First Impressions

“A whole big part of traveling is to find some sort direction. What i really want to do in life. It’s been quite fun, sometimes i think, is traveling a job?” Writes my cousin, who is presently traveling through Peru on her very first trip outside the US (Canada doesn’t count). My cousin landed in Peru two weeks ago and will spend another twenty-four on the road going through Bolivia, Ecuador, and who knows where else. It’s her first exposure to developing countries, to urban poverty, and to that weird feeling that despite the fact that these people have very little, they seem to be happier with life than many of us. In my response back to her I inform her that everything she’s seeing is the norm for the majority of the world – that as residents of the US, we are the minority.

It’s easy for me to forget that many people don’t know this, and even I forget from time to time. I’m thoroughly enjoying re-living my first impressions of the rest of the world through her. An email excerpt:

“As i see more and more of peru i´m starting to realize how low poverty some of these people live. They remind me most of the natives back home and how they live on the reservations. I go to the local markets and see all these people sellng their goods and i don´t know, someting happens when i see their faces. Eventhough they don´t have a lot of money, they still seem happy and always have a smile on thier face. And laughing with each other. I guess the feeling that i am feeling is compassion.”

Compassion it is, Brandie! Don’t lose it.

Wednesday | Jan 26 | The Orbit Room, SF

The idea of Catapult Design is officially one year old and we're celebrating!
Anyone and everyone is invited to join us for drinks at The Orbit Room this Wednesday night --
7pm, 1900 Market Street
(checkbooks welcome, but not required)

Let there be wind!

'Tis the season of no wind. And while it's freezing cold outside, the sky is clear and annoyingly calm. In a desperate attempt to put some mileage on the Wind Turbine testing unit, a few of us drive up to Twin Peaks and draw a small crowd while we assemble our girl for testing. No wind -- as the internet predicted.

(On the plus side, we captured some beautiful shots of the turbine with an SF backdrop!)

The testing unit (pictured above) is three plywood disks with blue plastic blades sandwiched inbetween. This arrangement is solely to enable quick-and-easy profile changes. Our objective: to experiment with the blade spacing, curvature, and width. A DAQ is connected to an anemometer, a force guage, and a tachometer collecting wind speed, force, and turbine rpm, respectively. From this info, the DAQ plots torque vs wind speed for each blade arrangement.

It's week six or so of absolutely zero wind. We've exhausted our contacts trying to find a wind tunnel at Stanford, Berkeley, NASA-Ames, SLAC, etc. Time to play God and create our own wind. To build a wind tunnel, or to build a car mount system? While the latter would make for some hilarious visuals, a wind tunnel would bring consistency to testing. How easy is it to build a wind tunnel? No idea. We'll find out. I'm convinced it can't be that difficult -- in fact, according to my highly technical sketch all I need is a plywood box and some expensive, ginormous fans (via McMaster-Carr). The real challenge is finding a storage facility for it.

Catapult Design occupies donated machine shop space in Mountain View (D2M) and Berkeley (The Shipyard). Neither facility would be pleased about storing something the size of a walk-in closet for us. It may be time call in favors with our friends at the Agilent Foundation, who have offered us space in their Santa Clara facilities.

Wind Turbine drama to be continued...

Engineers cook a meal, socialize

That's right. Thursday night was Catapult Design's first Catapult Dinner -- a gathering of the Catapult Seven and our Advisers. To throw in some non-engineers, the dinner also included two guests from San Francisco's Saatchi & Saatchi S as well as a small piece of Hollywood -- two producing partners from Los Angeles.

The setting: an old warehouse-turned-residence in the Mission that featured an indoor motorboat, pop-up trailer, 30ft tall Christmas Tree decorated with crayon ornaments, and bowling ball & pins suspended from the ceiling. The menu: engineers prove they can take direction by following an Alice Water's bruschetta recipe... prove they can get creative by making up a lasagna recipe on the fly.

Catapult's Advising Team was inaugurated just recently and includes:
Kurt Kornbluth, founder of UC-Davis PIET, winner of Lighting Africa: Development Marketplace
Ralf Hotchkiss, founder and deigner of Whirlwind Wheelchair
Chris Tacklind, founder of TwillTech
Jocelyn Wyatt, Social Impact + Business Factors at IDEO
Gary Zeiff, founder of dissigno, winner of Lighting Africa: Development Marketplace

Full bios on each of our advisers and the Catapult team is coming up on the Catapult Design website -- set to launch in the new year.

Catapult does D-Rev, Stanford

Long time no blog.

Catapult Design has been uber-busy with social events. At the top of the list was a visit near the end of November with D-Rev ("Design Revolution"), co-founded by Paul Polak, author of "Out of Poverty" and founder of IDE, and Kurt Kuhlman. Since Paul is based out of the Colorado, Catapult met with Kurt in D-Rev's Palo Alto technology offices. Located on Emerson a half-block from downtown, D-Rev is staffed with engineers and interns with the objective of making low-cost, scaleable technologies for the developing world. The designs are based on needs Paul and Kurt have observed from decades in the industry -- D-Rev is funded by grants, with a majority of their funding coming from the Gates Foundation. They're pursuing partnerships with for-profit corporations as well. While there, we took a look at several tech prototypes including: concentrated solar, mini-PV LED lighting, low-cost microscopes, and chlorination and UV technologies for clean water.

