Abundance Report: Video Conference from the Jungle
Last weekend I experienced an amazing example of abundance. My friend in Thailand called me. She and her friends took a drive two hours out of Bangkok to a nature preserve. When she was there she used her GSM cell phone to connect her laptop to the Internet and show me live video of the waterfall she was visiting.
The examples and levels of abundance are staggering.
First consider who she is. She is a young missionary from the Philippines teaching English in Bangkok. Her monthly salary is 750 USD. She is the youngest of 6 children of a disabled fisherman. She sends money home to support her parents, helps her other siblings with loans plus tithes 10% to her church. That doesn’t leave a lot of disposable income. So keep that in mind.
This call was not for business, it was just for fun. This is one of the characteristics of Abundance. When things are so cheap you don’t pay attention to the price. Except for the GSM connection to the Internet, the call was free.
She has a laptop with a webcam. So do a billion other people. Just 15 years ago the idea of a laptop was an outrageous luxury item. Now a computer with more processing power than everything that ran WWII is casually taken to a park. And this laptop wasn’t provided by her work. It was a present.
Nearly everyone on the planet has access to the Internet. Most of it high speed and capable of video. Cafes, restaurants, and cheap hotels give access away for free. Some of the poorest people in the world have such cheap and easily available Internet service they can spend hours sending Nigerian SPAM email.
She had a GSM phone to access the Internet in the middle of the countryside. She wasn’t in a big city. She was out in the jungle looking at a waterfall. The GSM phone is three examples of abundance. She could afford to have the equipment. The service was there. It was cheap enough that she didn’t care about the cost. Just 20 years ago making any phone call between Thailand and the USA would require scheduling overseas operators to make connections and it would be so expensive only governments or large corporations would do it. Today a young lady on a day trip calls a friend half way around the world and thinks nothing of doing it.
She used Skype to do the video conference. The software and the service were totally free. Once she was online everything was free.
The fact we even met to become friends is another example of abundance. Global communication is free and easy. Two people out of 6.5 billion on the opposite sides of the world with no people in common were able to meet based on shared interests and values. It wasn’t long ago that was nearly impossible. Now today its common place.
Abundance is the design of the universe and we are seeing the accelerating effects every day.
3D Printer Brings Vision to the Poor
The same week that I found all the articles on 3D printers I found an amazing example that could dramatically improve life for billions of people in developing countries who cannot access, nor afford, prescription glasses.
Last weekend I went to get a new optical prescription so I could buy new contacts. The technician used fully automatic devices to check me for glaucoma and calculated my prescription. I had experienced the glaucoma device but the prescription device was new to me. I instantly knew how it worked just from seeing it. The machine reflects a pattern off your eye then adjusts lenses in the device until the reflected pattern matches the original. Incredibly, quick easy and cheap!
My mind raced through all the potential innovations stemming from this device. I came up with a long list which I’ll get to in a moment. What I am more excited about is an extremely innovative application of this same technique. In 2002 a student at MIT used a similar technique as part of a system to make glasses for the poor. This was exactly what I had thought of. This innovation went from an idea in 2002 to commercial usable device in 2006. That is amazing.
One of the reasons the idea was developed in such a short time was the use of a 3D printer to create a prototype. But probably even more important was it solved a previously impossible problem and opened up a gigantic market. There are 1 billion people who need inexpensive glasses. 
There are two obstacles to providing eye glasses to people in developing countries. Read more
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