Trovus Revelations keeps us in the picture
January 31, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
Trovus, who provide an amazing website visitor monitoring system, has been a supporter of ColaLife from the moment they heard about the campaign.
This is how Trovus Revelations works. Every computer connected to the internet has a number (an IP address) this IP address is allocated to you by the organisation who ‘owns’ the internet connection you are using.
What Trovus Revelations does is match the IP address of all visitors to a website with the name of the organisation that ‘owns’ that address. When I view a page on the ColaLife website, Trovus registers that ‘Virgin Media’ (my internet service provider) has visited the site. Not terribly useful. BUT most corporations have their own connection to the internet - they ‘own’ their own IP addresses. So we know, for example, when Coca-Cola look at the website and that Heineken and Procter and Gamble are also interested in ColaLife!
Trovus allows you to set up email alerts that let you know when a particular organisation looks at your website. The image above shows a series of emails from Trovus telling me that Google are looking at this website which is reassuring given that entries to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th are being assessed at the moment.
Thanks Trovus for keeping us in the picture!
Moo Cards just work!
January 29, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
Today my mobile buzzed announcing the arrival of a text . . . from Tanzania! It read:
Hi simon! i hope ur fine,
I am grace mdc from
kinondon area since u
come u r 2 quiet why?
nothing is going on
from grace mdc tanzania
Frontline SMS! That is Grace in the pictures. She owns and runs one the Coca-Cola MDCs (Manual Distribution Centres) in Dar Es Salaam. I had the pleasure of visiting and talking to Grace during my trip to Tanzania in November. I explained what I was doing and gave her a ColaLife Moo Card. She was delighted (but then so is everyone I give a Moo card to - they are just lovely).
Anyway she must have kept the card and today she made contact. I called Grace and she says she has access to email so we are going to continue communicating that way. I hope she’ll be able to get to an internet connection to watch the video I took at the Freeman MDC.
Moo are ColaLife supporters.
Gearing up to vote for ColaLife in Project 10^100
January 26, 2009 by Simon Berry · 4 Comments
Google’s trawl for the best ideas in the World (aka Project 10 to the 100th) attracted more than 100,000 entries and ColaLife was one of them. The text of our entry is here and above is the video that Facebook members put together. The video on YouTube has been viewed 4,925 times at the last count which is pretty impressive.
Tomorrow (27/1/09) Google will announce the top 100 ideas and invite people to vote for their favourite. The five winners share $10m to implement their idea. If we get through to the last 100 PLEASE VOTE for ColaLife and help us by ASKING ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO VOTE TOO! Sorry . . . don’t mean to sound desperate 
At the time of writing you can REGISTER TO VOTE HERE.
Of course we might not get through but if we do you’ll hear about it here first.
More thoughts on the ColaLife AidPod design
January 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · 9 Comments
01: ColaLife AidPod with end cap(s) - click on the image to enlarge.
02: ColaLife AidPod (single piece) - click on the image to enlarge.
03: ColaLife AidPod with end lid - click on the image to enlarge.
Your comments please . . . .
Celebrating 8,000 ColaLife Members
January 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
At 17:11 GMT on 18/1/09 the ColaLife Facebook Group hit 8,000 members. This is a fantastic achievement and keeps the pressure on everyone for action. Thanks to everyone who’s joined and special thanks to those who have made very special efforts to recruit friends. I know James Pb, David Berman and others have been very busy in this regard recently. In the last week the group has grown by another 138 which is incredible but growth has slowed right down again now. Have you invited all your Facebook friends yet?
While this has been going on, people have been writing about the campaign all around the world. I have found, and tagged, 232 ColaLife articles to date (24/1/09).
We now have to gear up for voting for the ColaLife idea in Google’s Project 10 to the 100th (here it is on YouTube - I’ve posted our video as a video response). There were more than 100,000 ideas proposed and a shortlist of 100 will be announced on 27/1/09 and this is when voting will start.
From Communication & Learning to Collaboration - we can do it!
January 12, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
I feel that we are at a crucial stage of the ColaLife Campaign where our relationship with Coca-Cola needs to change slightly but in a significant way. As I am thinking this, Erik Charas makes the above post to the ColaLife Facebook Group (thanks Erik).
