Tag Archives: Amy Klobuchar

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

TBI Gala May 15 Honoring The First Couple of NYC


2014 Annual Celebration & Award Reception

Honoring The Black Institute’s Couple of the Year

Mayor Bill de Blasio & First Lady Chirlane McCray

Also honoring

Ana Castro, Founder L.A.T.I.S.M. (Latinos in Tech Innovation & Social Media)

Cheryl McKissack, President & CEO, McKissack & McKissack

Stephen Hawkins, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA

Community Resources for Justice

Music by Grammy Winner DJ Hex Hector

Host Committee (In-formation): Stuart Appelbaum RWDSU, Rev. A.R. Bernard, Hector Figueroa 32BJ SEIU, George Gresham 1199SEIU, Ed Lynch UFCW, Bob Master CWA District 1, Mike Mulgrew UFT, Peter Patch & Linda Kane, Larry Park NYSTLA, Eugene Schneur & Mo Vaugh OMNI New York and Doug Wigdor

The Black Institute Board: Selvin Bushay, Stephen Chukwumba, James Heyliger, Vince Morgan, Ademola Oyefeso, Martha Stark, Carmen Wallace and Jacquelyn Williams

For more information or to purchase ticktes please click here, call 212 871 6899 or email events@theblackinstitute.org

 

The Black Institute
http://www.theblackinstitute.org/

 

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Take the pledge. Reduce your meat consumption!

Looking for a healthy alternative to meat? For every Earth Day Sampler Pack, Paleta will donate a dollar to plant a tree through EDN’s Canopy Project.

earthdaylogoDid you know that the meat industry is responsible for about 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions? That’s more than the entire transportation sector! The production and distribution of meat doesn’t just consume a lot of energy and cause greenhouse gas emissions, it also requires a huge amount of water—up to 2,500 gallons to produce just one pound of beef. Take the pledge to reduce your meat consumption today! And the problem is getting worse. Over the last 10 years alone, global meat consumption has increased by 20%. So what can we do to help solve this problem? It’s simple—eat less meat! In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, eating just one less burger a week for a year is the equivalent of skipping 320 miles of driving. Join us in pledging to not eat meat one day a week. Thanks for your support. -The Earth Day Network Team

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Weekly Address: Congress Must Act Now to Stop the Sequester.
President Obama urges Congress to stop the sequester — the harmful automatic cuts that threaten thousands of jobs and affect our national security from taking effect on March 1.
~ Culture & History

Official Google blog – African entrepreneurship


GOOGLeCloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa

Posted: 20 Dec 2012 09:30 AM PST

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work.  Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family.  During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.
In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.
Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.
Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula

Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them.  By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.
In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.
Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine.  Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”
To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.
Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine