News
Seven Questions: Wiring the World’s Poor 
Foreign Policy, March 9, 2007
As head of the United Nations’ Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Intel’s Barrett has been at the center of efforts to bring the Internet to the developing world.
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UN warning to Silicon Valley over digital rift
By Richard Waters, Financial Times, March 2, 2007
Silicon Valley has been slow to develop technology and business approaches specifically suited to customers in the emerging world, according to representatives at a UN-sponsored gathering in the US technology heartland this week.
As a result, it risks missing out on one of the next big potential markets for its products, while also leaving a widening “digital divide” that is seeing the growing ranks of broadband users in the developed world leap even further ahead.
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Ignore Cheaper Phones At Your Peril, Says Motorola
Information Week, February 14, 2007
Consumers in emerging markets may be buying cheap phones with low margins at the moment, but a Motorola executive said Tuesday that phone makers who ignored those markets would miss out on major global trends.
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It’s super-phone! 
By TN Ninan, Financial Times, January 23, 2007
It is simplistic, and often delusional, to seek quick technological fixes for complex social, economic and organisational challenges.
Still, the prospects held out for making life easier for millions because of the rapid spread of mobile phones (150m, at last count) are exciting - especially when you compare that figure with some other numbers. India’s largest bank has about 10,000 branches. The post office network has over 100,000 offices. And the country has some 15m people who own and use credit cards. In short, there is no network of any kind that can count up to 150m, or anything remotely approaching that number.
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One of Four Handsets Shipped in 2011 Will Cost Less Than $20, Says ABI Research
ABI Research, January 22, 2007
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The global market for sub-$20 ultra low cost handsets (UCLH) will be over 330 million units in 2011. A new study from ABI Research finds that over 50% of these handsets will be shipped in the emerging markets of Asia Pacific and the remainder in markets of Africa, Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
According to research analyst Shailendra Pandey, “The growing demand for ultra low cost handsets has provided mobile operators and handset vendors with a quick route to a greater share of the emerging markets. The downside is that they are manufacturing and shipping a greater proportion of low-cost handsets, which can adversely affect their profits.”
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$100 laptop could sell to public
By Darren Waters , BBC News, January 10, 2007
The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project are looking at the possibility of selling the machine to the public. One idea would be for customers to have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world.
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India's Huge Market for Cheap Phones
By Nandini Lakshman, Business Week, January 8, 2007
It's one of the world's hottest mobile phone markets, but Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung must deliver cool handsets at very thin profit margins.
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From Matatu to the Masai via mobile
By Paul Mason , BBC News, January 8, 2007
Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason travels through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide.
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Motorola's gloomy outlook casts shadow on mobile phone market
By Katie Allen, The Guardian, January 6, 2007
The need for lower-cost models for large parts of these markets, along with intensifying competition between manufacturers, has eaten away at margins.
Shaun Collins, an analyst at the telecoms consultants CCS Insight, said competitive intensity was at an all-time high. "This is a marketplace that is making a lot more phones but it's gaining less profit from making a lot more phones," he said. Some of the targeted marketplaces were "ultra-low price", he pointed out, citing Motorola's recent launch of the Motofone handset in India for less than £20.
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Kenya's 'Lord of the Ringtones' carves empire in African cell phone
WBCSD, October 22, 2006
In a warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, the "Lord of the Ringtones" holds sway over a growing cell phone service empire amid an African explosion in mobile technology. With 14 employees and a clever Middle Earth-inspired slogan, Ken Njoroge's two-year-old Cellulant firm has seized on the phenomenal surge in cell phone use and a ballooning desire for people to customize their handsets with distinctive rings.
"Mobile phones are getting more and more sophisticated," says the 31-year-old "lord," as Cellulant employees in oversized headphones, upship song snippets and ditties to customers for 82 cents (65 euro cents) a ringtone. "We've just found an untapped niche," Njoroge told AFP.
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Mobiles 'to help track diseases'
BBC News, October 17, 2006
Mobile phone technology is being developed to help manage the spread of diseases such as HIV and bird flu.
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For India's Traditional Fishermen, Cellphones Deliver a Sea Change
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, October 15, 2006
Babu Rajan pointed off the starboard bow and shouted: "There! There!" In choppy, gray seas four miles from shore near India's tropical southern tip, Rajan spotted the tinselly sparkle of a school of sardines. He ordered his three dozen crewmen to quickly drop their five-ton net overboard.
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Africa closes tech gap with flashy phones
News.com, September 26, 2006
Rickety minibus taxis weave between corrugated iron shacks, dodging street hawkers and the odd scrawny child with trousers gaping at the knee.
