What’s Better: Saving the World or Building Another Facebook app?

While it certainly may appear that way if one's only source of exposure to the world is Techcrunch, all venture capital in the Valley (a fraction of the ~$30 billion per year in the entire US) is, ahem, literally less than rounding error next to world investment capital.

I mean, fixed income securities in the United States have face value of about $30 trillion. That's one asset class. (The biggest one, granted.)

Ditto the brainpower thing, although that is less instantly measurable.

http://djangozen.com/blog/11-days-in-kenya

http://blip.tv/file/3041374

I think it's well understood that one of the driving forces behind the boom in internet software entrepreneurship is that the barriers to entry are extremely low- historically low compared to other developing fields.

For most of the readership of this board, "barrier to entry" does not just mean financial resources but also domain knowledge. I would find it enormously rewarding to work on many of the "grand challenges" listed here, but I lack the basic science background to do so. Maybe if I had been a physicist or a bioengineer and picked up hacking on the side. I may be able to find a scientist to collaborate with, but I would still be a little out of my depth, and they certainly don't hang out at the same startup gatherings.

Or am I being too defeatist? Does anyone have success picking up biotech or solar cell design or neuroscience on your own, like some people pick up programming or sales on their own? What resources would help you do so?

1. Don't read techcrunch comments (if article insinuates humanitarianism)

2. Don't read wallstreet journal comments (if talking about the President)

Not only are the people making the decisions not concerned about the planet and human welfare, but they are actually making lives worse off. It'd be like arguing for a little common courtesy in the pits of hell.

It helps like this: Gridspy can measure the power usage of a building, helping you to specify a system that will satisfy that particular building's energy footprint and timing. Choices such as size of the battery bank, size of the battery array and capacity of the inverter bank depend on how power is used.

The Array itself needs to generate enough power over the course of a week or so to power the building for that week. Knowing exactly how much power is used helps you to specify the correct size so you don't spend too much on panels.

The Batteries need to be large enough to handle any difference between the power used when the sun is poor and the solar array's yield at that time. Knowing exactly when during the day power is used helps to specify how many batteries to install.

Finally, the peak power usage of the building determines how large the bank of inverters should be. Inverters convert battery power to usable mains - if there are not enough inverters, you will need to fall back on other power sources (generators / the grid) when you need lots of power for HVAC or lighting.

Gridspy can help you choose the right amount to spend on each of these different subsystems since it monitors your power usage at high resolution. Once the system is installed, Gridspy can monitor the solar yeild, the battery levels and the current demand to show you how well your solar installation is performing. This helps to prove that the investment in solar power was financially sound.

Crop tester; An application that lets farmers and agricultural scientists share techniques to increase crop yields. Inputting crop type, soil, climate information, the farmer could get ideas to test on a small portion of the crop. Feeding the results back into the system would help create a massive, public database.

Maybe the ideas is good, maybe it sucks. But it would be nice to have a site where ideas could get posted, then voted up or down.

What if the writer stopped writing utter drivel on TechCrunch and instead got out and volunteered to make the world a better place? If you're going to preach high and mighty, you should be coming from a place of height and mightiness.

"Saving the world" has a completely different set of challenges to be addressed. The SMS idea is a very good idea, and using one of the very few vectors in third world countries that aren't bogged down by systemic issues.

I'm not at all sure that a "save-the-world-a-thon" focusing on SMS solutions in the third world wouldn't have very interesting outcomes. Maybe TechCrunch can't see the forest for their eagerness to call the youth of today shallow?

As someone who only came to the valley recently, I agree with the majority of observations in the article. I wrote a short article with my comments here: http://dvitanov.posterous.com/innovation-and-the-interdiscip...

It isn't.

Technology can make it easier to save the world, but technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for saving the world.