Julius Akinyemi: MIT Resident Entrepreneur

If you've been reading my blog, you can see I have trouble coming up with good headlines.

I don't like the aspect of the Google Age that has eliminated creative headline writing by demanding a focus on keywords. So my cutesy skills have atrophied, and I usually just try to pinpoint people with something straightforward.

But I had real trouble with writing the headline for Julius Akinyemi. He has such a breadth of experience that I couldn't decide how to pinpoint him. He's been an exec at PepsiCo and Wells Fargo. He's done work with the UN. He's done work throughout the world. Then I realized that you can't pinpoint him. So I went with his current position at MIT and left it at that.

The real story is what Julius is doing right now at the MIT Media Lab. He aims to bring true empowerment--not the feel-good kind we have in the US, but the real kind that lifts people out of poverty--to millions of people throughout the world, particularly in Africa.

His idea is to create an eRegistry of everything from names of people to lists of the land and the cows they own, and create markets for them that are easily accessible, fair, and efficient. It's hard to explain in 100 words or fewer, so here's the full article/interview, just posted on the NOW Mag syndication site:

http://readnowmag.ulitzer.com/node/1125661