Green Garage: Mobile Apps for Change April 28, 2010

PariSoma is proud to announce a brand-new series of panel discussions focusing on the intersections of sustainability, social change, and technology. Each of these exciting bi-monthly moderated discussions will focus on a specific type of technology being applied to solve a major social problem, with titles such as "Clean Cars in the Garage", "Smart Grid Web Tech", "Social Media for Sustainability", and much more!

April's GreenGarage event, Mobile Apps for Change, will showcase three companies that are building mobile apps that catalyze massive worldwide change.

This month's panel is moderated by Ryan Brown, former Director of Operations at Mobile Greetings, Inc. and current MBA student in Dominican University's Green MBA program.

Panel speakers are Kaytea Petro, President of Neighborhood Fruit, who will talk about the company's Find Fruit iphone app, Craig Michael Lie Njie, CEO of Kismet Worldwide Consulting and creator of WasteNot, and Eric Dorf, an independent product management consultant, who will speak about VolunteerMatch.com's first mobile app, VolunteerMatch.

About the Panelists...

Kaytea Petro is the co-founder of Neighborhood Fruit, a service that connects people to the fruits, vegetables and nuts growing within their communities through intuitive online maps.  Neighborhood Fruit has also developed a mobile application, Find Fruit, that enables people to find seasonal produce growing on public land near them. The service launched in 2009, and currently has over 10,000 trees and 5,000 users.

Prior to founding Neighborhood Fruit, Kaytea has worked as an educational and strategic design consultant, buyer, and designer in the US and China; she has helped launch start ups in both countries. She has won the Urban:Revisions sustainable design contest two years in a row. Kaytea attended Beijing University, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and holds B.A.’s in Fine Arts and East Asian Studies from UC Santa Cruz. She earned her MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School.



Craig Michael Lie Njie is Founder and CEO of Kismet WorldWide Consulting, LLC, a company which aims to provide products and services that make the world a better place for everyone. The company's latest iPhone application, called WasteNot helps its users

to make the Earth a better, greener place to live, by helping them find and share good ideas that can reduce their waste and their impact on the environment. Then, users can watch to see how big of a difference they and their ideas can really make!

From July 2005 until August 2008 he served as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa. During his in-country training, his Gambian host family honored him with an nginté -- a Gambian naming ceremony -- where e was given the name of his Toma (namesake), Abdoulie Njie. Pretty much everyone in The Gambia calls him Lie (as in "I cannot tell a Lie"), except his students, who all call him Mr. Njie.

Eric Dorf is a Product Manager at VolunteerMatch. VolunteerMatch is a national nonprofit dedicated to strengthening communities by helping good people and good causes to connect. Volunteermatch.org makes it easy to find a way to make a difference by location, expertise, or availability. VolunteerMatch provides many of the nation’s most recognized businesses and organizations with Web-based solutions to facilitate and track volunteer engagement at local and national levels. The VolunteerMatch network regularly welcomes more than 850,000 monthly visitors and has become the preferred volunteer recruiting service for tens of thousands of participating nonprofits.

Official Website: http://www.parisoma.com/2010/04/green-garage-mobile-apps-for-change