The Green Frog from Silicon Valley

From traveling with a linguist to connecting under-served populations with basic energy and water services: do you know Mathias Craig?

Sometimes you meet someone who goes after a big idea and can enthuse his family, friends and others to join the adventure and to make a difference in this world.  It does not happen that often. Maybe more often than none in Silicon Valley, where Apple and Google started in family garages. That is what happened to me when I interviewed Mathias Craig who co-founded blueEnergy with his brother Guillaume and his childhood friend Lâl Marandin to bring basic energy and clean water services to poor population off the grid.

By the end of our chat, I could not help caring about his cause because his passion is not just about finding a technical solution or helping others. It is about connecting people, and this goes beyond infrastructure. More than 1.5 billion people still do not have access to electricity. Actually there are more people without basic lighting today than at the time of Thomas Edison. Some populations like the ones on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua live outside the pyramid, with little resources and in remote areas. That is where Mathias and blueEnergy come in to play.

French cleantech cluster visiting Silicon Valley: if talent is there, market is elsewhere

A delegation of companies from the French cluster in Provence area is visiting Silicon Valley this week. They connected with other French entrepreneurs in Palo Alto yesterday. It was the opportunity to compare cleantech activities in US and Europe. The South East is the first region of France in photovoltaic power generation, and has an important nuclear industry.

Provence has been working on the Environment before cleantech came to age. "It was more of an associative movement back then. We have since reworked our strategic plan." stated Carine Schlewitz of the Technopolis Arbois Mediterranee. “Renewable energy is now a strong and clear vector of economic growth” explained Pascal Rioual who heads the clean technology cluster Cap’Energies (picture above). The French Government has borrowed more than $1Bn towards sustainable infrastructure, and first smart grid projects have been awarded.

If Southern California is often compared to the French Riviera for its mild climate and quality of life, many clusters would like to be associated with Silicon Valley. Provence is actually a fairly high-tech area with semiconductor factories. Gemplus is world-known for smart cards, commonly used in Europe for credit cards and other transactions. IBM once had a large campus in Sophia Antipolis near Nice, and many US companies still have offices. But the comparison with Silicon Valley stops there.

WaterWalla fosters safe drinking water and micro-entrepreneurs in urban slums

WaterWalla opened its first store last summer in Dharavi, a slum in the city of Mumbai used as backdrop in the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. The reality on the ground is very rough: 1.5 million people in less than a square mile area with little access to clean water. I wanted to do something pragmatic about it and leverage the opportunities I had while a pre-med student at Brown University.

The project started by six students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design dreaming that they could make a positive impact in the world: Anshu Vaish, Soaib Grewal, Aamer Hassanally, Nehal Doshi, Darin Kurti, and Neil Parikh. Five of us were of Indian heritage. After exploring several problems and considering aspects such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we decided to focus on the problem of safe drinking water in the urban slums of India.