Vaccines can play a life-saving role in preventing serious illnesses, including devastating childhood diseases like polio. But if they are not shipped, stored or monitored properly, they can lose potency or spoil altogether. For the developing countries, this challenge is a critical one as the nearly 1 in 5 children that are not vaccinated are concentrated within their borders.

Both government entities, such as national health ministries, and individual medical clinics are realizing just how challenging it is to track and monitor the quality of one of their most important resources: vaccines. For many low-resourced rural clinics, a staff member might have to literally be in the same room as a cold storage unit to see if it’s working or not. NexleafAnalytics has created a temperature-monitoring sensor, called ColdTrace, which remotely alerts personnel if a temperature change threatens the vaccines being stored there. More →

Water: we’re all made of it, we all need it to survive – yet, more than 3 million people around the word die from water-related diseases every year. How do we solve this problem? Simple: make it entirely accessible for people we call “citizen scientists” to determine whether or not their water, and the water the community around them drinks, is actually drinkable.

Many times in developing areas of the world, access to trained professionals and the complex, high-power technologies they use to identify clean water is difficult to access and deploy. Enter MoboSens. Our product offers a great solution to this problem and eliminates the costs associated with the activities that were previously limited to a select few. With MoboSens, anyone who has access to a cell phone can identify safe drinking water by putting a single droplet onto our nanotechnology censor that plugs into the phone’s audio jack. We really do make it that simple. More →

The annual “wireless for good” competition awards $600,000 in cash to advance your innovative designs and ideas

January 8, 2013—Redwood City, CA –The Vodafone Americas Foundation™ today announced its final call for applicants for the annual Wireless Innovation Project™, a competition that identifies and supports wireless-related technologies with high potential to solve critical global issues. Proposals will be accepted through January 13^th at Midnight PST and winners will be announced in April at the Global Philanthropy Forum to be held in the Bay Area.

Why apply? Simply, the statistics for success are largely in your favor. Since launching the Wireless Innovation Project™ competition in 2009, every single winner has experienced growth and success for their wireless solution.  More →