Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 16, 2011

I’m a high tech engineer and the founder of Benetech, one of Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit technology companies, dedicated to seeing that the benefits of technology help all of humanity, not just the richest 10% • As a nonprofit charity, we focus on areas of market failure, where regular for-profit companies have decided that the market opportunity (..)

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 14, 2011

We use technology to create products and projects that serve humanity where the market will fail to go because they offer modest financial returns. At Benetech, our team is committed to using technology to drive positive social change. We want to see technology serve much more of humanity than just the richest ten percent.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 27, 2012

Although I'm firmly on the nonprofit side with Benetech (because we focus on big issues where the market is failing), it's definitely easier to get funded sustainably if you have an exciting and invest-able business plan. The rise of for-profit social enterprises has been quite exciting.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 20, 2011

Elaina Todd, an environmental planner who develops social marketing campaigns with the nonprofit conservation group Rare, is profiled in our most recent case study for Benetech’s Miradi software. Miradi, is used by nature conservation practitioners around the world to design, manage, monitor and learn from their projects.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 2, 2009

His point is: The little secret of this past year's capital crisis is that while many mainstream investments incurred significant losses in value, one category remained steady--with some investors significantly outperforming the mainstream market. It's called impact investing.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

For more than a decade, Nadine has worked at the intersection of policy and media in major markets including New York, Chicago and Washington, DC. I think they will both make big contributions to building Benetech’s ability to deliver greater impact in the technology-for-good field.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 6, 2011

Yes and how many times must I change my strategy Before I get on a steady road The answers, for now, are floating in this cloud The answers are floating in this cloud (Repeat) And when will I know my work has been done That the impact will forever be How will I measure my mark on the world That it not be just part of marketing Yes and can I admit that (..)

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 10, 2015

We need help in the following areas: Marketing and communications Fundraising Software development Recruiting Accounting and finance Community management To us, a wildcard position is a new, unexpected better option for accomplishing our social mission. If you would like to try the nonprofit sector on for size, read on.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 18, 2014

We’re a nonprofit technology company on a mission to address unmet social needs by providing targeted software tools and services to groups left underserved by the market, such as human rights activists and students with learning differences.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

However, there is a problem with this: market failure. So, a key action to improve this market failure problem is to be open to licensing technology to social entrepreneurs. Commercialization is a proxy for societal impact: if it sells, it's a pretty good indicator of social value. My favorite example is in the pharma area.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 29, 2007

Author Andrew Wolk, a Senior Lecturer at MIT on Social Entrepreneurship, focused much of his discussion around the concept of how social enterprises were a socially useful response to market failure. He covers some other great social enterprises such as ITNAmerica (a novel approach to senior-focused paratransit) and Kaboom!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 14, 2013

Erik Brynjolfsson technology Gandhi market failure Gandhi''s theory of trusteeship TED2013 Harris Wofford Giving Pledge socent social entrepreneurship Robert Gordon economic justice'

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Step in when the market fails. Go where the market won't go and demonstrate to the market what's possible. Finance needs to take into account social and environmental returns. I hope you come away from the conference with deals. A bit of government here can go a long way. 250 million pound fund for this.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 13, 2008

The folks I know who have tried to get investors to accept sub-market returns haven't raised much capital, although I continue to have hopes that they will. So, if you're a for-profit promising market investment returns, you're back in the situation of having to choose between serving society or delivering market returns.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 6, 2007

The structure of the nonprofit capital market has been something I am dedicated to trying to both understand and influence. Since I come from the Silicon Valley venture world, I'm familiar with a capital market that is tough, but very much provides incentive to accomplish the goal of maximizing financial returns to investors.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 29, 2008

What was incredible about the Social Capital Markets conference was that a month before the conference, Kevin was worried about getting the 350 attendees he had planned for, since he had only 200-250 signed up. And then, Lehman Bros. collapsed and suddenly 650 people came!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

This particular weekend we divided into teams and tackled projects from the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), MiX Market, and UN Global Pulse. I joined the NYCLU team, where we worked on data collected by the New York Police Department about their “stop and frisk” practices.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 21, 2009

She was much more on Facebook marketing message, but of course that's her role at FB. Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook had the tough gig of presenting a lunch keynote outside under a tent in lower Sproul Plaza (mucho noise and people talking). Lots of enthusiastic FB users in the audience helped make her points.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 14, 2009

