Mobile crowdsourcing

While microfinance continues to get a hammering in the press due to charges of abusive practices, techno startups may be paving the way for a fresh new approach to help the abject poor devoid (maybe) of endemic institutional corrupting influences.

Nathan Eagle here presents an innovative way to harness leading-edge mobile innovation on the phone to empower the poor in developing countries, starting with Africa. This will be a binary outcome - either hugely successful, a gamer changer and startlingly disruptive or be killed by self-serving market forces that perceive it to help the poor.

He launched his company txteagle last year and initial news is positive - a space to watch.

Satire

Don't always like Bill Mahr, but he may have got it at least half right on calling out Jon Stewart on this one.

With all due respect to my friends Jon and Stephen, it seems to me that if you truly wanted to come down on side of restoring sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he’s not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance’s sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There’s a difference between a mad man and a madman.

Stewart explains his intentions and defines the role of satire versus status quo polarized news reporting.