Intel has announced a partnership with the Grameen Trust, the organization that offers micro-credit loans in developing countries. The Grameen Trust founder Muhammad Yunis and his organization were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their groundbreaking work with micro-credit in Bangladesh.

I should mention that Grameen Bank is not all unicorns and rainbows, Bangladeshis have complained of the bank’s rough collection practices.

Intel wants to make use of Grameen’s social business model, micro-credit and in-roads into communities to reach the developing world with information technology. Already many Grameen Bank patrons use their loans to invest in information technology.

This does not look like charity on Intel’s part, they are putting venture capital into the new joint-venture, but hopefully the move will help spur economic development in poverty-stricken countries.

Video of Intel’s announcement, promo video from Yunis after the bump.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body charged with managing the standard file formats and protocols that make the web work, has formed a group to look into connecting people with mobile phones. The Mobile Web for Social Development interest group (or MW4D, they really like acronyms) will be looking in how to better utilize mobile phone networks to provide services to rural and under-privileged communities in developing countries.

Mobile phones are increasingly touted as the key to issues from how to provide content to people to how to get rural communities online. Wireless cell networks are cheaper and easier to setup and phones have become inexpensive. The MW4D will bring together industry leaders in mobile technology and hopefully come up with some good ideas on how to make use of these networks.

Although the mobile device is hailed as by content producers looking for the next revolution, it has a way to go before it can be use for more than the simple communications it’s designed for.

I have a Windows smart phone right now, and it was the top-of-the-line when I bought it from AT&T last summer. Let me tell you, I really don’t like using for anything other than making calls, sending texts and sending emails. The screen is too small, the software is not well designed and the Internet connection is slow in most places. In the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to use an iPhone and I have been impressed by how it seems to finally fix most of the problems with using a mobile phone to access Internet services. Most mobile web pages are added as an afterthought, but the iPhone gets around this by doing a great job of displaying full size web pages.

It’s good to see W3C paying attention to the problem of using Internet services on mobile phones. We shouldn’t all have to buy iPhones to be able to make use of services on the web, mobile device designers and content creators need to focus on the big opportunity on the small screen.

via Businesswire and Cellular News

There are many ways you can share your Internet connection to neighbors over WiFi. Disable security on your wireless network, or check out one of these organizations: Open-Mesh, Meraki or FON.

One of my favorite open source projects is DD-WRT. It is a software package that can be installed on many off-the-shelf wireless routers that you can find at Best Buy and the like. It turns your $50 router into a $500 one. I’ve run this software on my home wireless router for about a year now and I’ve always wanted to figure out how to share my Internet connection without allowing people full access to my network and all the computers on it. I found a great article about this.

The steps on how to set this up is in the last half of the video. The copy and paste settings that I reference in the video are after the jump.

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A report was released this week by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania about the state broadband access in Pennsylvania’s less populated areas. With data collected in 2005 and 2006, the project looks at how healthcare, local government, education and business in rural Pennsylvania are using high-speed Internet.

Some quotes from the report about local governments with websites:

Among the counties analyzed, Internet use for transactional purposes varied considerably. It appears, for example, that being close to an urban county makes a difference in the quality of Internet interaction possible in counties.

And if if you didn’t see that coming, here is another quote:

In analyzing the quality of e-government services among municipal governments (including boroughs, townships and cities), the most striking finding was how little local governments in rural Pennsylvania use the Internet at all, as measured by the availability of a website. The exception, a county with a strong tourism economy, had a high-level Internet presence.

The report says that the Internet was most noted for it’s “transactional use” and far less for it’s “transformative use.” The document breaks these two uses down. Transactional use of the Internet replaces the need to travel for face-to-face interaction and makes finding information easier. Transformative use means applications: creating products and services that are only possible with the Internet and information technology.

As far as getting more people connected, the report makes this comment:

Proactive governments are critical to the successful uptake of broadband technologies. Government is often a key enabling factor in the availability and use of broadband, primarily through legislative action that creates opportunities and, in some cases, constructs constraints through mandates, which dictate that technology and services be provided.

I’m interested to see the recognition of the “transformative use” of the Internet. How can the Internet transform rural America?

The teachermate is a handheld computer, like a Nintendo Gameboy or a Sony PSP, and they have been in use in Chicago public school classrooms for the past school year. The Teachers’ Podcast did a review of the device last month.

A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity to see the teachermate in action at Jungman Elementary school on the South Side of Chicago.

I wrote a month ago about a school district in North Carolina that is using smart phones in class as a platform for learning.

Mobile devices could be a great way to integrate technology into the classroom. They are inexpensive, ubiquitous, and are designed for communication. A lot of kids have them already, so teachers could harness their power instead of telling the kids to turn them off.

Read Write Web has a piece up about mobile learning and the integration of mobile devices in the classroom, a response to a recent book called Augmented Learning by MIT Professor Eric Klopfer.

Klopfer call this idea m-learning. E-learning is so 2005.

Small mobile game devices are already making strides in classrooms, although they may not all be mobile phones. I’ve talked about the importance of the educational software. The mobile phone could hypothetically be a great platform, but with all the different kinds of phones and different capabilities, can you create good software that won’t require all students to by an iPhone for class?

In response to the recent Parks Associates study that said that around one fifth of American heads-of-households had never used email, the Next Web Blog put up a post with some comments from Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels.

Amazon focuses on keeping prices low, and so naturally attracts lower income individuals. Vogels said Amazon designs their site so that it’s accessible from slow connections, old computers and small monitors. For Vogels it’s important to make sure as many customers can use the site as possible.

As a web developer, I get excited about the newest tech, gadgets, and the best looking websites. It’s difficult to build software and web sites that both harness the best parts of interactive javascript and aesthetics and not disenfranchise the web surfers that are not up to date with their hardware and software.

The ITU, or International Telecommunication Union, has produced another video about their efforts to connect  a remote and impoverished area of Honduras. They sent out a technician to install a wireless telephone that locals can use to communicate. This kind of thing can make a big impact in communities, allowing businesses to communicate with suppliers and buyers who only come to town once and a while.

A recent survey from marketing firm Parks Associates has found that around one in every five American house-holds have never used email or any other Internet service. So potentially one in five Americans have never used email.

The survey interviewed heads-of-households and found that of those that had never used email, around half were 65 or older and around half had a high-school level education. It also says that around 20 million households do not have Internet access.

Heads-of-household tend to be the oldest people in the house, the release about the study doesn’t say, but I wonder if they asked about kids in the household. Kids make much more use of the Internet than adults do, and the Internet is available in libraries in most places.

Via TechBlog and PC World

Source: IDC/Nortel White Paper -
The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!

A post by Steve Rubel up on his site Micro Persuasion, points at a gap between the hyperconnected and the rest of the world. The term comes from a recent IDC/Nortel study that surveyed people for the number of communication devices and communication applications. The hyperconnected are those who use online communication services extensively and from a myriad of devices. People who use Twitter from their cell phone, check email on vacation, or have Flickr, Facebook, myspace, LinkedIn, Pownce and gTalk and use them all regularly.

The survey says 16 percent of internet users fall into this category. The hyperconnected have at least 7 gadgets, including computers, mobile phones, gps maps, video game consoles, and PDAs, and use at least 9 applications or services, including things like Firefox, Outlook, RSS readers, Facebook and Twitter.

Rubel writes about the passive online, and how this gap represents a barrier to user-generated media online.

I believe this gap will narrow as more people get comfortable with the technology and with participating online more. Will there always be a sizable group people who decide not to participate, barring any other reason from getting online?