Nokia Ideas Project: Student Entrepreneurs See the Future of Communications

May 10th, 2010 | Insights

Nokia’s Ideas Projects finds out What It Means to be a Student Leader in the Age of Social Media:

College students are, by nature and context, ideally suited to the role of spoilers in society. So when IdeasProject invited a group of students from the University of California, Berkeley, to interview the big "influencers" among their peers, we expected to have our assumptions challenged in ways beyond those posed by our slightly older Experts. As beta-testers and early-adopters of social media from a tender age, they not only take for granted many of the “break-throughs” we rhapsodize about, but offer an impressive range of big ideas for how these technologies can be used to address the numerous challenges we face as a planet.

Most run their own organizations and are used to doing the hiring rather than waiting to be hired. They weigh the usefulness of traditional communications tools like letter-writing and resumes against the kinds of social media (text, email, microblogging) they’ve grown up with, and envision a time when tools for sharing video, location and real-time information will be deployed more fluidly across platforms and devices. When they encounter an application, a platform, or some aspect of the world they’re not satisfied with, they think of a way to make it better and then, as the ad says, just do it.

Check out some great videos of the students talking passionately about their projects. Here’s one such video

Nikhil Arora. In his final semester at school, Nikhil found through a class research project that there was one kind of retail business that was creating a huge amount of waste in urban areas: Coffee houses. Nikhil resolved to change that – and a business was born. His company, BTTR Ventures, collects tons of coffee grounds and uses them as fertilizer to grow mushrooms, which he then sells at farmers’ markets around the country. He uses social media including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to connect to communities in urban areas and plans to deploy geo-location “to track salespeople in farmers’ markets…with give-aways and contests.”

Nikhil says that “…being able to translate the virtual world into the real world and start making them interact a lot more easily” will lead to a “next wave” of fun tools that can be used simultaneously by individuals as well as companies.