy toward entrepreneurs: A nice simple piece about the irony of our immigration policy by tech blogger Robert Scoble. He points out how, on the one hand, the US creates a space safe for failure -- the necessary prerequisite for an entrepreneurial culture. Yet on the other, we make it immensely hard for talented people from around the world to settle and work here.

Why Every Social Entrepreneur Should Be Paying Attention to SKS & Unitus: I haven't spent as much time with the Unitus shut down and the SKS (microfinance) IPO as I should, in large part because I'm still wrapping my head around what I think they mean. This post does a nice job connecting many of the dots, however, and links to a follow up, as well.

Are Most VCs Dinosaurs Who Need to Hurry Up and Die?: The venture capital space is in the midst of a rationalization period, in which the model is trying to adjust to the reality that startups are starting for less, and exiting earlier through buyouts. This week, leading angel investor Dave McClure launched his own seed fund "500 Startups," and launched a shot across the bow of the traditional VCs. This post looks at both sides.

Photo credit: Scott Kinmartin

People working there will tell you that we're entering a new era of African talent, and it's being largely facilitated by the explosion in affordable mobile technology and computing power. Yesterday the State Department announced "Apps 4 Africa," a collaboration with Kenya's iHub incubator, Appfrica, and SODNET to get East African web developers designing applications to help their communities and countries.

Of all the social entrepreneur subcommunities, it's hard to find one as consistently creative, dynamic, and successfully collaborative as the group focused on unleashing African technology talent. While many of the organizations and individuals in the community have been involved much longer, as a whole it burst into many people's view a few years ago with the launch of Ushahidi.

Ushahidi began as a call by Keynan blogger Ory Okolloh to the East African tech community to help figure out a way to better track and create a collective memory of the violence that spread in the wake of the 2008 disputed elections. Since then, it has create an open platform that has been used to track violence, elections, and disaster response. Recently, many of the folks behind the platform have helped launch the iHub, an incubator and coworking space for Kenyan tech talent in downtown Nairobi.

Not long after that, Appfrica launched. Appfrica includes a media property that is one of the best sources for African tech news and commentary and Appfrica Labs, which is part web development client firm and part incubator for new home built applications. They've done an array of awesome things, including their ongoing work with Ushahidi to create a machine intelligence tool for separating valuable, usable information out of the general social media stream in the wake of a disaster.

The State Department, again displaying the collaborative jones we've written about being impressed with before, is helping coordinate and add weight and heft to the competition. The team at State behind this project include some of the folks who worked with Ushahidi and other civil technology organizations to establish tools for relief in Haiti after the January earthquake.

The App 4 Africa contest will bring together the African tech community with local civil society. Local organizations will suggest challenge areas ranging from better development information to governance reporting issues to whatever they can dream up, which will seed the field of applications that developers will be asked to build.

Citizens can submit ideas through a variety of social media means, and the contest is open to any developers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. International folks can participate as mentors if they have valuable skills to contribute.

The contest runs through August 31st. Check out the Apps 4 Africa website to learn more.

Photo credit: Barcamp Nairobi at iHub by whiteafrican

What a week of links. We've got crazy new forms of disease fighting, changing scenes for mobile technology and philanthropy beyond US borders, and an important critique of one of the biggest US social innovation initiatives.

Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure: There is so much interesting here I don't know where to start. Google co-founder and 15 billionaire Sergen Brin discovered that his genome contains a mutation associated with higher risk of Parkinson's. Since finding this out, he has begun to fund research for us to learn more about the disease that we still know little about. And he's doing it in a very Googley way, trying to use massive amounts of data to uncover patterns we might not otherwise see.

An African iPhone? There's No App for That.: Foreign Policy Magazine notes the bummer in Apple's slowness to enable the exploding base of mobile phone users (and indeed, web developers) across the continent of Africa to buy into Apple's technology ecosystem.

Chinese Philanthropy Gets Official: I'm interested in the rise of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship in China, one of the world's great emerging powers. This piece in the Wall Street Journal is a snapshot look at the conversations around philanthropy in China that are being inspired by the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge. It sounds like things are moving...but slowly.

Commentary - The Social Innovation Fund: Innovation for What?: This blistering critique of the US Social Innovation Fund by philanthropy expert Pablo Eisenberg is both right and wrong. Right to ask tough questions about how much innovation the fund will actually enable; right to ask whether a bigger play -- moving the amount of their endowments that foundations are required to give each year from 5% to 6% is his suggestion -- might have had a bigger impact; but wrong, I think, to fall easily into the "its community and activist organizations not Echoing Green fellows that will change the world," divide. While I don't want this money funding super well-funded organizations like Teach for America either, the lines are not as clear as he would like between local organizations and American social entrepreneurship organizations. What's more, Barack and Michelle have their hands in the thick of those grassroots organizations. Michelle, for example, was one of the first faculty fellows of the Asset Based Community Development Institute in Chicago. I believe they get it; the constraints are about what they believe the larger political apparatus will stomach and how far they are willing to push it.

Photo credit: duncandavidson