The Tech For Good Podcast

One in four people worldwide suffer from allergies - and many don’t even know what’s causing them. In this episode of the Tech For Good podcast, Romily Broad speaks with Santosh Nair, President of ImmunoDiagnostics at Thermo Fisher Scientific, about the cutting-edge science behind allergy testing. From life-changing IgE diagnostics to a secret allergen-harvesting farm in Sweden, this conversation reveals how early, accurate testing can transform lives and reduce the massive economic burden of allergies.

Learn how Thermo Fisher’s 50-year legacy is helping millions get answers — and why now is the time to get tested.

Visit: allergyinsider.com

More info: techforgood.net

The ICONIC project, which stands for 'Intergenerational Codesign of Novel Technologies in Coastal Communities' -aimed to combat digital exclusion by developing novel new technology applications with disadvantaged communities, rather than for them.

An example of purposeful research in action, ICONIC began in 2022 and has just concluded with the creation of four unique prototype technologies developed hand-in-hand with the communities intended to use them.

In this episode of the Tech For Good podcast, host Romily Broad is joined by three research fellows from the Centre for Health Technology (CHT) at the University of Plymouth: Dr Rory Baxter, Oksana Hagen, and Dr Marius Varga. They describe an initiative built on years of research into the intersection of technology and public health. Their focus was on the community in its own area, rural southwest England - a perfect testbed as a region with high digital exclusion due to its rural geography and generally older, less affluent population.

The project engaged local users in developing four technologies: a VR experience of local heritage site Cotehele Hall, underwater telepresence for marine education, a conservation-focused social game, and an AI voice assistant for accessing local services. Researchers facilitated codesign workshops over the course of months, where participants shaped the development process, overcoming ther own technological hesitations while producing innovations with a much broader potential impact.

ICONIC’s results demonstrate that both its process and its outcomes offer rich benefits. Engaging excluded communities in technology development fosters digital literacy amongst participants, and simultaneously produces meaningful solutions tailored to local needs.

Now, the team is seeking new partners and funding to further develop the prototypes and expand their impact.

Find out more and get in touch: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-health-technology/iconic

Read more: https://www.techforgood.net/

In 2021, serial tech entrepreneur Nikita Kuzmin decided it was time to give something back to the world that had given him so much.

His idea was a simple one: Build a charitable organisation and app that could connect an individual in genuine need of urgent help with someone elsewhere in the world willing to donate to provide it.

The obvious first target was in healthcare. Around the world, millions of people - especially children - go without simple treatments for serious but easily curable conditions for want relatively small amounts of money to pay for them.

What if an app existed where a patient's doctors could easily connect with someone in the world willing to pay for a course of antibiotics, anti-malarial drugs, or a simple procedure? Someone with the means and the will to pay the small amount to save a life?

As Nikita says in this episode of the Tech For Good podcast: "In this world, there should not be people who die because they don't have $300 in their pocket."

But what seemed like a simple idea soon became a Herculean effort to establish both trust and the banking facilities to enable it to take shape.

Four years later, with bases now established in the USA and Estonia and now operating in multiple counties in Africa and Asia, Helpster is on the verge of realising its promise. More than 700 children's lives have already been saved, and the goal is exponential.

"We are doing it all. Nobody is going to stop us."

Visit the Helpster website.

Get the Helpster app: IOS, Android

Visit TechForGood.net

Emigrating from Ukraine to Chicago as a boy in the early 1990s, Vadim Vladmirskiy found his calling plugging in dial-up modems under the desks of his family and neighbours. Thirty years later he is the founder and CEO of Nerdio, which serves thousands of companies across 50 countries helping to manage and cut costs on their Microsoft deployments in the cloud.

Vadim's journey from high-school side-hussler to multinational tech leader has seen him build and grow a number of successful ventures along the way. He says the secret to success has been 'naively' failing to set limits on his own expectations - something he'd recommend for all budding entrepreneurs.

