In Silicon Valley, innovation is often defined by the latest cool gadget or service: the iPhone for instance, or Facebook’s news feed, the RIM Curve, or Cisco System’s latest muscular router.
Rural villagers in third world countries where daily incomes are counted in cents instead of dollars aren’t quite so fussy. A simple solar-powered lamp that brings light at night is a miracle. A hydro-powered
Frano Violich shows off a solar lamp that coils into a cylinder
turbine that sends electricity to a backwoods shack is a pinnacle of technology.
A gaggle of the valley’s tech leaders honored 25 of these unusually inventors Tuesday at the annual Tech Awards and gave the most inventive of the bunch $50,000 to be ensure their innovations help humanity.
Here are several of the contenders:
*Georg Gruber, CEO of a German company making fuel for tractors (and eventually cars) out of plants, such as canola and sunflowers. Gruber has 20,000 vehicles running on the juice. His company’s name is Vereinigte Werkstatfen fur Pflanzenoltechnolgie.
*Juan Frano Voilich, princpal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture of Boston, makers of a solar powered room lamp that charges in 3.5 hours and runs for 8. Flexible thin-film solar cells are mounted on a rugged piece of plastic tarp with a reflective material to amplify the light.
*Javier Coello Guevara, manager of Practical Action, promotes a hydro system that channels water downhill from a waterfall of river to generate electricity of rural villages. A 1 kilowatts system capable of powering lights and computers in three homes costs $3,000.
Among the companies behind the award are Applied Materials, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Intel, Genetech and Google.
Posted by Mark Boslet 
