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Khan Academy is an organization that freely distributes instructional videos on all kinds of topics from algebra to organic chemistry. It’s kinda similar to my old company Flat World Knowledge in that it’s goal is to make access to educational materials free to anyone who wants them, only it focuses on video rather than textbooks and actually operates as a non-profit.

Well in an effort to make these videos more easily available to people and cut some of their bandwidth costs, Khan Academy has teamed up with BitTorrent to distribute over 2,000 videos they’ve produced. Click that link to read more from the great blog Hack Education.

This is an awesome idea on a number of levels and I’m glad to see more examples of how the BitTorrent technology, which is constantly vilified as solely a method for illegal file sharing, can be used for legitimate purposes.

Community Consulting Teams-Atlanta is an organization that matches up local professionals (mostly MBAs, both students and graduates) with local non-profits for consulting projects. The exact qualifications for clients and projects as listed on their website are:

Organizations that
-have a 501(c)(3) or equivalent designation
-have an annual budget of less than $1 million (although we work with larger organizations on a case-by-case basis)
-are located in the Metro Atlanta area (local chapters of national organization are acceptable)
-have dynamic leaders who are open to advice from third parties
-have a designated “executive director” and preferably a full-time executive directior (paid or unpaid)
-have a highly-engaged board, including a member willing to serve as a project champion

Projects that
-are central/significant to the organization and its mission/future
-are well-defined and tangible; have specific topics to be addressed and deliverables to be produced
-are able to be completed in about 300-400 person-hours (4-5 months of work for a 4-6 person team, at about 4 hours per week)
-are relevant to the skills, training, and backgrounds of our volunteer consultants

So it’s pretty cool.

I got an email from GT MBA program about it and sent off an application a couple weeks ago. Yesterday I heard back about the project I got put on, and it was actually my first choice: working with the Metropolitan Youth Symphony Orchestras of Atlanta. The project deals with a number of different aspects of the organization, and given that my mom grew up in the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra and all us kids play a variety of instruments, is something that is close to my heart.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in there is another arm of CCT operating in Boston, where the program started. There are also groups in the planning stage of starting up in Denver and Seattle. If you are in any of those cities, or Atlanta obviously, check them out and see if you want to help.

Stupid browser fragmentation and stupid IE6 (and IE7 for that matter) making it so hard to just make a simple webpage look like it’s supposed to. We’re trying to clean up the web interface of liquid now (and build out a mobile one) and it’s just so frustrating as we try to get this working under every possible scenario.

For an example of the problem, below is the breakdown for this site according to Google Analytics.

And if you dive a little deeper, there are 14 different versions of Firefox, 11 different versions of Chrome, 10 versions of Safari, and then 4 versions of IE which is actually the worst because all of those versions interpret style sheets COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY. Shoot me in the face.

To get around most of this I’ve started to play with a couple different CSS frameworks to try and take as much crap out of the equation as possible. My first experience with a grid system was The Square Grid, which is a pretty nice introduction. I’ve since moved on to Blueprint CSS because of the built in IE compatibility, plugin capability, and social proof from sites like Mint.

So yeah, I’m learning quickly but still pretty clueless. Should be a fun next couple weeks.

Whenever people ask me about my background leading to me starting a business I always tell them the same thing:

I started out college as an electrical engineer for a year, did a co-op semester and hated coding all day. Switched my major to industrial engineering, worked a couple years in logistics/supply chains but couldn’t wake up every day passionate about moving boxes. Went back to get my MBA to learn about business and focused on marketing and entrepreneurship.

And now I’m here, coding all day to help people move boxes.

Yeah, I know.

I think the big hang up for me wasn’t so much that I hated what I was doing, it was that I hated being able to see what was wrong with the process but having no way to change it. I mean, I could (and did) make little changes here and there but the major inefficiencies still sat there unaddressed, and it was way outside of my sphere of influence to initiate those reforms.

And so here I am; back to working on the things I once thought I hated, and loving it.

The other thing I always seem to come back to is education. I grew up around family members who were educators at all levels (aunt – elementary school, mom – high school/elementary, grandfather – college professor, step-aunt – college professor) and it’s always had a huge appeal for me. In fact, we’re actually working on a slight redesign of liquidWMS right now to make it the most useful and cost-efficient inventory management tool (tracking things like books, furniture, computers, etc) for schools.

There were two articles I came across today thanks to my twitter feed that got me thinking hard about education changes again. Take a few minutes to check them out and try to think about how you can help redesign education in this country.

1. The Rise of ‘EduPunk’ (Inside HigherEd)
2. The Education Manifesto – Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty (WSJ)

I like getting emails at 3:15am from people I work with that start out

So, woke up at 3am and started thinking of another program to design

That’s the kind of dedication you should be looking for in a co-founder.

As most of you probably know, a friend and I have a new company that we’re getting up and running. In true customer development style I had another meeting with a potential customer today to talk about our software. They’ve been kind enough to meet with me before and are now going to be set up with a 2-3 month beta test so we can iron out bugs, see what features are useful, what else they might need, things like that.

I went through the functionality we’ve built in so far and they were really impressed. There’s not a better feeling in the world than creating something for a group of people, and having them turn around and actually appreciate what you’ve done.

The conversation went something like this:

Me: “And then there’s this, it isn’t linked up right now because we just finished it last night, but I should be able to type it in.”
Him: “Oh wow, you can automate the packing lists and BOLs?”
Me: “Yeah, and if you have a certain format you like to use we can set that up for you too.”
Him: “Man, this is all really professional and easy to use. Give me a month, but if I like what you’ve got I can think of at least a dozen other companies I can get you in touch with who could use this.”
Me: ::swoon::

If that’s not enough reason to deliver, I don’t know what is.