Nerdio started as an internal project at a Managed Service Provider (MSP) Vadim helped set up and run in his native Chicago. It was a tool to help the company manage client needs in delivering desktop virtualisation from their own private cloud. Soon enough, however, other MSPs learned of their innovation and asked to license it themselves.

A move away from their private cloud to Microsoft Azure allowed Nerdio to offer its services to other MSPs without competive tensions, and that's when things really took off.

Then, in 2019, Microsoft released Azure Virtual Desktop and Nerdio chose to rapidly expand its feature set. It was just in time. A few months later, COVID-19 lockdowns began and seemingly half the world surged into Nerdio's inbox looking for solutions for suddenly dispersed workforces.

In this episode of the NODE podcast, Vadim takes us back to his roots and explains how his mission to 'destress IT pros' has helped Nerdio seize its opportunities and expand both its offering and its workforce at pace.

Estimates have it that one in five of us is somewhere on the autism spectrum, and that number is increasing. Up to 50% of Gen-Z people entering the workforce now say they are either neurodivergent themselves, or put a huge amount of value on working in a place that is neuroinclusive.

auticon is a company founded in Germany more than a decade ago by Dirk Müller-Remus, who recognised the challenges his own autistic son was to face securing gainful employment, despite his capabilities. The company, 80% staffed by people on the autism spectrum, now operates in around 15 countries and works to place neurodivergent talent in tech roles at some of the world's most significant companies.

While mentoring those people, the company also delivers a suite of advisory services to their employers to help them build truly neuroinclusive workplaces. The result is organisations that function better for all, and ones with much improved staff retention.

This year, auticon launched a new non-profit called the auticon Training Institute - a place those on the autism spectrum can go to obtain free training, mentorship, and internships as they pursue careers in the technology industry.

Today's episode of the Tech For Good podcast welcomes Vance Checketts, CEO of auticon US, who opens our eyes to the scale of the underemployment problem amongst the neurodiverse, as well as the vast opportunity for employers to help both them and themselves by embracing neuroinclusivity.

Read more thoughts from Vance at TechForGood.net.

In this episode of the Tech for Good podcast, we dive into the transformative world of education technology with Felix Oswald, the founder of GoStudent. Join us as we explore how the pandemic has reshaped the landscape of learning, making online education more accessible and effective than ever before.

Felix shares insights into GoStudent, the largest tutoring marketplace connecting students aged 6 to 18 with qualified teachers for personalized online lessons. We discuss the impact of AI on education, including how it can enhance the learning experience, reduce costs, and improve the quality of teaching.

Read more insights from Felix here.

Topics

Whether you're a parent, educator, or simply interested in the future of learning, this episode offers valuable perspectives on the intersection of technology and education.

Enterprise software giant SAP is working on a way to help its corporate clients embed sustainability accounting into the hearts of their businesses. The key is the Sustainability Data Exchange (SDX) - a tool that aims to provide visibility on emissions right across an organisation's value chain.

A partner in the project as been telco giant BT.

In this episode, Tech For Good is joined by SAP's Stephen

In 2019, Canon Medical Systems, one of the world's most important makers of medical diagnostic systems, decided to bring its technology to the people. A pandemic-era project resulted in not just a community-level medical diagnostics facility for the people of Sheffield, UK, but a home for the city's fast-growing population of professional basketball fans, too.

Tech For Good checks in with Canon Medical Systems Managing Director Mark Hitchman to find out how its innovative project is shaping up since it was completed in late 2023.

What does it take to incubate a cutting-edge technology startup within a company as large and established as De Beers?

The public sector is often built on old technology procured through even older processes. Even when the technology is new, the glacial pace of bureaucracy can make it old by the time it arrives. Andrea Danes, global human services leader at EY, discusses how we might break the paradigm and unburden the public sector's "innovative instigators" to deliver cutting-edge technology faster and deliver better public services for all.