Month: June 2014

More than 200 entries from 48 countries worldwide, hundreds of ideas, comments and unique perspectives on the creation of local digital content, many hours of serious consideration by our panel of judges – and the winners of the ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition 2014 Challenge 1: Local Digital Content have been selected!

We were looking for the most promising tech start-ups aimed at inspiring the creation, aggregation or digitization of local content, whether through innovative technologies or a fresh angle on established technologies such as optical character recognition or translation software.

Demonstrating innovativeness, business potential and a clear social value proposition in meeting the Challenge, the winners chosen by our Selection Committee are:

• TeleMuseum – Lorna Okeng, Uganda
  Telemusuem aims to preserve and digitalize African local content, culture and history often traditionally passed on through the ancient informal education of storytelling. Local script content and analogue voice content from various sources will be aggregated and converted into fully independent, virtual cinema using a range of technologies from optical character recognition to abstract graphics algorithms. This is bringing storytelling to life – and preserving local history for generations to come.

• Incept – Safouan Ben Jha, Tunisia
  Incept provides an interactive, multilingual solution for museums, historical and archaeological sites via augmented reality, including language translation, interactive guided tours, and adaptive content – all through a standard smartphone. By presenting content in a highly attractive, interactive manner, it enables you to experience history as never before – such as translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on tombs or pyramids into your own language via the smartphone in your hands, or watching the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Explaining the motivation behind her start-up, Okeng said, “I worry that with no local content reservoir, two centuries from now, these traditional stories will be extinct. TeleMuseum aspires to redefine the way local content is accessed by aggregating local script and merging it into one big screening room. It embraces the concept of cinematography married with virtual reality, moulding each legend narrative into motion pictures all tied together to create a mini-film or documentary.”

Taking the boring out of history and making our past accessible, relevant and interesting for all is the drive behind Incept. According to Ben Jha, “We must learn from the past in order to know where our future is headed, but in order to make people excited about knowing the past, we have to present the content in a new manner.”

Both winners of this Challenge will attend ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, where they’ll benefit from seed funding, mentoring sessions, workshops, networking and showcasing opportunities before a high-profile audience from across the ICT ecosystem.

For Okeng, it’s an exciting prospect: “ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition stimulates creativity and innovation and taps into the inner child. There is no doubt this is the type of platform I’ve been looking for, where technology marries art, a place where my background, young experience and skills can be put to use to make real things happen.”

Ben Jha has a clear idea of what Incept hopes to gain: ” Our team is made up of engineers, so our main goal now is to establish a solid business plan. We’re looking forward to gaining from the mentoring at ITU Telecom World, and meeting up with potential investors and partners. The only way to take our idea worldwide is by starting working immediately.”

Digital content, in the form of text, images, video, software or apps, is what drives the internet, empowering users to benefit from knowledge, opportunities and e services – and to generate their own content. So it’s critical that digital content is available to everyone, regardless of the language they speak or script they use. But only an estimated 5% of the over 7000 languages of the world are currently on the internet. The uphill battle to overcome this content divide is every bit as important as bridging the digital divide; access and content, supply and demand, are two sides of the same coin. That’s why this Challenge is so vital, and why it is so exciting to have found two winners of such high calibre to bring to the world stage at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha this December.

The second ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition on Open Source Technologies for Disaster Management is open now – find out more here on how to take part!

The current telco crunch is not new. Voice revenues have collapsed in developed and emerging markets alike, whilst data traffic from OTT players continues to increase exponentially. So costs are going through the roof just as revenues are vanishing. Life as telcos have known it is unsustainable – and change is inevitable.

In the words of leading internet academic Viktor Mayer-Schönberger at ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok: “Telecom operators, if they continue doing what they are doing, will go out of business. It’s a commoditized business; it’s the end of the line. If I were a telecom operator, I would be extremely scared of the future. Extremely scared!”

Or, as former Zain Africa CEO Chris Gabriel said at the same event: “There’s no money in telcos and fundamentally organizations need to basically totally rethink the way they do their business processes.”