I’ve been keeping busy lately with side projects as I continue networking and trying to find the perfect job. Obviously one of my passions is soccer and one of the least appreciated parts of American soccer (and that’s saying something) is the US Open Cup. This is the longest continually running soccer competition in the world with a trophy awarded every year going back to 1914.

While it’s not the most well respected competition out there, the people at www.thecup.us do a wonderful job reporting on it and working hard to raise awareness. I had made contact with Josh, the senior editor there, and actually worked to help retool their bracket. You can see my work here: http://thecup.us/2010-lamar-hunt-u-s-open-cup-bracket/

Obviously I’m no web design guru, but I think it’s pretty decent and has a lot of opportunity to provide some dynamic content that their excel spreadsheet image couldn’t. Plus it’s cool to get to help out with something that I like so much.

Another little project that may be turning more serious is some work I’ve done with a couple Georgia Tech people. It’s the output of a few professors from Purdue and Georgia Tech who run the VIP Program at their respective schools. What this does is allow students to work on multi-year projects that deal with professors’ research and also gives them practical experience that many have leveraged to get jobs at great competitive companies like Google and Microsoft.

Last semester a friend of mine at the GT MBA program did a study on the feasability of commercializing some of this technology. We’re still in the research stage, albeit the final parts of it, but it looks like this may be something that they could move forward with. If that is the case, it would be a really cool opportunity to work with a group that is trying to improve the in-stadium experience for fans who are increasingly choosing to watch games in front of their 60 inch HDTV’s with DVR rather than go spend 3 hours seeing it live.

At the end of every semester a handful of students from the Georgia Tech MBA program go down to New Orleans and volunteer with the St Bernard Project. This organization works to rebuild families’ houses in Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes. It takes about $15,000 and 12 weeks of volunteer work for each house, but they’ve grown from serving one house at a time when they first started to having 50 houses under construction and 279 completed.  It’s a great group of people doing amazing work.

I have wanted to go on this trip for a while, but had conflicts each of the three times previous.  Fall semester first year was a family trip.  Spring semester first year I was interviewing with Flat World Knowledge for my internship.  Fall semester this year I was on one last trip with Dave before he left the country again to go see Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship Game.  This semester, I made a point not to have anything else that could conflict with the trip.  Both my parents went to Tulane, my grandfather taught there for 15 years, my mom and aunt both spent more than a few years living there, and I’ve visited a ton of times.  It just felt like the right place to give back to.

This trip we worked putting up insulation and drywall on the Meshell House.  You can check out some of the pictures on the St Bernard Flickr account, or just see the two that matter (me holding up drywall with my shoulders and our pyramid) below.

So go to the webpage, check it out, sign up to volunteer, or maybe even donate a couple bucks to help this group keep it up.

Yup, that’s right, another review of two books at once.  This time it’s The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of The Acumen Fund, and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad (who just passed so RIP CK).  Like before, this is because I had to read the books in tandem.  In fact, I had to write a short paper comparing the two books’ strategies for building value within the poorest areas of the world; so if you’re interested in that check out the pdf linked at the bottom.

Let’s start with The Blue Sweater.  I first heard about this book when Fred Wilson reviewed it in February.  He called it “a terrific book” and I second that.  I loved Jacqueline Novogratz’s stories about investing in businesses in Rwanda (before the genocide), Pakistan, and India among other places.  It is inspirational to see the difference that one person can have on the life of so many by giving them a way to provide for themselves.

Since very few of you are actually interested enough to go read my paper, let me summarize something here instead: I strongly dislike charity.  I think that it serves a very important role in giving immediate aid to those who are in need, and it does it very well.  No amount of investment or teaching is going to get medical supplies to Haiti right now or feed the starving people in sub-Saharan Africa.  However, at the same time, none of those people’s children are going to live a better life than their parents if nothing is done to fundamentally change the way that they live.  Charitable donations are not a sustainable option for the economic growth that can make these problems obsolete.

Anyway, enough of that.  I really enjoyed reading The Blue Sweater and greatly admire the work that Novogratz did and still does.  Her model of mixing philanthropy and capitalism will get your brain churning about different ways to help people.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is a little different.  This book is about how multi-national corporations can sell to the poorest 20% of the world and still make money doing it.  Now, before you go getting all appalled that a company would dare to profit off the poor, let’s think about this a little more.  If the option is to wash your clothes in filthy river water and spread bacteria and disease, or buy a 10-cent laundry detergent specialized for your conditions that will clean your clothes are you really being exploited?  When a company like Hindustan Unilever (the Indian branch of Unilever) creates a program that employs over 1-million local women to act as sales people to their communities, are the poor worse off because they are buying goods they wouldn’t usually?  I would argue no, but you are free to disagree.

This book has a very good formula for how a company should go about redesigning its business practices to market to the people in these poor areas and is supplemented by interviews and case studies in the back (including one with Novogratz and The Acumen Fund).

I think that everyone should read The Blue Sweater to get a good idea of what is going on out there and some of the mechanisms smart people are coming up with to help the poor.  If you read that book and get really interested in exploring ways to help the poor more, check out The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

And yes, here’s my paper: http://www.f2f2s.com/SocialEntrepreneurship.pdf

Soneter won the People’s Choice Award at the Green:Net Conference yesterday in San Francisco. I’ve always been a man of the people so this was ideal.

http://earth2tech.com/2010/04/29/greennet-launchpad-ecoatm-and-soneter-win/

Then we went out for an awesome dinner at a small Italian restaurant and finished off the night at our 18th floor hotel bar overlooking the city. A very good day all around.