A Marketplace for Peer-to-Peer Charity
 After Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Berkeley Engineering graduate students Ephrat Bitton and Anand Kulkarni watched with the rest of the world as logistical snafus, bureaucratic red tape and communication breakdowns prevented charitable aid from quickly reaching the storm’s victims. There was a disconnect between those who had something to offer and those who needed it. Since then, the two students have spent their free time developing a Web application to help ensure that such a disconnect would never happen again. Their system automatically pairs donors with those in need, creating a "marketplace of charity" while putting a human face on the process of giving.
COOL ALUMNI: Eric Allman
The Man Who Made E-mail Go
Eric Allman (B.S.’77 EECS, M.S.’80 CS) was a student at Berkeley when he developed sendmail, the invisible program that moves your e-mail to someone else’s inbox when you hit “send.” The product, still marketed and supported by Allman’s Emeryville-based Sendmail, Inc., is now responsible for delivering 70 percent of e-mail traffic worldwide.
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New Spin-Off
 Nano-scale polymer fibers—the thinner, the better—can potentially enable the manufacture of more effective chemical sensors, biochips, protective clothing and other innovations. But electrospinning, the standard technique for producing these fibers, produces a chaotic tangle rather than controllable patterns. A variant of the technique, near-field electrospinning, offers full control over the path of deposited nanofibers, allowing them to realize their engineering potential. "It could open the field up, taking it in completely different directions," says the technique's pioneer, Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin.
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