Congratulations to mPedigree, entrant in USAID's Development 2.0 Challenge, and 2009 Tech Laureate, as announced by the Tech Awards today! Tech Awards reports that this year's 15 laureates were selected from among 650 nominations representing 66 countries.

Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us.

You can monitor activities, violence, and trends related to the August 20th Afghanistan elections  thanks to a collaborative partnership enabling people on the ground in Afghanistan and others to share their data in real time on an online map.

The Global Development Commons congratulates Pascal Katana, a Fourth Year Student at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya on his two new inventions which will enhance food security and renewable energy usage.

Yesterday Grameen Foundation announced the launch of a suite of mobile phone applications developed with Google and MTN Uganda (MTN) that deliver services and information that were previously unavailable to Uganda’s poor and disadvantaged communities.

Check out the apps here!

Enhancing value chains to provide market based solutions to development challenges is a strategy that has huge potential to unleash business growth in untapped markets.

After trekking to New York City for MobileActive’s last Mobile Technology for Social Change (M4Change) event, I was thrilled to take the metro down to Google’s DC offices for last week’s M4Change barcamp.

Mobile technologies and devices are changing aware that governments do business. m-GovWorld aims to accelerate the development and deployment of new mobile applications to enhance democracy and increase the reach of public services to previously unconnected regional areas.

Sensing is just one way in which mobiles are used in environmental protection. Another promising area is wildlife protection in sensitive areas where humans and animals collide, often to the detriment of protected animals.

The U.S. Government and innovation—for many, the two simply do not go together. By necessity, government agencies must play it safe with taxpayers’ money and speak with one voice. Innovators, on the other hand, take risks, welcome dissent, and embrace the lessons of failure.