Jacob Mullins

NetHope: Providing the backbone of humanitarian aid, the ability to communicate with each other

I wanted to quickly write about and draw a little bit of attention to a key humanitarian organization that I support, and who I think offers crucial services in a way with which many of us ‘techies’ can easily relate.  Think about how frustrating it is when a conference WiFi system is overloaded and you can’t load a webpage or send a tweet; or when you’re at a large public concert and the cell network is clogged to the point where you’re unable to send a text to a friend to coordinate a meetup location, or to a girl to set up a date for that evening.  And we live in one of the most technologically advanced places on earth.

Now imagine a rural second or third world country, with already limited communications infrastructure, that has experienced a natural disaster of epic proportions rendering its existing infrastructure incapable.  Examples quickly come to mind:  the Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 leaving more than 5 million homeless, even Hurricane Katrina of 2005, and now Haiti.  In the wake of these disasters what is left of local emergency units and first responders primarily focus on saving lives, while trying to survey the entirety of the disaster so they can create an actionable plan.  However, with radio towers destroyed, land lines severed, and little electrical power, communication and coordination grinds to a slog.

Within the first 24 hours of news of this earthquake in Haiti, well over 25 countries acted by proffering their support with flights of support personnel, doctors, heavy machinery, search dogs, food and water, and any other usable supplies en route to Port-au-Prince.  An airport that was built to manage no more than three planes on the ground at once, and approximately nine flights per day, has absorbed over 600 takeoffs and landings within the first five days after the atrocity.

With this phenomenal outpouring of support from around the world comes a new challenge – one of coordinating the people on the ground so they can be deployed around the small island nation with the necessary resources to provide the assistance needed to the places that need it most.  This is where NetHope proves invaluable. 

NetHope is a non-profit hub bringing together a consortium of the IT departments of 28 of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, with some the world’s largest technology companies including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Accenture and others who provide both financial backing and core business services to better enable the humanitarian members.  NetHope provides the communications infrastructure for all organizations to coordinate with each other to most effectively carry out their charters on the ground.  Currently, 17 of NetHope’s members, including the American Red Cross, Save the Children, MercyCorps, and World Vision, are present in Haiti providing relief to earthquake victims, being supported by NetHope’s vital telecom link.  However, NetHope’s working to improve comms even more.

At this moment in Haiti, NetHope is working with technology partner Inveneo to establish a VSAT/Wimax internet connectivity setup in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas to further support the flow of information and communication.  To stay abreast of NetHope’s involvement in Haiti click here, and to donate to their cause go here.

And here’s a short anecdote, close to home, that underlines the importance of communication in disaster type situations. Yesterday, I chatted with a friend who is a Red Cross volunteer who spent his Saturday answering calls at the Red Cross Disaster Call Center in Oakland.  He told me about a Haitian woman he spoke with who lives in New York, who had been able to connect with her brother in Haiti, over the phone.  She relayed the situation:  her brother and his family were marooned in a town only nine miles outside of Port-au-Prince.  Most of the town buildings are destroyed, the survivors are camping in the church parking lot, and the roads are blocked.  In the five days since the earthquake they have not seen one relief worker or aid truck.  They have no food, and their only option is to buy a one-pound bag of rice for $7.00, in a place where the annual per capita income is $350 per year.  Unthinkable.

Immediately after ending the call, my friend passed along the status and location of this village, and within three hours of the call had confirmation that the village was placed on the Red Cross high-priority list to receive attention and aid as quickly as possible.

The need in Haiti is obviously great, and there are countless options of organizations to support.  But I like NetHope because I can tangibly understand the problem that they solve, enabling the literal flow of communication that is saving lives.

Fascinated by Cannes Lions and what it’s about

Over the past two days I have become beyond-normally fascinated with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Yesterday morning a spent two hours or so watching 5 minute long videos of their presenters, and this morning I’m spending time on Summize and created a Tinker page to follow the activity.

The conference fascinates me because it’s bringing together the most influential and creative minds in marketing and advertising from around the world, to sit and talk about what is Advertising today, and what has been successful this past year.

It seems to me however that most of the presenters, submissions and winners are mostly missing the boat. Advertising, as I see it, is totally broken. Spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns that shove their way in front of our eyes simply doesn’t work anymore. Even the cutsy ads that make you smile, do exactly that, make you smile - not more. Not buy the product. Which is the goal, right?

