Cell Bytes

In the weeks following the January 12 earthquake, the relief effort in Haiti relied in part on crowdsourcing: an army of volunteers in the United States and elsewhere helped sift through emergency text messages, translated them and send them on to first responders on the scene.

According to Rob Munro, a graduate fellow at Stanford who works with the nonprofit Energy for Opportunity, about 40,000 useful text messages came through the system in the first six weeks, meaning that thousands of Haitians received timely requests for food, water or medical help.

But the high-tech Haiti volunteer response also depended in large part on personal connections, and the mobilization of the Haitian diaspora in North America, for it to work. Now development agencies, relief workers and even the U.S. government are looking at ways to reproduce the experiment in the next emergency.

Read full article in Wired. Image from CNN via Techilobang.

Spotted on Greenvehicle Recycling via Don’t Twive. By cartoonist Joe Heller.

The earthquake that devastated Haiti also destroyed the nation’s feeble network for phones and Internet service. Except for cellphones, the population was largely cut off from communication.

But out of the rubble, one U.S. wireless industry pioneer sees opportunity, reports The Washington Post.

John Stanton, founder of Voice Stream and former chief executive of T-Mobile USA, wants the Haitian government to forget about rebuilding its copper wire communications network. Instead, he thinks Haiti should go mobile.

Read full article.