India's Hidden Hotbeds of Innovation

Prof.Anil Gupta is father of my friend. A quiet unassuming man dressed in hand spun cotton shirt. Only years later I learnt about his work with grassroots inventors and innovators.

Anil Kumar Gupta taught at famed business school, he started 'Honey Bee Network' to help grassroots inventors and innovations. Every year his management class traveled to rural India to study and learn from traditional knowledge and innovation of the people.

In this 2009 TEDTalk India's Hotbeds of Invention he shares his experiences with Honey Bee Network. Enjoy and get inspired.

African WebMuses : African Women in Technology

African WebMuses presents portraits of women that the AfricaHackTrip team met during a journey in November 2013. We wanted to show powerful females from the East-African IT industry, working as programmers, teachers, tech events organizers and managers supporting technology development. It was a great pleasure to meet you. Thank you for being an inspiration!

African WebMuses from WebMuses on Vimeo.

The movie was made by WebMuses and AfricaHackTrip, with financial support of W4 – an organization dedicated to the empowerment of girls and women around the world.

George the robot makes a come back at 60

Robots, the stuff of my childhood dreams. Tony Sale revives the much loved robot George, the 6 foot robot made from scrap metal. It is remotely controlled can walk, move the arms and turn his head. The robot inspired the whole generation and found its way into popular fiction.

Newsreel From 1950

Spotted Bio Truck Expedition in Pokhara, Nepal

Had an unexpected encounter with Andy Pag's Bio Truck Expedition bus in Pokhara's Fewa lakeside camping grounds. The expedition is traveling around the world in a recycled school bus engine runs on vegetable oil biofuel with very low carbon emission. It collects used vegetable oils from homes and restaurants along the way and features other interesting sustainable technologies as well.

I returned twice to the camping grounds to find the truck locked and empty. Hope to run into the expedition team next time before I leave Pokhara this week.

Floating Weeds Debut Film

Few months after I moved to Hyderabad, I caught up with Vinoo on IM, he too it seems had moved away from Bangalore to the tinsel town Bombay (nay, sorry Mumbai) to start Floating Weeds with Kaevan.
In the following months I kept track of Vinoo and kaevan work tirelessly to start their company and produce their debut film for IBM. Kaevan who is a Film and Television Institute of India(FTII) graduate took on the mantle of directing the film. It was amazing to follow the making of the film in the small towns of Rajasthan, Jaipur and fishing boats at sea down south in Kerala. The film does capture how mobile networks changed how people communicate in India.

Watch the film here on IBM site or click this direct link (WMV, 6:00 min, 9,76MB)