Polish 3D Printer Zortrax Sells 5,000 Units To Dell

It may seem like small potatoes, but Polish 3D printer manufacturer Zortrax has chalked a 5,000 unit order from Dell. This is the first I’ve heard of a mass order of home 3D-printing equipment and it means a real boon for the budding Olsztyn-based company.

“Dell kept in touch with us when we were still in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign. We weren’t in a position to make them a reasonable business offer at that time, since our production volume was very limited,” said Rafał Tomasiak, Zortrax CEO. “At that point in time the production was very tedious, every single printer was quality checked and tested by us. Business negotiations with Dell were stalled at some point and we focused on shipping the printers to our Kickstarter backers. Now the situation is much different, we are prepared for large quantity orders.”

Zortrax launched last May and is now shipping to happy Kickstarter backers. I’ve used the printer multiple times and was very impressed by the print quality and build. The company is poised to be a major player in the European market and, with this investment by Dell, potentially globally. The company said the the printers are headed toward Dell’s central and east Asia offices.

“Frankly speaking, we were surprised that any company, even a company like Dell, wants to place such an order! But after a while we realized how many printers we use in our own office… For a designer who prints a large number of prototypes it is much more useful to use 10 smaller printers on one desk, which operate simultaneously, rather than one with a larger build volume,” said Tomasiak.

ORIGINAL: TechCrunch
by John Biggs (@johnbiggs)

MIT's 2013 Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies - 3: Big Data from Cheap Phones

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
By David Talbot
April 23, 2013

Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.



WHY IT MATTERS
Poor countries lack data-gathering infrastructure; phone data can provide it.

Breakthrough
Creating disease–fighting tools with cell-phone mobility data.

Key Players
• Caroline Buckee, Harvard University
• William Hoffman, World Economic Forum
• Alex Pentland, MIT
• Andy Tatem, University of Southampton

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.”

Caroline Buckee

This work is now feeding into a new set of predictive models she is building. They show, for example, that even though malaria cases were seen at the tea plantation, taking steps to control malaria there would have less effect on the disease’s spread than concentrating those efforts at the source: Lake Victoria. That region has long been understood as a major center of malaria, but what hasn’t been available before is detailed information about the patterns of human travel there: how many people are coming and going, when they’re arriving and departing, which specific places they’re coming to, and which of those destinations attract the most people traveling on to new places.

Caroline Buckee, a Harvard epidemiologist, is using detailed data on population movements—gleaned from mobile phones— to build precise new tools for fighting the spread of malaria.

Existing efforts to gather that kind of travel data are spotty at best; sometimes public-health workers literally count people at transportation hubs, Buckee says, or nurses in far-flung clinics ask newly diagnosed malaria victims where they’ve been recently. “At many border crossings in Africa, they keep little slips of paper—but the slips get lost, and nobody keeps track,” she says. “We have abstractions and general models on travel patterns but haven’t been able to do this properly—ever.”

The data mining will help inform the design of new measures that are likely to include cheap, targeted campaigns of text messages—for example, warning visitors entering the Kericho tower’s signal zone to use bed netting. And it will help officials choose where to focus mosquito control efforts in the malarial areas. “You don’t want to be spraying every puddle for mosquito larvae all the time. But if you know there is a ton of importation from a certain spot, you want to increase your control program at that spot,” Buckee says. “And now I can pinpoint where the importation of a disease is especially important.”

Buckee’s most recent study, published last year in Science and based on records from 15 million Kenyan phones, is a result of a collaboration with her husband, Nathan Eagle, who has been working to make sense of cell-phone data for more than a decade. In the mid-2000s, after getting attention for his work mining data from the phones of volunteers at MIT, Eagle started to get calls from mobile carriers asking for insight into questions like why customers canceled their phone plans. Eagle began working with them. And when the couple spent 18 months in Africa starting in 2006—Buckee was doing work on the genetics of the malaria parasite—he studied call data for various purposes, trying to understand phenomena like ethnic divisions in Nairobi slums and the spread of cholera in Rwanda. Buckee’s results show what might be possible when the technology is turned on public-­health problems. “This demonstrated ‘Yeah, we can really provide not just insight, but actually something that is actionable,’” says Eagle, now CEO of Jana, which runs mobile-phone surveys in the developing world. “This really does work.”

“This is the future of epidemiology. If we are to eradicate malaria, this is how we will do it.”

That demonstration suggests how such data might be harnessed to build tools that health-care workers, governments, and others can use to detect and monitor epidemics, manage disasters, and optimize transportation systems. Already, similar efforts are being directed toward goals as varied as understanding commuting patterns around Paris and managing festival crowds in Belgium. But mining phone records could be particularly useful in poor regions, where there’s often little or no other data-­gathering infrastructure. “We are just at the start of using this data for these purposes,” says ­Vincent Blondel, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Louvain in Belgium and a leading researcher on data gleaned from cell phones. “The exponential adoption of mobile phones in low-income settings—and the new willingness of some carriers to release data—will lead to new technological tools that could change everything.”

Blank Slate

The world’s six billion mobile phones generate huge amounts of data—including location tracking and information on commercial activity, search history, and links in social networks. Innumerable efforts to mine the data in different ways are under way in research and business organizations around the world. And of those six billion phones, five billion are in developing countries. Many of them are cheap phones that can do little besides make calls and send text messages. But all such activity can be tracked back to cell-phone towers, providing a rough way to trace a person’s movements. Throw in the spread of mobile payment technology for simple commerce and you have the raw material for insights not only into epidemiology but into employment trends, social tensions, poverty, transportation, and economic activity.

