Loccasion is a smartphone application that uses geo-fence technology to make the interactions between campus organizations and students more effective and sustainable. This application is intended to improve the way students receive information about clubs and groups that they are interested in because up until now, the distribution of flyers on Sproul Plaza is passive, inefficient and unintuitive. The goal of the Loccasion project is to streamline the process for campus promoters to disseminate information to a relevant audience. The team’s solution is to equip student organizations with a smartphone tool that can create events and announcements that are interactive and engaging. The user interface provides a framework for creating events – such as date, time, directions to venue and the ability to upload photos – enabling a simple way for organizations to create announcements and spread them to their targeted audience within a matter of seconds. Upon the creation of an event, a circular virtual fence with a certain radius around the student promoter’s smartphone is set up. Anyone who has installed the app on their phone can receive notifications once within the virtual border. Event organizers can tag their postings with certain keyword hash tags such as #engineering or #entertainment and users can subscribe to certain keywords to receive a stream of events on their smartphones.
Diarrheal disease from drinking unsafe water is one of the leading causes of death in Mexico. Today, millions of Mexicans in low-income communities are still at high risk of waterborne diseases because of inadequate water infrastructure and insufficient water quality control. In particular, safe water remains unavailable to those who cannot afford commercially sold bottled water. Water technology like the UV Tube, developed through collaboration between UC Berkeley and Fundacion Cantaro Azul, is an effective means to secure water quality at home. Nuestra Agua, a new social franchise designed by UC Berkeley students, will expand on the UV Tube project and offer a local, affordable, and reliable option for people who need to purchase safe water as well as an economic opportunity for local entrepreneurs.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Social Entrepreneurship” category.)
Water unavailability is a problem that families face in almost all of the cities in South Asia and in at least a third of the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Millions of households have a piped water supply. However, water is only available through these pipes for a few hours at a time. Households faced with irregular water supply may lose hours each day waiting for water. They become stressed and regularly use unsafe sources of water instead. Part of the problem is water utilities being unable to reliably track and verify the delivery of water. NextDrop is a program that addresses this problem. As it scales up, NextDrop will use the provided information by consumers to assist water utility engineers in tracking and correcting problems of water delivery to consumers.
MobileWorks provides a platform that gives underemployed and impoverished individuals in the developing world the ability to earn supplemental income by doing work through their mobile phones. The organization accepts data entry and transcription contracts from a variety of sources-government programs in India, Western crowd sourcing companies, and traditional outsourcing companies–and sends this work to workers’ phones over a locally-accessible interface, handling payment to workers and guaranteeing quality to companies. Over time, MobileWorks users have the opportunity to earn data entry certifications and lift themselves out of poverty.
Currently, about 140 million rural mountain inhabitants lack access to an improved water source. Consequently, there is an urgent need to find an efficient solution to supply safe water to these populations by further developing the delivery of piped water. Piped water is necessary to conveniently supply the water volume required to meet personal and household hygiene and consumption needs. Unfortunately, willingness to pay for water is traditionally low, and sustainable financing of the necessary water supply infrastructure is known to be very challenging. Power for Water will overcome this obstacle by implement an innovative combination of policy and technology. Specifically, the project combines a proven infrastructure synergy and an efficient public-private partnership to sustainably address the lack of access to safe water and electricity in rural mountainous regions of the world. By overcome the technological and institutional barriers currently preventing millions of people from access to clean, reliable water, this project will improve the lives of millions of people living in remote mountain regions.
This project proposes that UC Berkeley generate its own biodiesel using the 500 gallons of used cooking oil generated weekly by Crossroads Dining Commons, Foothill Dining Commons, and the Golden Bear Café, for consumption in the campus’s Bear Transit buses. The team has been able to project production of 500 gallons weekly if two reactors are used. Fuel can be produced for $1.44 per gallon and could be sold to Bear Transit for $2.00 per gallon, potentially making the operation financially sustainable.
Energy efficiency represents a vast, low-cost energy resource—but it can only be unlocked with an innovative and comprehensive market based approach. There is growing demand for an alternate financing mechanism for the implementation of energy conservation measures to reduce energy consumption and thereby lower greenhouse gas emissions. Zaakta is a webbased marketplace that brings together customers, technology experts, contractors, and financiers to implement energy efficiency projects. This platform will target under-served markets that either lack the direct funds to invest in these projects or the scale and scope required to attract interest from current energy service companies or utilities for financing.
On Calle de Monte Verde in Nicaragua, poor farmers with no daily earning, depend directly on agriculture for their livelihoods and survival. Water is raised from wells by hand-cranked levers which lift small buckets from the depths to the surface where they are detached from the well rope and dumped into a larger bucket located on carts drawn by oxen. This project will seek to improve the efficiency of this highly labor-intensive process by testing solar or treadle pump technologies in this setting. If successful, this project will enable farmers to more efficiently manage their crops and their time. It would thus allow farmers to diversify crops and increase yields sufficiently to allow them to enter the market and generate income.
