Tech Tuesday: Energy You Can Count On on & Defending Your Good Name

This week our Tech Pioneers are both tackling issues of reliability- but in two very different contexts. Quintas is tackling energy reliability in Nigeria, where access to a steady source of electiricy in hospitals can mean the difference between life and death. Reputation Defender is tackling reputation management on the web, where a bad review can result in lost revenues.

 

Tech Tuesday is an on-going series profiling the Forum’s Technology Pioneers. The Tech Pioneers are companies that have been recognized by the Forum for ground-breaking and innovative approaches in tackling some of the world’s most wicked problems. Each week leading up to the Annual Meeting in Davos, we will be showcasing some of the 2011 Tech Pioneers. You can learn more about the Technology Pioneer Program on the Forum's website.

 

1.    Energy and Environment:  Energy You can Count On

The Wicked Problem:

The normal electricity volt operating in Nigeria is 220 volts but because of low power generation (less than 3,000 Mw to serve a population of 140 million) there is an overload of the power supply and a fluctuation in voltage that can vary from below 50% to over 100%, resulting in blackouts and brownouts that impair hospitals and businesses and harm electronic products.

 

The Tech Pioneer: Quintas Renewable Energy Solutions Ltd.

 
Location:  Akure, Nigeria
Number of employees: 34
Year Founded: 2009
Origins: Entrepreneurial Start-Up

 

The Wicked Solution: 

Founded by a physician dismayed at the loss of life when power outages occur during childbirth and surgical operations, Quintas develops inverters specially designed to meet the challenges that poor and erratic power generation and distribution pose to people in Nigeria whose businesses and daily activities require continuous power supply.

Quintas makes a range of inverters now in use by local teaching hospitals, medical clinics and residential homes that come with battery overcharge and over-discharge protection, brownout and cut-out detection and manually operated turbo charge to allow battery charging when voltage dips far below 220 volts.

The inverters work on a variety of power sources, including solar panels, wind turbines or batteries. Quintas is also aiming to use technology to exploit Nigeria’s natural resources to increase its power supply. It is planning projects to develop locally wind turbines, efficiently harness solar energy, dam brooks for mini water turbine power generation, harness natural gas resources to make gas turbines and produce biogas from the country’s human and animal waste.

 

 

2.    Information Technologies and New Media: Defending Your Good Name

The Wicked Problem: 

Online slander can cause personal devastation, but search results can also sway public opinion and purchasing decisions disproportionately for businesses. With 25% of search
results for the world's top 20 largest brands being linked to user-generated content, corporations are looking for  solutions to regain control of corporate brands. Small businesses are also heavily impacted: doctors and lawyers, for example, regularly report that they lose as much as 70% of their business after being defamed on the Web.

 

The Tech Pioneer: Reputation Defender

Location: Redwood City, CA, USA
Number of employees: 90
Year Founded: 2006
Origins: Entrepreneurial start-up 

The Wicked Solution:

ReputationDefender specializes in helping consumers and business shape how they are seen online. It sells different security products on a monthly subscription basis, allowing consumers and businesses to monitor information about themselves across the Web, bury undesirable information and promote vetted content to the top of research results.

The company specializes in both safeguarding privacy and reputation. Its “My Privacy” product allows consumers to find and remove their personal information, such as name, address, phone number, credit score and transaction history from data aggregation sites.  The company’s technology is based on innovations in the fields of recursive search, semantic and sentiment analysis, language-agnostic processing and data schemas for global flows of personally identifiable information.

ReputationDefender puts the power back in the hands of consumers and businesses, offering computational tools to protect against and repair the rapidly proliferating new varieties of online attacks.

Know an innovative start-up that’s solving a wicked problem? Nominate them.