Alexandra is one of South Africa's roughest townships, and yet you can switch on your laptop there, slide in a data card and access your e-mail in seconds using the world's most advanced commercial wireless technology. About a decade after mobile phones started to spread across the poorest continent, trailing Europe by several years, wireless technology in major cities is catching up with that in the West.
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Linux v. Microsoft: Third World Showdown
By David Wolf , Yahoo News, September 13, 2006
So, in the brewing battle of Windows vs. Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth's stated belief that "software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local languages and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit."
If you think that's all standard Linux/Open Source talk, you're right. The difference is that instead of trying to convert school systems, governments, and enterprises in the developed world, Ubuntu is attacking Windows in it's soft underbelly - Africa, Asia, Latin America, and those places around the world where the money for a software license is more urgently needed to feed a kid a hot breakfast every day for six months.
>> More Details | created on: 09/15/2006
Negroponte: $100 laptop trials to kick off
By Andrew Donoghue , CNet News, August 22, 2006
Reports that trials of the $100 laptop project will kick off in Thailand alone have been quashed by Nicholas Negroponte.
Negroponte, the chairman of the One Laptop per Child group, said Monday that field trials of its low-cost PC for children in the developing world will start everywhere the laptop is required at roughly the same time.
In an e-mail sent to CNET News.com's sister site ZDNet UK, Negroponte said reports that trials would initially be limited to Thailand were inaccurate. "Visual models and developer board demos" will be sent to Nigeria in September, and to Thailand in October, for field trials, he said.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Entrepreneur has quixotic goal of wiring Rwanda
By Christopher Rhoads, The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2006
MOUNT KARISIMBI, Rwanda -- Greg Wyler, an American tech entrepreneur, dreams of bringing the Internet to this troubled country. There are a few hurdles. One is a battered communications tower atop this 14,787-foot volcanic peak. The air is too thin for helicopters to transport the several tons of equipment needed for repairs. Instead, it has to go by hand.
One recent morning, as mist covered the mountain, a group of 20 Rwandans lugged a 1,300-pound transformer with ropes and pulleys through deep mud. Rains had turned part of the trail into swamp. Mr. Wyler, 36 years old, was checking on their progress. He had recently hired a South African mountain-rescue company to advise on navigating the steeper sections.
"We are pushing the boundaries of technology here," Mr. Wyler said, as the muck oozed up around his knees.
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Thai kids to get low-cost laptops
The Associated Press, August 16, 2006
The ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to poor children around the world is about to take a small step forward. More than 500 children in Thailand are expected to receive the machines in October and November for quality testing and debugging.
The One Laptop Per Child program, which began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and now is a separate nonprofit organization, hopes to deploy 5 million to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina in 2007.
>> More Details | created on: 08/17/2006
A revolution in a laptop
By Greg Norman , Aljazeera.net, August 13, 2006
After an inauspicious birth 25 years ago when Ronnie Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were in their prime, the IBM 5150, retailing at $1,565, ushered in the age of the modern PC.
While software applications and the companies that develop them have become the main drivers in today's information society, the CM1, more commonly known as the $100 laptop, could take over where the venerable 5150 left off - becoming one of the enduring pieces of techno hardware in the next 25 years.
>> More Details | created on: 08/14/2006
New Move to Bridge Digital Divide
WBCSD, August 4, 2006
IPS, 4 August 2006 - The Commonwealth has launched a new initiative to take information technology to underdeveloped countries that need it most.
The initiative 'Commonwealth Connects' aims to bridge the digital divide that leaves large numbers of people in many vulnerable Commonwealth countries cut off from the information flow.
The 'Commonwealth Connects' programme will seek primarily to ensure that "all developing countries have good ICT (information and communication technologies) policies," Devindra Ramnarine, head of the programme told IPS Friday. "It will seek to make sure that these policies are in line with national development goals, and can be implemented."
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ICT Access Centers to be introduced in rural areas
News from Bangladesh, August 3, 2006
The government for the first time is going to introduce ICT Access Centers for the rural people to attach the underprivileged section to the technology-based knowledge society, reports UNB.
The rural ICT Access Centers, to be equipped with modern computers and Internet facilities, will provide ICT-enabled services to the rural people to bring them into the mainstream of development.
“Within next two months, we’ll be able to introduce such knowledge centers,” Science and ICT Minister Dr Moyeen Khan told a workshop here Wednesday.
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India's great leap forward?
By Brian Bremner, Business Week, August 2, 2006
The world second fastest-growing mobile phone market offers challenges for telecoms and implications for Indian society.
