Ask HN: What are some startups working on big problems in the developing world?
E.g. http://www.mobiusmotors.com
"We built the first community cellular network in a rural village in Papua, Indonesia, in early 2013, with support from USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies. That first network is still running today, and today we continue to add new networks, constantly bringing connectivity to new users and communities worldwide."
Haven't met the rest of the team, but the CTO, Shaddi, is an awesome guy.
Not.
This is ... centralized, US-led, heavily geopolitically partisan communications networks sold with vague economic development overtones. Any realistic evaluation would find it hard to conclude other than that such networks will chiefly be used to justify further US and Australian meddling (eg. extreme communications interception... such as the Indonesian president earlier this year) in this region.
Instead, we should lobby for FirefoxOS to drop cellular as de-facto and embrace alternate link-layers, ad-hoc and mesh! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047
Building solar micro grids for remote villages in Tanzinia and Ghana. Amazing team and vision.
Yelp for low-income people in the developing world. They just did a pilot in Hyderabad (India), and helped pregnant women living in slum areas discover hospitals around them offering better, cheaper care then they were receiving elsewhere (some were having to pay bribes to get care at government hospitals).
Their mission is to give everybody in the world an address. Something that people in the West take for granted, but isn't available for most of the globe's citizens. This is also a major opportunity business-wise of course and if I could invest, I would.
is another very clever effort aimed at solving the same problem
We have addressed every 3x3m on the planet with 3 common words. More memorable, faster and less errors than alphanumeric systems. Currently in 8 languages with more including Swahili & Arabic coming. This could mean an address for the 4 billion unaddressed, as well as water points, schools, managing disease outbreaks.
More here: Vimeo.com/what3words/about.
I work for what3words.
Rumie is a Canadian non-profit who makes $50 tablets containing built-in educational contents to make education more accessible for kids from the developing countries. These tablets have a long battery life and they only need to be connected to the Internet once every couple of months to update the content.
I believe they're also working on creating a community to produce more open sourced educational content for kids. They also don't go out and "sell" their product; they only work with organizations who come to them believing that the tablet is suitable for the intended community.
I'm not affiliated with them but learned about them at a conference last year and thought what they were doing is pretty awesome. I could've remembered some details wrong though so check out their site yourself.
I'm not directly associated, but one of my friends was an early employee who worked on some of the early prototypes and helped set up a location in India. They make a cheap (a few thousand dollars vs tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars) and compact (Read: portable) eye-exam device that interfaces with a smartphone for its camera and processor. Think of a traveling doctor bringing eye exams to patients in remote villages. Pair that with some of those cheap adjustable glasses (http://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid...) and you've got a means for providing first-world eye care to the rest of the world.
I think the company is still based in Cambridge, MA.
Based in London and Nairobi, they've built a Bitcoin-based service that enables migrants & expats to send money quickly and safely back to their relatives (called remittances in FinTech parlance). I'm not directly associated with them, but we've met many times at Nairobi's monthly Bitcoin meetup.
And let's not forget, they have a presence in North-America, Western-Europe and Australia. Not even e.g. Japan. And hell, they're in beta in all of those countries except five.
But more importantly, they're not a remittance company. So I really doubt we'll see a remittance product from them anytime soon.
But who knows. It's a legitimate business venture. If you can process a payment in bitcoin and pay out in a local currency and do remittance that way, you can process a remittance 'payment', too. The problem isn't really the technical or business part though, it's that it brings up a lot of KYC/AML responsibilities that facilitating retail shopping doesn't. So unless you want to really build out a remittance product, you can't just do something like this 'on the side'. And Stripe is way too focused on payments to jump into remittance properly anytime soon.
Especially when there aren't any deep liquidity pools for bitcoin in Africa (i.e. a lack of exchanges). Phillipines, India, all of that could feasibly happen soon (not by Stripe, but other companies), as liquidity does exist (and they're big remittance corridors), but undercutting Bitpesa anytime soon is unlikely. Bitpesa itself is already hustling to make this work with a local presence and its a bit of a mystery to me who their liquidity provider is atm.