D-Rev's office is a mess of product tear-downs, proof-of-concept prototypes, testing equipment, soldering supplies, and workbenches. The front room is decorated with a few photos from the field as well as the latest and greatest from competing LED lighting and UV filtration companies. Looking forward to seeing great things come out of D-Rev.

Following our visit with D-Rev we visited Stanford University's d.School, just a few blocks away. Stanford's d.School has a notorious class right up Catapult's alley -- "Entrepreneurial Deign for Extreme Affordability." Or for short, DfEA. Student teams partner with developing world organizations to develop a product addressing a specific need within their communities. Sounds like what a lot of other schools are doing, ho hum. The key differentiatior is that this comes out of the d.School, not an engineering school. The class is a combination of engineers and MBAs, encouraging each team to approach their solutions with a business model. Students aren't working on modifications of existing solutions, but innovating new ones that address unique needs they've observed during their Spring Break in country. The output of the class has been so good, several companies have spurned out of the class. d.Light, Embrace are of recent fame. Catapult Design is excited to be working with the 2009 class, and hope to take on our first Summer Interns directly out of the class. More to come...

Pop!Tech 2008: Day Two

It's an amazing transformation that each Social Innovation Fellow and attendee goes through just by attending a Pop!Tech conference. What is Pop!Tech all about? Inspiration. This year's theme is "Scarcity and Abundance" and the speakers and performers include: Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Polak, Imogen Heap, Chris Anderson, Amos Lee, Benjamin Zander and Chandler Burr. Whether you're an economist, an engineer, an artist, a doctor -- this is the one conference that speaks to all. It is a gathering of people listening to passionate and motivated individuals share their stories and their point-of-view. PopTech is a place to cultivate your perspective, learn the latest-and-greatest in pop culture, technology trends, and social impact.

Last night, Benjamin Zander the conductor for the Boston Philharmonic gave a speech on the power of possibility that had the audience singing "Happy Birthday" at the top of their lungs with passion and power that shook the halls of the Camden Opera House. That's right, "Happy Birthday." Zander educated us all on the power of blocking internal voices of negativity that feed our insecurities and hinder us from achieving everything that we're capable of achieving. This change isn't just mental, but about changing our physical behavior too. The next time you experience "PC Load Letter" on the office printer 2 minutes before your big presentation, throw up your hands, smile, and exclaim "That's fantastic!" Only by embracing annoyances, discouragements, or failures can you recognize the potential and the positive in every situation. It's an attitude shift, and having sat through Zander's talk I can tell you that it's also contagious.

Other greats included Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic who passed around several scents and shared the intricacies of combining and sourcing scent; Marion Bantjes, an artist and master of typography, poetry, and graphic design talked about the importance of having love in your life; Paul Polak, the founder of International Development Enterprise shared the latest low-cost technologies aimed at developing world markets; Saul Griffith, the founder of several successful startups in renewable technologies and think tanks, shared how he measures and reduces his environmental foootprint; Imogen Heap performed live and played a beautiful song from her new album.

Imagine how your life would change if you didn't sweat the small stuff, embraced love, biked to work everyday, or could make a difference in the lives of the poorest people in the world. That's what Pop!Tech aims to share -- and "That's fantastic!"

photo by Kris Krug

Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows Program: Day Three

It's the end of day 3 at Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows Program and it's been a non-stop two days. Our programs run 13 hours per day -- our brains are constantly absorbing new information and being stretched and pulled to the limits. On top of that, most of us are deep in the midst of funding and communications. After a long day at the Point Lookout Conference Center, we had back to our cabins to put in a few hours of work. Four hours later we wake up and repeat the cycle.

With that said, Pop!Tech treats its guests like royalty. They do their very best to reward their Fellows with comfort, mentorship, tools, and contacts. Did I mention that there's heaps of food on demand?

Day two featured two intense sessions: "Funding Social Innovation" and "Taking Projects to Scale." Jon Balen of Canaan Ventures headed off "Funding" and Jim Koch and Kevin Starr led "Taking Projects to Scale." In the latter, each Fellow's organizations was individually evaluated by best evaluation metrics for economies of scale.

Day three tapped into our creative sides with a morning session on "Digital Storytelling" led by David Sasaki. We finished out afternoon with "Media Training" by Fenton Communication and topped the evening with a personal conversation with Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprise and Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College in India. Both Polak and Roy shared their stories of what drives their enormous contribution to a global society. Paul Polak, who's devoted the majority of his life to helping small farmers get out of poverty, gave us all chance to ask him any question we wanted:

Q: What's the hardest challenge?
Polak: My own stupidity... I'm willing to learn from failure

Q: Do you have hard days where you wonder why you do what you do?
Polak: I crash and burn. I lay in bed and read a chap novel.

Q: Is there a correlation between wealth and happiness?
Polak: If you talk about a dollar a day... those people in some ways got it a lot better than people in the West. But a mother has to watch her kids go hungry. That's not happy. Unhappiness has to do with the 20% probability of watching your kids die. Having wealth doesn't guarantee happiness, but it gives you options.

Q: Is there anything you've learned that you wish you learned when you were 25?
Polak. No. I made a lot of mistakes at every age. At 25 I grabbed the world by the throat and throttled it -- but I learned that I had no control. And once I learned to give up control, I was more powerful. Be open to the mysteries of things you don't control.