Solidarity at LIFT09 - Juliana Rotich

Juliana Rotich just spoke here at LIFT Conference on "Globalism, Mobiles and The Cloud". She touched on several points that are interesting from a mobile for development and also a social placemarking perspective.

Global Voices and Ushahidi, two projects she is working on, are giving a platform and a voice to people reporting from countries and on incidents (crises, natural disasters, diseases) that are not usually covered by mainstream media.

Could Tagcrumbs, the start-up I'm working on add somthing here? I believe that it could bring people together by telling hopeful stories, conveying shared cultural contexts, annotating shared spaces and bring personal information from rural areas on a map. We are not there yet (adding a Tagcrumb via SMS is not possible for example) but taking into consideration the adoption rate of the mobile web in emerging regions ("80% of BBC's mobile site's traffic comes from Africa") we might get there.

The image is by mrtnk.