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Poverty-stricken Rwanda puts its faith and future into the wide wired world
By Xan Rice, The Guardian, August 1, 2006
Office workers talking over Skype. Fibre-optic cable snaking hundreds of miles underground and to the top of a 4,500-metre volcano. Paperless cabinet meetings with every minister using a laptop. This may sound like an advanced western country rather than a tiny, poor African state. Yet this is Rwanda, now in the midst of an extraordinary development plan to leap into the 21st century.
More "mobile in every pocket" than "chicken in every pot", the Vision 2020 project aims to rapidly transform a depressed agricultural economy into one driven by information communications and technology (ICT). If it works, the percentage of Rwanda's workforce involved in farming will drop from 90% to 50% in 15 years. By then the country should be the regional ICT hub - a kind of Singapore of the Great Lakes.
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PCs for the poor: as good as their hype?
By Waleed al-Shobakky, SciDev.Net, July 31, 2006
Technologists are at odds over how to bridge the digital divide. What one group calls the ultimate solution, another dismisses as "the scam of the century", reports Waleed al-Shobakky.
At the 2005 World Economic Forum in Switzerland a soft-spoken academic made an announcement that sent seismic waves across the computer industry. Nicholas Negroponte, then director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, spoke of making laptops available at US$100 for schoolchildren in developing nations.
The price was not the only big news. Negroponte named companies that had agreed to collaborate on what would become the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
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Nanotech debate 'must involve poor communities'
By Tawanda Majoni, SciDev.Net, July 24, 2006
[HARARE] Poor communities must be involved in debates about whether nanotechnologies can contribute to social and economic development, said delegates at a series of meetings in Zimbabwe this month.
The last of the three 'nano-dialogues' — attended by Zimbabwean scientists and representatives of local communities — took place on 22 July in Harare.
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India’s farmers switch faith to mobile phones
By Ashling O’Connor, The Times online, July 24, 2006
FOR centuries, Indian farmers have relied on ancient rituals, the study of wind direction and local gossip to ascertain the annual onset of the unpredictable monsoon rains. Deciding when to sow their crops and when to take their produce to market is based on experience and instinct.
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Going Mobile in India
By Nandini Lakshman, Business Week, July 24, 2006
Service providers and handset manufacturers look forward to explosive growth as India skips the copper wire and heads straight for wireless networks.
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Namibia: Cellphones Can Reverse Poverty
By Prof. Monish Gunawardana, allAfrica, July 14, 2006
Recently, Warren Buffet, the world's second richest businessperson, adding US$31 billion to Bill Gate's Foundation, did not forget to say: "A market system has not worked in terms of poor people." It is true. The third world nations are struggling in a highly volatile global market system that was promoted by the first world. It focuses on profits but not the welfare of the poor. As China and India did it, let us use this system for our benefit. Let us arm our people with the best technological tools to reverse the poverty and retain the global competitiveness. Today, our topic is "cellphone", which is a status symbol for the rich, but an anti-poverty weapon for the poor.
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UN and Microsoft for small business in Africa
Bloomberg, July 12, 2006
Cape Town and Seattle - Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, and the UN are forming a partnership to supply information technology (IT) and other support to small businesses in Africa.
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Motorola May See Gains In Emerging Markets
By R.M. Schneiderman, Forbes, July 11, 2006
Motorola, the number two manufacturer of wireless headsets, could see market share gains in both developed and emerging markets in the second quarter, according to a Monday report by Morgan Stanley.
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Rwanda: Rural Areas to Access Solar Energy
By Grace Mugabe, allAfrica.com, July 10, 2006
The president of Solar Energy Africa, John Ssemanda, has said that the organization has an ambitious project of accessing solar energy to rural areas to boost economic development.
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In War-Torn Congo, Going Wireless to Reach Home
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, July 9, 2006
KINSHASA, Congo -- Until not long ago, if Zadhe Iyombe wanted to talk to his mother, he had to make the eight-day boat trip up the Congo River to the jungle town where he was raised. In a country with almost no roads, mail or telephone system and a grisly guerrilla war raging, making that exhausting and dangerous trip was about the only way he could find out if his 59-year-old mother was still alive.
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Uganda: USAID Pushes for Rural Mobile Banks
By D. Livingstone Ssempijja, allAfrica.com, June 28, 2006
BANKING institutions have been urged to start rural mobile banking services to attract more people into the banking industry and help the country instil a savings culture; much lacking in Uganda.
