By Lynda Chanwai-Earle
Vinny and his team win at the Microsoft Imagine Cup photo courtesy Asia NZ Foundation
Auckland University graduate Vinny Lohan is so full of ideas he is literally buzzing. It's no wonder the young Indian New Zealander has seen international success with his aptly named projects OneBeep and Onebuzz, although "success" in Vinny's terms may not be about how much money he makes from his projects. Vinny's altruistic streak means that he often gives his inventions away.
Ranked by General Electric as one of three upcoming entrepreneurs in the world, Vinny has captured the attention of the Bill Gates Foundation. Vinny's big data projects are saving lives and bringing education to children in third world countries with "engineering simplicity and ingenuity" and OneBeep delightfully involves radio waves.
Vinny's a network leader and guest speaker at a social innovation hui in Christchurch, sponsored by the Asia New Zealand Foundation. Vinny takes time away from the buzz of the hui to tell me how his technology works.
Vinny set up OneBeep, a data communication company while he was still a student in computer engineering at Auckland University. These days Vinny and a small team of engineers that make up OneBeep work out of Bangalore to expand their ventures in the big data industry.
"You know the One laptop per child project?" Vinny asks me, I nod. "That's where 30 million are in distribution around the world for children to help combat the digital divide in places like rural Uganda or Peru. But the problem is that the lap tops are going to areas without internet and without the infrastructure to build the internet, so the laptop becomes a static device."
So what is the solution?
So we came up with a method to get all the new data to the laptops as sound files, through radio waves. We chose radio because radio is everywhere.
OneBeep, transmits data using radio signals to remote areas where cellular networks and broadband have not reached. Simple and ingenious.
OneBeep placed third at the Microsoft Imagine Cup ahead of over 425,000 competing tertiary students from 69 other countries. Vinny owns 91% of OneBeep, his company based in New Zealand. The rest is held by Icehouse, a top technology incubator.
What about OneBuzz? Why the name and what's this technology about?
OneBuzz is personal for Vinny. His mother contracted malaria while she was pregnant with him. She ran the risk of delivering a stillborn child or a child with birth defects. Luckily Vinny was born without complications but subsequently has contracted malaria twice over himself.
Vinny Lohan Jeet photo courtesy Asia NZ Foundation
Vinny tells me that while on a visit to rural India recently, he stopped at a medical clinic. A mother carrying her sick child came in. She had walked for over 2 hours from their village. The child was suffering advanced stages of malaria. The mother was desperate but the clinic had run short of medical treatment. The child died there at the clinic, in front of Vinny. The grieving woman told Vinny that if only she had known the clinic didn't have enough medicine, she would have walked to another clinic to save her child's life.
So OneBuzz was born, an algorithm and technology platform that helps project manage the stockpile and transportation of anti-malarial measures - measures that includes vaccines, insecticide sprays and aerial spraying. Vinny created a system using disparate data and satellite imagery, along with data from government health, climate and recent rainfall patterns to identify areas around the globe most at risk of malarial mosquito infestation.
Social entrepreneurs need to spend time in those communities. It's about falling in love with the problem not the solution. The solution comes out of a very deep understanding of what the problem is.
Vinny tells me that he trialed OneBuzz in the state of Bihar in the North East of India. It's the 13th largest state in India with an area of 94,163 km2 and with total population of 82,998,509. Over 85% living in villages and over 58% under the age of 25. "These communities have very little resources. The amount of medicine or aerial spraying was not the problem, the problem was intelligent distribution. it's smart decision making"
These are very small changes but they have great impact.
OneBuzz, the malaria predictor solution, also made it to the finals in Microsoft's Imagine cup. Vinny's big data technology platforms are not hugely expensive to create or sustain. In fact they work compatibly with already existing systems. So why isn't OneBuzz being implemented across the globe right now?
OneBuzz was a success and continues to be utilised across Bihar. However the biggest problem is not the invention or sustainability of this technology but the governmental bureaucracy and "old school" hierarchy that stands in the way.
There is resistance in other states across India to the setting up of OneBuzz in the first place. Vinny tells me that perhaps because OneBuzz is not a money spinner it is not taken seriously enough. Vinny considers the greatest irony being the resistance to implementing his life saving technology.
The biggest barrier is that I wanted to give this technology away for free.
What is Vinny and his team working on next?
Vinny is building a platform primarily for tertiary and secondary students to work together across disparate platforms, a little like Dropbox to help gather and collaborate across different digital devices.
Vinny believes that social enterprise and entrepreneurs needs to work in collaboration with companies like Google or Microsoft rather than reinventing the wheel. Vinny and his team decided to make OneBeep and OneBuzz open source. They gave the technology away.
We were able to pitch OneBuzz to the Bill Gates Foundation in the U.S. and that was really exciting - that was a real buzz.
So it's international award winning technology that's obviously changing lives for the better around the globe. Melanie Crawford is the Leadership Network Coordinator at the Asia New Zealand Foundation. She describes Vinny as a "serial entrepreneur" and his technology having world wide implications.
That's a real testament to Vinny, he could have a different life, he could be in Silicon Valley making a new APP for Facebook and a lot of money but he's not. His next steps might be how to develop social enterprise that is sustainable financially. Vinny Lohan's been named as one of the world's top three young social entrepreneurs - he is definitely one to watch.
