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ColaLife – the nomadic phase begins

21 August 2011 By Leave a Comment

Core team - operation get the Berry's out of here
Part of the team that moved us out: Jane, Elizabeth, Pete, Angela, me and David
This post is really just a tribute to our great friends who always have a habit a rallying just when you just couldn’t manage without them. Our house is a family home and so if we were going to rent it out we were going to have to do it now as parents gear up to get their kids into school for the new year.

The house is a self-build project which we started 20 years ago (our experience is that you never quite finish a self-build!). Three kids have grown up there and never quite moved out (although they haven’t lived there for 10 years or more) and so moving out was always going to be a big challenge. Two weeks or so ago it became clear that we were not going to be able to get out by yesterday (20/8/11) by ourselves and the rallying began. Richard was in charge of the frequent runs to the Oxfam shop; Doug (an old friend from the Zambia days) came over for a day to get boxes into store and get my workshop cleared; neighbours, Lesley and Tim, cut the hedge (see the picture below – it’s never looked this good before); Trina, Drew, Sara and Martin did lots of the early clearing, packing and lifting.

The above picture was taken one hour before the new tenants were about to walk through the door as we raise (chilled) beakers of cold Cava to celebrate the beginning of “ColaLife – the nomadic phase” and the end of “Operation get the Berrys out of here”. Jane and I will be staying with family and friends for the next few weeks as we prepare to move to Zambia, probably at the end of September.

So thanks everyone. We will get there, one step at a time!

Here are a couple more pictures from yesterday:

Pete serves the celebratory Cava
Pete supplied the chilled beakers and Cava to celebrate the end of “operation get the Berrys out of here”. We left the wooden parrot to keep an eye on things… hmmm is it connected to Google?

The Hedge at Beam Ends
Tim’s handiwork on the hedge, which has never looked this good. I should mention that Tim is also working to get a project underway in Africa – check out The Stand Up and Build Project. You can find them on Facebook here.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Intercontinental collaboration | Mash-up of the month

14 April 2011 By Leave a Comment

Mash-up of the week | Intercontinental collaboration

Picture the scene. People on three continents are lining themselves up for a telephone conference that took a while to set up given the time differences and availability of the various parties. But at last the time comes. It’s 8am at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, it’s 2pm at the UNICEF HQ in Lusaka, Zambia and 1pm in Rugby, England.

UNICEF Zambia attempted to pull us all together but alas, they could call Jane and I in the UK but patching in Rohit Ramchandani in the USA wouldn’t work. They tried again, this time starting in Baltimore, but again the second call to us would not patch in. While this is going on Rohit and Jane start a Google chat so we can understand better how we are doing. Then came the stroke of brilliance from Rohit: ‘Why don’t I participate on Skype?’ he said.

So in the picture above you have: Jane, myself (I’m taking the picture) and Rohit (on Skype) gathered around the speaker phone on our kitchen table and Jesper and Rogers on the other end of the telephone line in Lusaka.

This worked so well I could hardly believe it. The call lasted an hour and half with full participation from all parties. Even Rohit could hear what was being said and could chip in whenever he wanted. At the UK end it really did feel like there were three of us around the table.

:-)

 

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Ludo Lauwers, Vice Chairman of Janssen Pharmaceutica, talks about unlikely alliances

10 February 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ludo LauwersThis is interesting. Around Christmas time, the Vice Chairman of the Board of Janssen Pharmaceutica, Ludo Lauwers, was interviewed by Bert Lauwers of Trends.be. Lauwers talked about the need to think out of the box and innovate by forming alliances with unlikely partners. He mentioned Microsoft, Google, General Electric, Siemens and Philips as potential collaborators of the future. You can read a summary of the interview here in Dutch.

He also talked about the challenge of getting Janssen’s products to small villages in Africa, where the need is greatest and made the Coca-Cola link. He also said that a company already exists that has made containers to fit into Coca-Cola crates – that will be us then!

All very encouraging. When powerful people like Lauwers start talking like this I think we might get there and realise the ColaLife vision.

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Open Sourcing Project 10^100?

25 November 2009 By Leave a Comment

Open Project 10 100 logo

Do you remember Google’s Project 10 to the 100th? In the autumn of 2008 Google asked us all to submit ‘ideas that would change the World’. More than 170,000 of us did just that across 170 countries. We submitted the ColaLife idea. The plan was that Google would select the top 100 ideas and ask people to vote on them. The top 5 would share $10m to implement their idea. Inspirational! Unfortunately, after a very long delay Google backed off their original vision and turned something quite extraordinary into something very, very ordinary.

Backing off the original vision was bad enough but, more seriously, 170,000 ideas have simply disappeared. Only Google knows what they are.

Enter the wonderful people at project10tothe100now.org who have set up a website where those of us who submitted ideas to Google can submit them again but this time where everyone can see them! They also have a Facebook Group.

So if you submitted an idea to Google which is now trapped in Google’s servers somewhere, free it! Submit it here.

