TEDxCam: Cambridge TED conference

I was at the TEDxCam conference to present Ventropy, which is the winner of the TEDxCam Hackathon 2010.

The hackathon, the TEDxCam Open Data Challenge, took place over a single day, with a set of teams competing for a slot at TEDxCam. The theme was a set of open data feeds, to be used for a social impact project. My team's project took the funding rounds of technology startups from CrunchBase, TechCrunch's database of startups and the money they raised, and combined them with the feed from Kiva, the microlending platform for entrepreneurs in developing countries. It would tell you things like how many projects could have been funded with the money spent on a loss-making startup: the investment in SpinVox, the voicemail-to-text startup that raised more than $100 million in venture capital before it was sold off at a loss, could instead have funded 100,000 medical projects in Sierra Leone, 84,500 agriculture projects in Uganda or 34,000 construction projects in Haiti. Some of the numbers were eye-opening.

We went on to expand the project into a startup called Datagiving, which broadened the scope to look at charities and how effective they are at using their sometimes large amounts of donations to make a real difference. We presented it at the Guardian Activate Summit 2010 in London.