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Title Voxiva - connecting without a computer
Date 2003-09-30 14:57:30
Technology Review Names Paul Meyer, President & CEO of Voxiva, Inc. as 2003 Humanitarian of the Year
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 25, 2003--Technology Review, MIT\'s award-winning Magazine of Innovation, today announced it has named Paul Meyer, Co-founder, President & CEO of Voxiva, Inc., the recipient of the magazine\'s 2003 Technology in the Service of Humanity Award.
Meyer, 32, founded Voxiva, a voice and data solutions provider dedicated to public health, in 2001 to help isolated communities access computing power through the touch-tone telephone. Because phone usage does not require literacy nor much electricity, Voxiva\'s system benefits regions that are short on both, enabling users to input and retrieve information by tapping phone buttons, listening to messages and speaking responses.
Currently, the system is used in Peru, where health care workers dial in toll-free to a Voxiva server to submit reports about patient symptoms or disease outbreaks. Over 50,000 reports on various threatening diseases have been collected. The U.S. Department of Defense has also contracted Meyer\'s company to track both the spread of disease among Iraqi citizens and the impact of smallpox vaccinations on U.S. soldiers.
Before co-founding Voxiva, Meyer was Founder and Chairman of IPKO, the first and largest Internet service provider in Kosovo. Started in the weeks after the 1999 war, IPKO was hailed by the U.N. Secretary General as \"a model for future humanitarian emergencies,\" and is today one of the largest businesses in Kosovo. Previously, Meyer was a Senior Fellow at the Markle Foundation, where his work focused on the use of technology in humanitarian emergencies and strategies for promoting the spread of Internet-based technologies in the developing world. He has also worked for the International Rescue Committee, where he launched a number of projects using technology to reunify separated refugee children and families in West Africa and the Balkans.
Meyer was chosen from among the 2003 TR100, a group selected from around the world as top young innovators in technology and business. The complete TR100 list appears in the October 2003 issue of Technology Review, available currently at www.technologyreview.com and on newsstands September 30, 2003.
Hailing from 10 countries, the TR100 have been chosen for their contributions in transforming technology in industries such as biotechnology, computing, energy, medicine, manufacturing, nanotechnology, telecommunications and transportation. This year\'s TR100 includes innovators from well-know companies and institutions such as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft as well as lesser known but influential entities such as CombinatoRx, Voxiva, PureTech Ventures and Nanosys.
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