Weather insurance via SMS

And now for a more positive example of Dev 2.0 in action. Giulio Quaggiotto pointed me to a very cool use of technology in the service of private sector development - weather insurance via SMS. According to Eric Seuret of 3S Mobile, SMS technology has sufficiently brought down the cost of providing insurance for farmers in Kenya against droughts to make it a viable business model. (Apologies for the cheesy intro music - you can safely skip over the first 20 seconds.)

Update: For some unknown reason, the video interview with Eric Seuret was taken down. But you can check out plenty of other interesting Dev 2.0-ish videos on Jonathan Mark's vimeo page (the source of the Seuret video).