NetSquared Projects - Day 2

Here’s a quick summary of the projects presented at NetSquared N2Y4 this morning. The complete list of Featured Projects is on NetSquared’s site.

NetSquared Talk - Phone Plus Web With Open Source by Jason Goecke

What’s a multi-modal application? One that does phone, web, and perhaps Twitter, etc. One example is TwitterVoteReport, a Rails application that collected reports of waiting time at the polls for the 2008 US election. Produced in 3 weeks by Dave Troy. Input came from telephone, Twitter, SMS.

Give 'em Something Good

A month or so after Paul Graham and company started Y Combinator, that visionary mix of venture capital and summer camp, they took the motto “Make Something People Want.”

The Net for a Nonprofit

Last spring I attended the NetSquared conference, a competition for nonprofits using the net. The projects were fabulous, with MapLight winning first prize. As part of each project’s pitch, we heard what these organizations, some fledgling, some established, needed.

Helping Ghana without Reinventing the Wheel

A friend’s client wanted to help Ghana. Microlending seemed to be a good way to do it. The client would collect money in the US, and fund small loans to farmers and entrepreneurs in Ghana. The web might even make the first half of this — collecting money and telling the stories of who was helped — easy.