LINC 2005 Symposium speaker

Herren, honored

October 26, 2006

LINC 2005 Symposium speaker, Matthew Herren, was selected by Technology Review magazine to be one of its 35 innovators under the age of 35 for 2006. These awards are “a celebration of the young scientists, computer programmers, and engineers inventing the future of technology.”

As participants at the LINC Symposium may remember, Matthew is founder and chief technology officer of EduVision, an e-Learning company based in Zurich, Switzerland. He set out to find a way to help poor, rural schools in Africa gain access to up-to-date educational materials via satellite transmission. He chose one-way satellite transmission because interior, rural villages of Africa have little access to the Internet - if any. LINC recently received the following update on EduVision from Matthew:

“In December 2005, EduVision concluded the Mbita Point Technology Trial, where a prototype of the EduVision E-Learning System was developed and tested in a school in rural Kenya. The Mbita project showed that EduVision's e-learning platform was a feasible alternative to textbooks, even in remote Africa, as both the technology functioned as we had hoped, and our students and teachers embraced it with remarkable ease.

In January, EduVision entered a second stage, and was taken over for incubation by Bridgeworks, a venture capital company with offices in Zurich, Switzerland and Nairobi, Kenya. Bridgeworks' focus is the commercialization of technologies that address the key global concerns of soil, food, health and education. The founders of EduVision and Bridgeworks share the belief that long-term, sustainable development is driven by entrepreneurship and economic principles. Our goal with EduVision is to create a sustainable commercial company that can support itself and deliver significant improvements to the quality of and access to education in the developing world.

Matthew Herren joined the Bridgeworks team as EduVision Project Manager in January, and spent the first three months of the year devising a commercial strategy for EduVision. EduVision is now in the process of securing seed funding. Concurrently, EduVision is in discussions with several African countries, one of which will host the next EduVision showcase - a country-wide implementation of the EduVision E-Learning System in place of textbooks in that country's secondary schools. Our goal is to start work on the ground in that country within a year, and then start a phased roll-out to schools across the country over the following five years.

Maciej Sudra, EduVision's interface designer, (who also spoke at the 2005 LINC Symposium) has accepted a place in Harvard's Technology in Education department, where he will complete his Masters degree. He hopes to return to EduVision once he has completed his degree.”