with:public tag:haiti

What are the philanthropic use cases for Wave?

Lars Rasmussen: What really impressed me there was with the Haiti Earthquake. There was a lot of people that used Wave to coordinate the work they were doing for the relief in Haiti. I think they liked the real-time aspect of it; getting stuff together really fast, like information. They used public Waves for this, if you search for with:public tag:haiti, you’ll see some of those Waves are still around.

What is the coolest thing you’ve seen done with Wave?

Lars Rasmussen: What really impresses me most right now is when people use the raw form of Wave; finding a way to  use  it that  makes them more productive.  Just the other day I read this great blog post, I think we linked to it as well, a teacher of fifth graders adopted Wave. She actually had an account six months ago, and not really found it not ready. A friend of her told her, “Hey come back, try it out. It’s a lot better now”, and she tried it out and she had her kids get on Wave. And these fifth graders did research in Wave together. I thought it was awesome to hear the teacher tell the story of how she could watch the students do their work together, so she divided them into groups, and the teacher could just jump right in and help them out with their homework. I thought that was awesome.

There’s a lot of evidence in people using it for education, both in Universities and in High Schools, and even secondary schools. That’s pretty likely where we see a lot of early uptake because there are natural groups of collaborators there, it’s an environment where people tend to be more familiar with technology. And we’re really excited to see what comes out of Wave in education.

Also, there are a lot of digital learning management systems that can really benefit from integration with Wave.

What inspired you to create Wave?

Lars Rasmussen: It was actually my brother’s idea. It was this observation that email is this thing that we all use for our work, but its a 40 year old technology. It’s based essentially on mimicking snail-mail. We think that with all of the development of computers, the Internet, there’s so much power there, that we could do something better. Wave is what we came up with.