Change is inevitable, but what are the options? We understand the why, but not the how or where or whither.  What are the options for players in the ICT sector? This is the key question which ITU Telecom World 2014 will address in Doha this December under the theme of Confronting the Future.

Confronting means opening our collective eyes, becoming aware of the radical change transforming the ICT industry, ecosystem and indeed our whole world. Engaging with the new realities, exploring the major trends shaping our shared future, focusing on scenarios of the future and their potential for all the different players involved.

Confronting does not mean being aggressive or belligerent, unnecessarily scaremongering or sensationalist in approach. It certainly doesn’t mean predicting a promised future. But by working together to investigate the rich opportunities of that future, we can find paths forward, perhaps building in counter-mechanisms to, or even in part avoiding, the major ethical, regulatory, social and legal challenges ahead.

The Internet of Things, new advances in artificial intelligence and the deployment of intelligent software and machines, big data-centric applications and business models, social media and social commerce, cloud networking, wearable computing – these are just some of the principal trends and developments that will not wait for us to catch up, that demand urgent attention.

And all this glittering promise brings such immense global challenges as privacy, data protection and surveillance, inequality and the digital divide, the ethics of machine intelligence and the human-machine relationship.

Creating a responsible and effective regulatory regime for the future will not be easy, but the need for it becomes more and more apparent in an era dominated by immensely powerful, unregulated and unaccountable organizations with no history of social responsibility. This is far removed from the traditional culture of the telecoms sector: that of responsible regulation designed to protect both societies and individuals.

Preserving this heritage, re-establishing trust, building upon past achievements rather than dismissing previous regimes in their entirety  – this is a key part of Confronting the Future.

Following the success of challenge 1 on Local Digital Content, which attracted 205 ideas from 48 countries, the ITU Telecom World Young Innovators competition is launching challenge 2, calling for innovations using open source technology for disaster management. The competition seeks 18-30 year old entrepreneurs from around the world with start-ups that use open source technologies for disaster preparedness, early warning, emergency communication and response, and recovery from natural disasters. If that describes your work, log on to https://ideas.itu.int and submit your idea for a chance to showcase your work at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, and receive seed funding and mentorship from top experts in technology and entrepreneurship.

Often, the areas and communities which have the hardest time preparing for and recovering from natural disasters are also the poorest parts of a country. For these areas, open source technologies can prove the ideal solution in disaster and emergency situations, as they are inexpensive, adaptable and easy to replicate across different circumstances.

Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms and epidemics, and other natural disasters pose a growing threat in terms of both frequency and the levels of damage associated with them. Disasters, in addition to causing death and injury, can destroy infrastructure and shatter communities, displacing people and devastating economies. As human populations rise in numbers and density, and as the effects of global warming cause more frequent and powerful natural disasters, these risks are only set to increase.

We urgently need new tools to prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters on this increased scale. The types of tools we need could include communication technologies, teaching tools, new equipment to save lives during a disaster, and new tools to help clean up, recover and rebuild after the event.

Open source technologies such as 3D printing, UAVs, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other open source computer programs and systems could hold the key to providing solutions in the poorest and most vulnerable areas, and are already a critical element of the emergency management systems of many countries. The current generation of young social entrepreneurs, with their ambition, creativity and innovative mindset are perfectly placed to develop these ideas. Plus, a focus on open source tools is a call to a new tech-savvy generation, since the technology is created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes with the community.

In addition, we are also looking for innovators who have ideas for taking the iconic technologies of the community of do it yourself inventors, creators and designers known as maker culture and applying them to saving lives, in combination with low cost, low entry barrier technologies to help reach the most vulnerable communities around the world.

The closing date for entries in this challenge is July 31^st 2014. Two winners will be selected per challenge, and will receive up to USD 10,000 of seed funding, in addition to mentorship, dedicated workshops and an opportunity to showcase at the InnovationSpace of ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, Qatar. We look forward to seeing your ideas!