We need to speak directly to the consumer, not on a broad-level, not even on a targeted level, but on a singular and individual level.  With advancing technology in mobile phones and proactive engagement of social media we are incrementally sharing our life, in bits and pieces. These bits and pieces, if pulled together and constructed correctly, would paint the picture of our likes and dislikes, passions, world view, beliefs and habits. The winner in marketing will be the one who can take that information and use it to provide extremely relevant offers - offers that I actually care about. Offers on musical artists I love, restaurants that I frequent, events that I pay attention to, and vacations to places that I dream about. This can only be done with technology.

It won’t be Madison Ave, London, or a fancy firm with three last names that figures this out. It will be Silicon Valley. The former are too focused on the $$$ that come with gaining the big accounts, they’re chasing the trend-line, focusing on one-upping the other guy to win the business. Silicon Valley is about thinking 5 years down the line, barely considering what people are doing today - which is the status quo of stagnant thinking.

As a marketer these thoughts excite me, as an entrepreneur these thoughts fire me up. For what could be more exciting than revolutionizing an industry that hasn’t changed in over 100 years? To quote the closing lines of Jerry Maguire’s most famous Mission Statement:

“Let us start a revolution.  Let us start a revolution that is not just about basketball shoes, or official licensed merchandise. I am prepared to die for something. I am prepared to live for our cause. The cause is caring about each other. The secret to this job is personal relationships.”

I am so mentally exhausted it’s refreshing.

Beer, girls, and a fresh perspective

Look at that sunrise – gosh it’s gorgeous, you can literally see the “god rays” splayed across the sky lighting up Ipanema beach.  The water is cold rushing below my knees and I roll my head back laughing deep within my belly.  I open my eyes and in front of me are people with whom I have memories and history, we have inside jokes, we poke at each other’s insecurities, and we seek the most personally abrasive nicknames possible for each other.  And for some reason I decided to fly here, to the other side of the world, and spend money I probably shouldn’t, to be standing right here, right now, with them.

The vacation to Rio was amazing; yeah, sure, for all the reasons that you think: cans of beer on the street cost $0.80, the summer sun was warm and inviting, the women stunningly gorgeous, all taking place in a city where literally 6 million people stop everything but to put on silly costumes and party for four days.  But I think an equal, if not longer lasting value came hours after I had returned home to San Francisco.

Upon landing at SFO I could feel a creeping anxiety coming over me as I reached for my phone, tapped my password onto the screen and went for the Airplane Mode OFF switch, but I stopped.  I realized that my anxiety was coming from the anticipated uber-shock of rentry into the atmosphere without a heat shield.  I was about to be deluged by a week’s worth of pinging text messages, ding-donging voicemails, endlessly scrolling emails, and continuously loading twitter messages.  I made an executive decision and decided not to re-enter quite yet, and put my phone back to sleep.

I realized that I was in a rare and unusual sense of rapture, floating in the ether, away from the oxygen of ultra-connectivity that we need to breathe in our Silicon Valley lives.  I only used the computer once in Rio, for less than 5 minutes, I never once used my phone.  What an amazing gift.

I used the rest of the afternoon, from about noon onward, to sip coffee and to evaluate the priorities in my life.  I journaled for a bit and came away objectively understanding that I spend too much time on things that don’t last past a headache in the morning, and not enough time on the things that will drive me forward for a lifetime.  That said, I’ll still end up with the headaches, I’ll just try to adjust the balance between those and my other priorities a little bit better.

Then, slowly but surely, I re-entered the atmosphere, starting with email, then a tweet or two, followed up uploading my pictures.  And now look at me, I’m laying on my hotel room bed across the street from my Microsoft office building in Bellevue, Washington at 11:30 at night, poking away on my computer with a 3G broadband card flickering out the side.  I’m about to send a tweet from my phone, as my mind drifts away from this post, which is less than an arms distance away.

I’m definitely re-immersed, which is great, don’t get me wrong; I’m just so happy that I took those few precious moments between vacation and reality to realign my thoughts and my focus, because I think there’s nothing more important or valuable than having a fresh perspective.