Joshua & Gwendolyn at eTech this year

I’m super excited that my friends Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd will be presenting presenting at ETech this year. And presenting something really cool too.

All the while, barely 1 in 1000 people have access to the Internet in a form recognizable to the average connected person. Mobile phones are nearly as absent from the technological mix. In Trinidad de Cuba, one hustler proudly showed off his mobile phone to us, though it didn’t even have a service provider…

… What will happen when a cultured, literate, hyper-social people get access to the Internet for the first time? How will their virgin experiences and experimentations impact the rest of the world? Cubans teach us to strip away layers of plastic, metal, and code to the root of what technology is, and what it has always been. From a people that have been greatly anticipating the future—any future—we’ll be left with clues for the promising technologies of our own near future by looking at recent progress and universal lessons in the Cuba of today. “

More on the official Etech pageOf Necessity and Humanity: What Cuba Can Teach Us About Ourselves and Our Own Technology.

Gwen and Joshua will also using the exposure from ETech to help

File under wonderfuly bright minds of our generation.

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LearnHub Launches, looks great

LearnHub shot

Congrats to John, Malgosia and their highly tallented team at Savvica on the launch of their newest product LearnHub. This is the project that brought them back from the valley to build their startup in Toronto. What they’ve just launched is version 1.0. It already looks great. But know to expect even more polish and general awesomeness in iterations to come.

LearnHub is a social learning platform, where members can create lessons, guides and all sorts of learning tools around user-generated communities like photography, cooking, software development (some serious Ruby experts resident at Savvica) and other subjects. Check it out!

Posted in Archive, awesomeness, learnhub, plugs, startups, torcamp, toronto | 3 Comments

Heading to Mountain View, San Fran next week

Dopplr mountain view

I’ll be down in the Bay Area next week for eComm2008 from the 12th to the 16th. Just in town for a few days but looking forward to meeting up with a few geeks and other trouble makers both during the conference and over the weekend. Drop me a line tom [at] thomaspurves.com if you’d like to join in or otherwise meet up.

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