The market often fails to deliver what society most needs. Fails for people where the business community decides that the market is too small. Fails when they choose to market a product, but they leave out certain communities because they don’t believe those communities are sufficiently profitable to be worth selling to.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

While I was at the ATIA conference in Florida, our Director of Marketing was in Washington DC at another conference. We recently obtained the ability to directly download books from the national accessible textbook repository for those states who appoint us to do that for the disabled students of their state.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 14, 2010

But, the world still needs tangible things, and the market often fails to deliver them. Benetech doesn't make tangible stuff: we've decided that our expertise is in making electronic bits. Software and content are easily scaled up.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 17, 2007

The problem of many (most) social sector organizations is outreach (marketing, in business-speak). Because of a lack of budget for marketing, it's hard for potential clients to find out about the services that are available to them. This is a program that I think many more nonprofits need to take advantage of.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 25, 2008

Vital Wave Consulting covers the opportunities in serving developing markets and one of their blog posts really grabbed me. Technology really is becoming an incredible tool for empowering the poor. Whenever I see a great example of this, I get excited. In M-Pesa is our hippo!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 8, 2008

Lian let me play with her Sunshine player (all the products of the Press are marketed under the Sunshine brand): it cost roughly $100 and has a 1 Gig of storage (the latest version has 3 Gig). We also got to visit (on the same campus), the Braille library, which was full of thousands of volumes of Braille.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 29, 2005

And, we do have functioning capital markets that address the needs of this slice. When social entrepreneurs say that we don't have a functioning capital market, they are talking about capital for the great majority of social enterprises. And, if they had high returns, I know a lot of great venture capitalists who would invest.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 20, 2013

This is the field where I found my life’s calling, applying technology to meet critical needs of society, where the market is likely to fail.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 20, 2010

Corporate leaders encouraging the pro bono or low bono use of their IP to social needs that are outside the corporation's markets. * Benetech's recommendation is to apply intellectual property to unmet social needs, by encouraging WEF stakeholders to think beyond solely profitable applications. We believe this can be accomplished by: 1.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 25, 2013

After all, they’re proud of their creations and would love to see them benefit disadvantaged people and communities, where regular market forces would fail to go. from the majority of IP owners we approach. Until now, we’ve operated with purely pro bono help in the form of two attorneys on our board.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 13, 2009

Years of practice both in general markets and especially in the disability market have recognized that synthetic speech is something that can be done when you have text. Does that violate the large print rights? Ebooks on PCs have had text-to-speech capabilities for years (although not always enabled).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

Last night I was able to meet Vivek Kundra, the new Chief Information Officer of the federal government, at an event organized by Full Circle Fund and the Craigslist Foundation hosted by IBM at their offices on Market Street in San Francisco. For me, it's an amazing change.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2006

The sector is reasonably balkanized, and market incentives don't provide enough push to make better software, with a few exceptions (i.e., Marketing doesn't come naturally to most social change groups. The web-based modifier doesn't change that fact. fund raising software). Distribution in the broadest sense is the third big barrier.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 22, 2013

In some markets, printed books are receding into the past. Since almost all content for the last decade originates as a digital file, using OCR on the scanned page or the PDF image document is a painful reverse engineering process that delivers lower quality access at much greater cost than native full access.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 29, 2009

This is a guy who as his daughter put it, piled books onto a little vegetable cart and trundled it into the market place so that the common man in small town India would be exposed to the literature of Tolstoy, Gibran, Ruskin and others. And he worked to abridge and translate much of their work.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 26, 2009

Phrases like "partner in charge" and "gaps in the market" caught my ear. Carlos was realistic: you probably aren't going to get Social Innovation Fund money was his aside. The goal of the social innovation effort is not simply to be a source of money. The Corporation for National and Community Service is clearly at the center of this.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

Unfortunately, because many of these solutions won’t make money for the developers, the market will fail to address most of what’s needed. Benetech Labs Gerardo Capiel, our VP of Engineering, representing Benetech Labs at a Fundación Avina conference One of our biggest milestones this year is the launch of Benetech Labs.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

This is why the making of accessible books is a classic example of market failure: if publishers could make a lot of money selling braille, large print, audio, and fully accessible textbooks, we wouldn’t need a copyright exception. The biggest challenge for access is that it’s expensive. It’s expensive to make braille books.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 14, 2009

The Author’s Guild asserts that they control the audio rights and that delivering a text ebook to a device which could speak it aloud with synthetic text-to-speech and that their commercial market for audio books will someday be significantly affected by TTS. It’s the right long-term solution.

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