We have developed a really strong relationship with Coca-Cola which has enabled open communications and facilitated mutual learning and development of the ColaLife idea. However, to move forward we need, in my judgement, to move from good communications and good learning to good collaboration.
We are going to need to answer questions like:
- how the need for a product would be decided upon in a specific area
- who would then be supplying the product and in what format
- how would get the product to the MDC’s and how would it be put into crates
- MDC workers take product to retail outlets - so how would it the reach the people who need it?
- how would all of this be funded
And these are questions we need to consider together with Coca-Cola and local people. It’s no good us all coming up with different answers.
I am working on the transition to the collaboration phase now. Having come this far, we don’t want a repeat of Erik’s experience.
More ColaLife Serendipity and Web 2.0 Magic
January 10, 2009 by Simon Berry · 5 Comments
My co-administrator of the ColaLife Facebook Group, writer, tipster and networker extraordinaire, Kate Andrews, invited me to join a Flickr Group. It was the Do Good Design group set up to support the micro-site supporting David Berman’s recently published book. So I joined the group and I posted the aidpod picture above.
This intrigued David and he left a comment. Kate answered and pointed David to the ColaLife website and this afternoon David and I spoke on Skype - he’s in Canada.
Here’s the serendipitous bit. Chapter 3 of David’s book is titled ‘Pop landscape’. Around the time I was setting up the ColaLife Group, he was writing:
Imagine what would be possible if The Coca-Cola Company’s uncommonly efficient distribution system in Africa could be harnessed to deliver health information, medicine, and condoms, in addition to caffeinated sugar water.
[Page 40, Do Good Design]
David and I only have 1 friend in common, Kate, so he will provide a gateway to a whole new network of people and introduce them to ColaLife and I guess I’m doing a similar sort of thing for his book!
First Edition ColaLife Cards on eBay!
January 8, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments
In this multi-media, web 2.0 world you can’t sit in one place (like your website) and expect everyone to come to you. People are everywhere so you have to be everywhere too if you are going to get noticed. That is why ColaLife has a presence here, on Facebook, on Flickr, on YouTube, on Vimeo, on Twitter, on other people’s blogs and many other places.
Well now we are on eBay too. This will introduce CocaLife to a new group of people and hopefully someone will buy the cards which will mean that we can buy some more and continue to promote the camapign to the (still important) offline world.
Go on! Bid! Click here go to the cards on eBay.
Introducing the AIDPOD concept
January 4, 2009 by Simon Berry · 5 Comments
Click on the images to see them full-size on Flickr.
While in Tanzania I mocked up two types of ‘ColaLife’ pods and went out to get people’s reaction to them. The ‘wedge’ pod was much more popular than the ‘tube’, because the tube would displace a bottle.
There are other very significant benefits from moving from focussing on distributing a particular product (ORS with hygiene and sanitation educational materials). Among these are:
- It allows the essential local determination of what is distributed and when. Needs will vary from location to location and from season to season and what is distributed MUST be determined locally by those with the long term responsibility for public health care;
- It potentially allows the idea to be replicated across the World after successful local trials;
- It also dis-associates the Coca-Cola product/brand with a particular ’social product’ which is likely to enable a wider range of products to be distributed.
Following this, at the first ColaLife face to face event, there was some discussion about what the pod should be called. Given that the pod idea has a broader application than Coca-Cola crates is ‘ColaLife Pod’ the right name?
Then on 27/12/08 in the BBC Radio 4 iPM feature, Eddie Mair rounded off the 10 minute interview saying “Simon Berry and his AidPod”. So we got the name we were struggling for after the face to face meeting. The following domain names have been registered just in case we need them in the future:
http://www.aidpod.org
http://www.aidpod.org.uk
http://www.aidpod.co.uk
Onwards and upwards.
Update - related links
What the frontline thinks of the ColaLife AidPod idea, Tanzania, November 2008 (video)
More thoughts on the ColaLife AidPod design (note the comments on this post also)
Simon talking about the AidPod concept on BBC Radio 4 (audio)
Simon talking about the AidPod concept at the Face-to-Face meeting on 16/12/08 (video)
Introducing Mark III of the aidpod (video)
Pictures of the Mark III aidpod
What others are saying about ColaLife- ColaLife on Flickr
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