Weekend Entrepreneur Links: Sergey Searching and African iPhones

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2010-06-27 11:28:00 UTC
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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

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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