This map, a product of cell-phone data analytics, shows the most important sources of malaria infections (darker shades)—taking into account the potential for further transmission caused by human travel—as well as the major destinations of people exposed to the disease (lighter shades). It can be used to determine where best to focus warnings and mosquito control techniques.

A True Elite Education at Half the Price

ORIGINAL: INC

Leigh Buchanan | Inc. magazine

Oct 30, 2012

The Minerva Project has a plan to take online education to the next level.

Illustration by Brett Ryder

Add caption

Illustration by Lauren Tamaki

You'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate. Ben Nelson, CEO of the Minerva Project

There may be no brand more venerable than the Ivy League. Individually and together, its eight members connote the pinnacle of scholarship. No university has emerged to challenge its intellectual supremacy in more than a century. On that timeline, Caltech, founded in 1891, is a start-up.

But now there is the Minerva Project. Ben Nelson, former CEO of the online photo service Snapfish, is building a school he asserts will be more rigorous than Harvard or Yale. "It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in." While Nelson is raising the floor established by elite universities in terms of who qualifies for admission, he is also raising the ceiling in terms of how many to admit. Like virtually every other higher-education start-up, Minerva, based in San Francisco, will live online. That means Nelson can swing wide his doors to tens of thousands of top-drawer students, many of them international. "Harvard allows 2,000 students into the admission cycle, of whom 200 are not American," says Nelson. "Clearly, that's not a good representation of the smartest people in the world."

The company, a for-profit, expects to admit its first class of several hundred in the fall of 2014 or 2015. Tuition will cost less than $20,000--half the price of the Ivy League. In April, Benchmark Capital invested $25 million, the largest seed round in its history. "The idea of giving kids a world-class, credentialed education is the most ambitious goal we've seen in this space," says Kevin Harvey, a Benchmark general partner.

Minerva isn't Nelson's first stab at transforming education. Twenty years ago, at the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in a class about the history of universities. "I studied Penn and Franklin and Hopkins," says Nelson. "Then I looked around and said, 'This is not what it's supposed to be.'?" His chief criticism: Schools were training people to be successful but not to become the kind of leaders who could move the world forward. So he joined the student government and spent the next four years loudly advocating for change.

Post-Snapfish, Nelson thought again about education reform. He still wanted to improve elite education, but his more pressing concern was to expand it. Since Nelson's graduation, top schools had adopted needs-blind admission policies, and students around the world increasingly coveted a U.S. education. The result was far more demand from worthy students than the Ivies and their prestigious brethren could handle. "Admissions officers at elite universities will tell you that they could take everyone they've accepted, reject them, then accept the next tier 10 times over and not be able to tell the difference in quality," says Nelson.

Minerva will be global in more than its student body. Nelson plans to establish dormitory clusters in cities around the world. After their freshman years, students will be strongly encouraged to spend each semester in a different location. Students unable to participate in this movable feast must demonstrate proficiency in three languages to graduate.

Minerva's curricular innovations emerge from a distinction Nelson draws between knowledge dissemination and intellectual development. Knowledge, he maintains, is free and ubiquitous on the Internet, with nonprofits like Khan Academy and schools like Stanford posting thousands of lectures and lessons. So Minerva will offer no introductory classes. Rather, students are expected to master the basics of every subject on their own. During their freshman year, all students will follow the same core curriculum focused on subjects including multimodal communications and complex-systems analysis. That foundation laid, every subsequent course can be taught at a very high level. "If you were to look at sophomore-junior-senior years at Minerva, they will be equivalent to junior-senior-and-master's years at most other elite universities," says Nelson.

He is also upending the pedagogic convention whereby tenured faculty deliver weekly lectures, followed by discussion sections presided over by beleaguered grad students. The school will bestow Minerva Prizes--characterized by Nelson as Nobel awards for teaching--on star academics at top universities. Prizewinners will "curate" classes for Minerva. That will entail creating original course materials; the professors can also invite their respected peers to contribute specialized expertise. Classes will gather online to view and discuss the material, overseen by the full-time faculty--all of whom will be Ph.D.'s or the equivalent and all of whom will receive both salaries and stock options.

Nelson's vision has already resonated at the highest levels of traditional academe. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers offered to chair Minerva's advisory board after a single meeting with its founder. Another adviser is Bob Kerrey, a former U.S. senator, Nebraska governor, and president of the New School. "What he's got is one of the best private-education ideas I've ever heard," says Kerrey. "I think he's going to be successful, and as a consequence, university presidents across the country are going to be able to say to their boards and their faculties, 'We have to change.' He's going to have a very, very positive impact on all of higher education in America."

For Nelson, that impact will be measured by how many brilliant students he can endow with what he calls the Minerva brain and establish in roles in which they can make a difference. Toward that end, he is creating a department to help graduates raise money and make connections for new businesses and other projects. The department will also perform many functions of a traditional publicist--promoting the accomplishments of alumni so alumni can concentrate on their actual work. "We want to create an ethos where what's rewarded is doing as opposed to self-promotion," says Nelson. "It's the difference between graduating people who are focused on themselves and graduating people who are focused on moving the world forward."

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture. @LeighEBuchanan