ICTD4D is just beginning to be recognized as a mainstream field in Computer Science. I think it was almost 3-4 years ago when people inComputer Science started to realize that the latest and greatest ITsystems they are designing are meant for only one-fifth of the world'spopulation. The state-of-the-art innovations in Computer Science and IT often have little relevance to the "other 4 billion" living in the developing world. Around this time I was also moving to the Pakistan, with my primary area of research being "Pervasive Computing". It was when I arrived in Pakistan that it hit me that computing can be pervasive only when the "other 4 billion" have access to it. This lead to our Dritte.org initiative.
At this time, there are several R&D initiatives in the worldfocused on ICT4D. The most prominent are UC Berkeley's TIER group and Microsoft Research Labs India. There is now an academic conference for publishing research in this nascent area, called IEEE/ACM ICTD. This year, I was the technical chair for South Asia and we got several impressive projects from this region.
In the last 3 years, our work on ICT4D has resulted in our researchforum called Dritte.org and two successful startups. Dritte.org is funded by Microsoft Research, USAID/US State Department, Higher Education Commission and the Punjab Information Technology Board. Ourresearch focuses on developing both hardware and softwareinfrastructure, specifically designed for the physical, social andeconomic realities of developing countries. Our recent work on Poor Man's Broadband and Donatebandwidth.net developed a radical newInternet architecture for the developing-world. Poor Man's Broadband and Donatebandwidth.net enable users in the developing world to access Internet at a much higher speed than is possible in the developing world. Using these systems, Internet users in the developing-world can dynamically "merge" or donate the bandwidth oftheir dialup connections to help those with low bandwidth connections to download data faster.
Our two startups -- chopaal.pk and seenreport.com are both focused on using cellphones to replace PCs and broadband Internet connections for everyday lives of people in the developing-world. ChOpaal.pk enables a mailing list style communication over the cell-phone SMS service. Often dubbed the Twitter of Pakistan, is currently the largest mobile social network in Pakistan and routes millions of SMS messages per month for many communities including political activists, rescue workers, health workers, NGOs, student groups etc. Likewise, , Pakistan's largest citizen journalism service, became the defacto place for the civil society to report news and voice their opinions during times of political unrest, emergency and media bans in Pakistan. We are now licensing the See`n`Report software to various media houses in Pakistan and abroad to enable them to automatically receive and publish news reported by ordinary citizens using their cellphones.