The company is building a mobile based care platform for patients with diabetes or at risk of diabetes along with a Square equivalent device for diagnostics. While cost is one of the issue for patients, it is not the only one. Quality of care varies significantly across a city and the moment you step outside a major city, there is little to no specialized care for chronic conditions that need some form of training for managing the condition. A mobile phone with some form of internet connectivity is ubiquitous these days. So leveraging that to reach as many people as possible makes sense. There are over 80 million people with diabetes in India and another 80 million are expected to develop it over the next decade or so. Add to this the costs and quality of life of patients who have to suffer the complications (kidney failure, amputation, etc), and any improvements that can be made to these numbers with technology is worth the effort and makes business sense too.
The problem isn't India specific. China, US, Europe and the Middle East have similar or higher prevalence rates. It is just that India makes sense as a place to start doing things.
It's been a few years that we have been working on this. We mostly operate out of Bangalore but we have an office in Boston too. Feel free to drop by!
http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/no-answers-in-sight-for-ind...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-07/india-s-deadly-diab...
Started by a serial entrepreneur from Boston, right now they're building tools to help NGOs reach people in abject poverty, and they have some really big ideas for the future.
They're based in the Philippines and actually are currently looking for developers to come over on 6-12 month fellowships to experience life there and contribute to the core product. If anyone is interested, I can link you to the relevant posting.
(not affiliated, just think what they're doing is awesome)
Surely in most cases the distances are too long?
It is like Kiva , but we crowdfund loans mainly for basic needs of people eg. sanitation(build toilets), water connection, education, enterprise development, energy (solar connection in remote areas) in India
Recently we launched a platform for crowdfunding donations for causes and social initiatives. https://milaap.org/open
Disclosure : I work at Milaap as a senior developer
Pangea was part of the first class of Impact Engine (http://theimpactengine.com/), a for-profit social venture accelerator originally run by Chuck Templeton (found of Open Table).
My friend is the founder, working in Ann Arbor with an amazing group of aeronautical and electrical engineers, medical researchers, and others. They're building hardened VTOL drones to take medical supplies, samples, tests, back and forth from hospitals to rural India. They have a great team and deep relationships with the NGO and health sectors in India.
I met the team, pretty strong, might have worked for them but they didn't want engineers working remotely (they're based in NYC).
Is search platform (as a service) for e-commerce websites to boost on-line sales through a complete and manageable integration. We are providing Amazon search experience for small/medium e-commerce web site. With advanced UI components and analytics.
The company is base in Riga, Latvia
Akvo helps people bring international development to life, online.
We're working to help aid and development organizations gain better insight into how effective and where donor money is going, monitoring and evaluating organizational goals, and aggregating raw data into useful reports for both the organization and donors.
GramVaani provides crowdsourced news and other ICT4D services to the underserved.
*Or 'Innovators' or 'Technologists', if you prefer.
I believe some of their projects make use of technology, but it's more business/innovation oriented.
ultra low-cost irrigation systems
Dimagi's mission is to use technology to improve the lives of people living in underserved communities everywhere, especially through the use of mobile technology to strengthen programs in many sectors. Dimagi works in over 30 countries, mostly in the Indian subcontinent, Africa. The main product CommCare (http://www.commcarehq.org), allows for NGOs to write and maintain their own mobile applications without programming knowledge, and Dimagi also offers extensive consulting services with our partners as they start to introduce mobile software into their program. CommCare applications are geared toward usage by illiterate and low-literate users in sectors such as community health, clinical settings, agriculture, small business, infectious disease, maternal and child health, counselling for people in stigmatized and vulnerable professions, and can be used for many others; and the underlying software is repeatedly field-tested for usability in these settings. And it is awesome.
Dimagi has strong field teams around the world, with offices in Boston, Delhi, Cape Town, abd Senegal. All of Dimagi's core software developers also routinely spend weeks at a time at at project sites and shadowing a field manager, usually about twice a year per person. In my opinion, Dimagi is the most mature, on-the-ground, and innovative company of its type, but, hey I just work here.