The service that involves making banking transactions through a combination of banking technologies such as Point of Sales Services, Automated Teller Machines, Mini-ATMs (Movable ATMs) and mobile phones does not necessarily require bankers to visit banks.
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Wireless: From zero to 3G: A cellphone utopia?
By Eric Sylvers, International Herald Tribune, June 26, 2006
Executives in the cellphone and computer industries are fond of speaking about bridging the digital divide, the gap between people with access to technology and those without. But translating the talk into action is not easy. In addition, the benefits of high-tech gadgetry for the poor often are not evident
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The Village Phone Comes to Rwanda
By Geoffrey Kamali, allAfrica.com, June 26, 2006
The Grameen Foundation of USA, in collaboration with MTN Rwanda, is re-energising its Village Phone scheme to bring mobile telephony to rural communities where no telecom services have existed before.
After resounding success in Bangladesh and recently in Uganda, the scheme was last week launched in Gashora, Bugesera in Rwanda on a pilot basis.
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MTN takes internet to poor
INet-Bridge, June 21, 2006
An initiative to provide convenient internet connectivity as well as access to a wealth of education information via a bespoke online portal to some of the country's poorest communities was launched on Wednesday by mobile services operator MTN.
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Globe Talk: Mobile banking as aid tool
By Shihoko Goto, Middle East Times, June 19, 2006
Mobile phones are becoming commonplace enough in some of the remotest parts of the world, much to the delight of both private companies and public policymakers. For phone manufacturers and service providers, some of the globe's poorest people have turned out to be one of their most profitable demographic groups, while for international development agencies, the proliferation of mobile handsets is one key means to bridge the ever-increasing technological divide between rich and poor.
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PCs for Third World, by design
Electronic Engineering Times, June 16, 2006
Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) are taking their fierce rivalry to the Third World. At stake is an untapped emerging market of 3.8 billion people, whose purchasing power, according to World Bank figures, is less than $4,000 per household.
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New Mobile Phone Program to Bring Economic Lifeline to Rural Rwanda
CSRWire, June 14, 2006
Washington, DC, June 14, 2006 – With the nearest telephone sometimes six miles away, a mobile phone is more than just a means of communication for rural communities in Rwanda; it is an economic lifeline. To help spur greater telecommunications access for villagers, Grameen Foundation, a global non-profit organization that combines microfinance with new technologies to empower the world’s poorest people, and mobile network operator, MTN Rwanda, are launching an innovative new venture: Village Phone Rwanda. Through its signature product, Tel’imbere, Village Phone Rwanda will provide affordable telephone access in places where there is no access to public communications and where power supplies are either unreliable or nonexistent.
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Ghana: Mobile Phone Prospects Attract More Investments to Ghana
By Amos Safo, allAfrica.com, June 12, 2006
After two previous attempts to set up mobile phone business in Ghana, MTN, Africa's biggest telecommunications provider has finally entered the Ghanaian market through a merger with Investcom, the parent company of Scancom Ghana Ltd. owners of Areeba, Ghana's biggest mobile phone provider.
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South Africa: Conference to Explore Potential of Research, Technology in Poverty Alleviation
By Thapelo Sakoana, allAfrica.com, June 5, 2006
More than 200 delegates will converge in Johannesburg next week, to explore how research and technology can be used to stimulate economic growth and alleviate poverty in rural communities.
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Microsoft Testing Pay-as-You-Go PC System in Brazil
By Mary Jo Foley, Fox News, May 22, 2006
Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled a new financing program designed to make PCs more affordable to emerging-market customers on May 22, the day before the kick-off of its annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle.
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Official: Africans pay $1,800 for 1GB of data
CNN.com, May 19, 2006
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- African Internet users pay on average 90 times what Americans pay, crippling efforts by the world's poorest continent to become competitive, a senior Kenyan official said.
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How the mobile phone has given hope to a new generation of African people
By Diane Coyle , The Independent, May 18, 2006
The spread of mobile phones in Africa has been dramatic and is having dramatic effects, social and economic. The continent has seen the world's fastest growth in numbers of mobile subscribers since the late 1990s. Although it still lags other regions, an average of nine people out of 100 have a mobile subscription, up from close to zero less than a decade ago. In some countries this "penetration rate" is much higher: latest industry figures show it at 62 per cent in South Africa and 38 per cent in Botswana.
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Nokia rates South Africa high
Mobile Africa, May 16, 2006
Africa has one of the most highly developed mobile workforces in the world, even in the poorer and least developed countries on the continent, says Eric Anderbjork, Nokia enterprise solutions head for Middle East and Africa.
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