Filed Under: Google 10^100 Tagged With: , , , ,

10,000 have viewed ColaLife Animation

16 November 2009 By Leave a Comment

Over the weekend the original ColaLife animation went through the 10,000 views barrier – that’s around 25 views a day since it was published. You can watch it on the *NEW* ColaLife Channel (it’s only got a few views here so far). Thanks go to Luke Berry (artist), Sam Berry (animator) and Julian (sound effects) of Georgia Wonder who put this together in 3 days back in October 2008 for the Google 10 to the 100th Project.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Videos Tagged With: , , , ,

The ColaLife Channel launches

14 November 2009 By 2 Comments

The ColaLife Channel

A key element of the online part of the ColaLife campaign has been to take a multi-channel approach and get ColaLife everywhere. We didn’t start with a website and expect people to find us, we went to all the places potential supporters might be. So we are:

And I’ve just set up vimeo.com/colalife. We didn’t have a website and this blog until we were well into the campaign and even now this acts as an aggregator of content from other places. No images are loaded on the blog, for example, they are all on Flickr.

A key missing element in this approach was the fact that we could not get youtube.com/colalife because it was already in place – may be it was set up by a ColaLife supporter – but it had never been used. Anyway, a handful of ColaLife supporters who work for Google (who own YouTube) worked some magic last week and now we have The ColaLife Channel on YouTube. Take a look.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Videos Tagged With: , ,

Google back off from original vision

24 September 2009 By 12 Comments

My Twitter search on Project 10 100 just started to yield results. With great excitement I rushed to my PC to see this:
Project 10^100 voting
Is ColaLife one of the 100 semi-finalists? No it isn’t. But hang on, there are not 100 semi-finalists! Google have changed the rules of the game!

There won’t be 100 concrete ideas to vote on, but 16 broad-brush themes. It now looks like a programme that a government or an aid agency would announce. Each theme is huge and it seems to me would need a lot more than a share of $10 million to make a significant impression. As an example, the first theme is ‘Help social entrepreneurs drive change‘ and within that is the idea to ‘Create a non-profit, venture capital-like revolving fund to invest in high-impact local entrepreneurs’. Nothing wrong with that idea, but it has been done. In the UK we have just such a scheme – UnLtd – which is wonderful. But UnLtd was set up with a £100 million endowment, not a $2 million investment.

Project 10 to the 100th has morphed. It’s not going to give 100 individual and amazing ideas the oxygen of publicity they need to become a reality. Perhaps that notion was just too innovative and too ambitious. It looks like we’re going to get a modest amount of additional funding with the traditional four or five key themes that existing organisations will bid for.

It turns out that Project 10^100 has been a bit of a distraction for ColaLife. We now need to move on and vigorously explore other options to make our idea a reality.

Onwards and upwards.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Google 10^100 Tagged With: , , , ,

ColaLife Limited – ColaLife incorporates

10 September 2009 By 2 Comments

ColaLife Ltd Certificate of Incorporation

It’s official. Today ColaLife’s Certificate of Incorporation arrived from Bells, Wells & Braithwaite.  ColaLife Limited is a company limited by guarantee (non-profit). Our Memorandum and Articles of Association are here. Many thanks to Bells, Wells & Braithwaite for their pro-bono help with the incorporation. The first draft of a business plan is also on its way.  Once this in place I hope it will provide enough information to enable people to sign up for board membership to take ColaLife to the next phase.

There are several reasons for incorporation including:

  1. To provide supporters, particularly potential funders, a mechanism to engage (please get in touch!)
  2. To enable ColaLife to inject further pace into the campaign which has been totally dependent on Coca-Cola until now
  3. To enable ColaLife to engage in design and prototyping of the aidpod concept
  4. To enable ColaLife to bid to implement the ColaLife idea if we make it to the finals of Google’s Project 10 to the 100th

The not-for-profit legal structure we have chosen will enable us to adopt charitable status or CIC status at sometime in the future if this would be beneficial. Either of these decisions would be one-way.

Onwards and upwards.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , ,

ColaLife Project 10 the the 100th animation hits 9,000 views

7 September 2009 By Leave a Comment

While we wait for Google to announce the 100 semi-finalists of the Project 10 to the 100th initiative, the ColaLife animation, which formed part of our entry, has passed 9,000 views. Here it is again:

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Videos Tagged With: ,

ColaLife featured on the Project 10^100 NOW Blog

7 August 2009 By 2 Comments

Projet 10 100 Now logo
Hats off to Evan Kroske who has started a campaign to get Google to commit to an announcement date for their 10th anniversary competition which has been postponed twice and is currently postponed indefinitely.

It’s true that Google have been somewhat overwhelmed by the number of responses they have received (150,000 in 20+ different languages) but there are many who think they should have ‘open sourced’ the selection process in some way.

Anyway, Evan was generous enough to mention ColaLife as an example of the task Google have taken on – see the blog post and comments here.

He also points to a Digg video interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google, who said that Google will be making some announcements regarding Project 10^100 this fall. In the interview, Mayer said “We’ll be making some announcements coming up this fall to close the process, get the public vote going, and ultimately decide on the winning idea or ideas.” See the full response here. The question starts 7min 20 secs in:

We have made a lot of progress since we submitted our idea to Google way back in October 2008. But we still Google’s help. Here’s why.

And . . . just to finish off . . . let’s remind ourselves what ColaLife is all about:

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Google 10^100, Videos Tagged With: , , , ,
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