SPEAK SHOP'S NEWSROOM

Editor’s Note: Sam Wainwright is a Research Associate at the New America Foundation.  This post is part of the Global Innovation Showcase created by the New America Foundation and the Global Public Square.

By Sam Wainwright – Special to CNN

New communications tools and behaviors are spurring innovation worldwide, revolutionizing finance, community, business, giving and government.  Here are some fascinating examples:

Finance: Mobile phone technology is empowering individuals to directly exchange money through their cell phones, bypassing traditional banking institutions. Companies like Square and their headphone-jack card reader let anyone with a smart phone accept credit card payments.

Mobile banking has developed even faster and spread far wider around the world. In Kenya, M-PESA connects over 65% of households to mobile money services. Websites like Kiva.org turn individuals into micro-financiers, allowing them to make $25 loans to anyone in the world.

Community: P2P technology is also facilitating near-free global communication through technology like Voice over IP (VoIP), turning even niche marketplaces into global exchanges.

Start-ups like Speak Shop, a web-based marketplace of Latin America Spanish tutors, allow  anyone, anywhere to brush up on their Español via Skype.

Alternative “mesh” Internet architectures are also emerging as challengers to traditional notions of centralized, institutional control over the web. When the Egyptian government attempted to shut down the country’s Internet last February, Egyptian hackers turned to mesh networking to bypass the blackout.

Business: People aren’t the only ones connecting in new ways. There are new direct company-to-person interactions, whether as simple as announcing deals on Twitter, or as complex as a Spiroxil’s system for detecting counterfeit prescription drugs in the developing world with a cellphone camera.

Companies are connecting with new workforces by crowdsourcing small tasks with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or by partnering with not-for-profits like Samasource to build sustainable internet-based jobs for people in poverty.

Giving: Charities have also benefited. Direct giving through text messages became a major source of international philanthropy – especially disaster relief – following the Haitian earthquake last year. Meanwhile, sites like GlobalGiving connect individual donors to grassroots charity projects with unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability.

A free service called ChildCount+ uses text messaging to coordinate community-based health providers in Africa. Beside providing for the social good of improving the delivery of health care, ChildCount+ means more patients end up coming back for follow-up appointments.

Government: Lower barriers to communication are also allowing individuals to hold governments accountable in ways never before possible. Ushahidi maps have been revolutionary in increasing government transparency. The free and open-source software allows anyone to report location-tagged information, and has been tweaked to track everything from street violence in Kenya to infrastructure damage from the Haitian earthquake. Residents of D.C. even used it to track snow removal during 2010’s “snowmaggedon.”

Perhaps most strikingly, many of these new interactions begin with the ethos of “free” and seek out new ways to monetize innovation outside of traditional cash-for-goods-rendered transactions. For example, Ushahidi software generates revenue by offering set-up and hosting services.

As Chris Anderson noted in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, “free” is “a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology, create new markets, break old ones and make almost any product more attractive.”

Taken together, all these breakthroughs suggest that the truly innovative work in the global economy is increasingly divorced from traditional models of individual ownership and old boundaries of communication. Indeed, new forms of communication are leading the way.

Dowser.org
By Tessa Farnsworth
April 13th, 2011 11:36 AM

In this series social entrepreneurs discuss the importance of sharing their big idea and reaching out to others. From  making business partners out of strangers to saving flooded headquarters, our contacts and future contacts routinely prove integral to every aspect of creating and running a social enterprise.

Speak Shop seeks to create inter-cultural dialog and understanding through language lessons. People use the service to take Spanish lessons with tutors in Guatemala one-on-one by webcam, and the founders hope to expand to other languages and countries.

Their business model makes tutors micro-business owners instead of seasonal teachers and gives the student a cultural and language experience without the overhead costs of travel.

Dowser: What’s something concrete and tangible you’ve learned in the last three months?
Cooper: You need to find at least one other person you can let your guard down with who really gets it. I’m lucky I have that with Clay who is not just a co-founder, but also my husband. But sometimes you need someone outside your organization or family. Most people do not want to hear about your problems, but other social entrepreneurs are usually pretty receptive, and that’s where I go first. I recently heard a venture capitalist say, ‘As an entrepreneur, you need to show your passion. When you ask people which Winnie-the-Pooh character they want to be, no one says Eeyore’ (the gloomy one). He has a point. But entrepreneurship is notoriously up and down, so it’s really important to know who will be there on your Eeyore days.

What is a mistake or mishap you’ve learned from?
One of the biggest mistakes we made early on was waiting to launch for fear of failing. When Speak Shop started out in 2004 we were very hesitant because no one had ever offered or heard of one-on-one Spanish tutoring by webcam, and we did not have the resources to prove that webcam-based tutoring would work. After unsuccessfully trying to get beta testers for several months, we just started marketing Speak Shop using Google Ads. People came. We were really excited, but still worried we might have launched too soon. I remember asking our first customer, Poppy: ‘Do you think you can learn Spanish this way?’ She was probably wondering: Why do you need to ask me, but she said, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ That was one of the best moments. We had a real customer who was excited and happy. I now notice that even huge companies like Twitter and Facebook fail some times. By temporarily suspending the drive for perfection, you can create something that really works and truly helps people. You aren’t an entrepreneur until you’ve made mistakes.

Speak Shop, a leading provider of Spanish lessons online with video chat, is pleased to announce Claritza Morales as the 2010 Tutor of the Year.

Speak Shop Spanish tutors provide one-on-one Spanish lessons to people all over the world using videoconferencing technology. The tutors are certified Spanish instructors who operate their own micro-business through Speak Shop.

Based in Antigua, Guatemala, Claritza has nearly 20 years of Spanish instruction experience and started teaching Spanish online at Speak Shop in 2007. She also teaches students at the local PROBIGUA Spanish Academy. Claritza has taught nearly 3000 hours of Spanish online and consistently receives outstanding feedback ratings from her students who often mention how fun, supportive and truly kind she is.

Spanish tutors in Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, rarely have the opportunity to operate their own businesses and few can afford computers at home. In appreciation of Claritza’s kindness and support during a serious illness, one of her students sent her the money to buy a computer, which not only helped her with her business, but also gave her more time with her five children. This story was chronicled in the Omaha World-Herald http://press.speakshop.com/2009/03/31/friendship-grows-from-online-lessons/ .

Jean Wakefield, one of Claritza’s students, uses Spanish as a nurse and says, “Claritza teaches from the heart, with patience and humor. She encourages me to practice my Spanish with her and at my workplace, and she explains Spanish usage and Guatemalan culture. I have seen such great improvement in my Spanish since working with her. She is such a positive and inspiring teacher, and the hour-long tutoring session just flies by.”

“I am very excited and honored to win Tutor of the Year for 2010,” says Claritza, “I feel very fortunate to be working with Speak Shop because I am able to teach from home which allows me to spend more time with my family. I’m grateful to God, Speak Shop, PROBIGUA and each of my students who give me the opportunity for dignified work.”

Speak Shop CEO Clay Cooper says, “Claritza is not only a great Spanish tutor, she also has the unique ability to put just about anyone at ease – from the young to the young at heart. I was one of those people who would get nervous about making mistakes in Spanish, and I know what a difference it makes when you feel comfortable with your Spanish tutor. Claritza is a wonderful asset to the Speak Shop community.”

About Speak Shop
Speak Shop is a certified B Corp founded in 2004 to increase access to cross-cultural foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in developing countries. People around the world use Speak Shop to learn Spanish online by webcam. For more details visit http://www.speakshop.com.