there's plenty of room at the bottom - innovating for the other 90%
tichard fewnman's 1959 lecture to the american physical society - www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
how do you make ict (information and communication technology) relevant to the developing world.
there are great opportunities for countries to leapfrog technology - a good example is that some countries completely skipping the landline infrastructure and going straight to cellular. This means that some countries that are really without at the moment will end up having much more interesting infrastructure than developed countries.
So why has cellular telephony been so successful -
it met local needs - the abillity to communicate has had profound economic and personal implications for people in developing nations.
innovative business models - pay as you go etc. receive only service.
www.grameenphone.com - gsm provider to rural bandglasdesh, operates on mcirocredit model. profitable, sustainable, growing wildly.
the business model - someone takes out a loan, buys a phone which they then lend out the phone for a small fee. the upfront is $250 and they then gross $700 a year...this vaults these "phone women" into the middle class.
they took the r&d that the developed world had undertaken, but flipped the business model to fit the local need.
some examples out there...nsp/isp in ghana, voxiva building cellular feedback tools for gathering info about disease spread over the phone.
www.simputer.org
IML - supports multilanguage, voice markup
technology needs to be repurposed to suit local needs and context.
diaspora - brain drain - can be a good thing if you can build in the mechanism to get the experience, capital and education to eventually return. This is a slow process. To bridge the gap you need to put geeks on planes...
www.unites.org
www.techcorps.org
www.thinkcycle.org
www.geekcorps.org