Student Entrepreneurs See the Future of Communications

Take, for example, Nikhil Arora. In his final semester at school, Nikhil found through a class research project that there was one kind of retail business that was creating a huge amount of waste in urban areas: Coffee houses. Nikhil resolved to change that – and a business was born. His company, BTTR Ventures, collects tons of coffee grounds and uses them as fertilizer to grow mushrooms, which he then sells at farmers’ markets around the country. He uses social media including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to connect to communities in urban areas and plans to deploy geo-location “to track salespeople in farmers’ markets…with give-aways and contests.”

Najm Haque works in a cancer lab, a data-intensive arena that requires exhaustive research in narrow areas. He often feels constrained by the absence of a central databank that would enable him to benefit from the most current developments in his specialization and share his own findings. “It would be nice to have just one central repository,” he says, “where everything is just indexed altogether.”

Sophomore Jessica Mah, who launched her first Internet company at age 13 and has a blog following of over 100,000, is constantly finding better ways to communicate. In spite of her own success, she cautions peers who see blogging as a “magic fortune that will help them do everything that they want to do.” Mah sees tremendous potential in a collaboration process, which she calls “online thought-sharing,” an open information-sharing environment where people show “…their thoughts to the world.”

Martin Edelman, a UK born product manager with a bit more post-collegiate experience behind him, believes video, as a means for face-to-face contact, will facilitate the next advancements in communications technology. As an expat, living abroad, the technology “would help to connect me more to the people that aren’t close by, more so than it would if I could just make a phone call or write an email.”

Graduate student Will Smelko says bigger platforms are the way to encompass all the services and applications he likes to engage in. Even though we can access big libraries of music, video and games, he maintains, we do so through the tiny screen of a mobile device. Similar to the mobile device envisioned by Najm Haque that docks to a station, “you can plug it in and access all these other platforms,” says Smelko, taking it a step further, “to see the same information to work off your computer on your phone.”

Abhishek Gupta is putting his expertise as a Computer Science major and Global Poverty minor, to use as president and co-founder of Project RISHI, a non-profit organization devoted to developing rural India villages through the development of medical clinics, water purification systems, and modern sewer systems. His experience has taught him that mobile devices are not only getting smarter, they can be transformative in rural societies. “Connectivity is like productivity,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about traveling somewhere you can just call someone, and your productivity rises.”

Hassan Khan, who serves as student advocate at UC Berkeley, envisions his future in the field of solar technology, and shares with his peers the belief that a single device will encompass a “full range of applications.” Khan acknowledges a trend many have noted about his generation: “More and more people are more comfortable with having their social life take place on the Internet and not necessarily in person,” he admits, while still extolling the benefits. “Applications like Foursquare and geo-tagging” will enable friends to connect, which in turn will enable more in-person encounters.

Finally, student Sean Wycliffe, like his peers, isn’t just talking about future technology: He’s helping to create it. Sean has launched a company that’s working with Internet giant Cisco to interconnect video sources over wireless networks – without needing a computer. He’s integrating the service with devices from Apple and Research In Motion’s Blackberry. “I really see that could be the next big thing.”