Earlier this year Radio La Luna in Ecuador surprised us with the great documentary “Memorias de Quito”, a very interesting proposal on recovering the collective memories marked by social and racial differences. La Luna is more than a radio station; it is a grassroots communication centre. In November, when I visited them, they were very enthusiastic to show me their computer lab, a 24-seat room based on thin client technology, NComputing. The seats are arranged in a “U” shape and in the centre a screen projector. Funds and knowledge were scarce, thus they had to use all the means available to make it happen.

Mauricio Velasco, project manager, told me they had to break down a wall between two offices to make a larger room. The furniture is simple, "we hired an electrician to set the cables, all the rest we do it by ourselves."

He said it was cheaper to buy the small black boxes (the clients) in US, so they imported them. The LCD screens, keyboards and mouse were bought locally. They couldn’t afford a real server thus they fed up a tower PC with extra RAM memory and powerful processors. Initially they had planned to run everything with open source software, the server as well as the clients. They couldn’t make the server work with Ubuntu, it seems they missed some drivers. So they switched to MS server. The clients do run Open Office, Gimp and Skype (is not open source but it is free).

Then they started the test period. Would so many seats work with the “server”? Could they Skype? Would the USB sticks work? Their approach was very empirical, they tested different scenarios and when they found problems they went to the online forums and tried to find similar problems other people had encounter and how they solved them.

This has been a whole learning experience, at the beginning they didn’t know much about thin client technology. But the whole process of selecting the equipment (choosing for the
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As the Managing Director of IICD, I participated in the end of January in the World Bank’s “ICT Sector Week: Enabling Development” in Washington. This event was organised by the World Bank’s Global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department for the Bank’s staff and the staff of the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group.

The purpose of the week was to engage IFC and WB staff, senior industry executives, and sector experts in discussion how to leverage ICT to scale up the development impact of the ICF and WB operations. 

Strategy sessions were held on increasing the reach and impact of services in public sector management, education, health, agriculture and rural development.

IICD was involved as speaker in the ICT for Health session and contributed to the panel discussion of the agriculture and rural development session. I also presented IICD in the ICT for Education session.

Find below my personal findings on the Health and Education sessions.

Working towards innovative health services delivery

The workshop on health was very interesting and included participants with lots of experience and key positions. After a well-received presentation the participants discussed: What is e-health? What long term commitment do we need from the bank? What is the role of, amongst others, health insurance and privacy of data?

A much respected female senior advisor of the World Bank suggested that the World Bank thinks about new ways to deliver health services in developing countries. She pointed out that the WB should not be willing to finance projects that are just replicating what was done in the past in the ‘North’. From this point of view she considered that there was a
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Bringing life to presentations with interactive whiteboards has been out of reach for our partners because of the high costs involved. Since Johnny Lee hacked the Wii remote control in 2007 an alternative market for low cost interactive boards has developed. When i saw the video in YouTube I feel I had to try it and I did it!

Johnny Lee (YouTube 2007, at TED) discovered that the remote control of the Wii is in fact a very sensitive infra-red camera. And if we have a infrared pen, the camera will register the movements of this. Based on this simple concept he develop a software to track the movements of the infrared pen and voila, a low cost interactive whiteboard was born.

Reading literature, I got convinced that it was something doable for low-tech people like me. All you need is:

• a Wii remote control (known as Wiimote)
• an infrared pen
• a Bluetooth connection between your PC and the Wii 
• the software to track the infrared pen movements

There were many stories on how to transform a felt-marker into a infrared pen using an old TV remote control but i was looking for a shortcut. Something very annoying from infrared light is that it is not visible to the naked eye. The risk that things won't work because the improvised pen was not emitting light at all was too much risk. 

I started Googling to know if somebody had already post a product in the market and w
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