IDGNS: How will an MID improve the life of a poor farmer or fisherman?

Barrett: It depends how they use it. If you travel to central China today or even parts of India and see farmers with PCs -- these are standard desktops or laptops -- they're using them to get information about weather and fertilizer and how to be more productive growing their crops, and how to bypass the middleman and sell their crops at the best possible price. They're using them to increase their standard of living by being more productive. The key thing is that it's all local content produced in the local language.

If you drop existing technology into a lot of places in the world today you can create phenomenal results. We've done a couple of examples of this in the Amazon and Brazil, and remote Chinese and Lebanese villages. If you train some teachers and put a broadband connection and some computers in, you can change kids' lives overnight, it's dramatic.

IDGNS: But how do you scale that to reach a significant portion of the developing world?

Barrett: Our role is not to be the volume implementer, it's to say here's what you can do, now you local governments and local people need to take this and run with it. When we went to Parantins in the Amazon, we dropped in a satellite link, put up a WiMax tower and connected some community centers and schools. Then we went to the president of Brazil and his ministers and said, "Look, it's none of our business but we showed you what can happen. It's now up to you."