I'm a PHD student at the University of Washington's Information Science school and part of a project called 'ICT for Developing Countries' so my focus is on how to take information and turn it into a development activity. There are so many development questions, I don't think I could create the ultimate model, but we can always do more. We also have to adjust what our existing product sets are to fit into those environments. Here's an example: we have a research lab in Banaglore, India. If we took our existing products and gave it to folks who didn't have enough training, they would soon revert back to where they were. Instead we are creating text-free interfaces using symbols that they can understand even though the literacy rate is low.

There are other projects as well, like the Gates Foundation. We still do some active work with them on the HIV project -- a huge project to take a spam filter that was shipped in Office and actually turned it into and algorithm that can analyse protein sequences and show you the highest probability of where the HIV vaccine should go, and then also derive a vaccine from that customised for each human being.

I think there are 5 billion people that make under $5 per day - is our investment and research helping them directly? I think it is. We just did a study at the university of 35 countries and analysed their cyber café's and their telecentres. And what we found was that the technology is starting to get an increase in numbers, so the technology that computers have created is actually having an impact. It isn't going to ultimately solve the digital divide, but there are exemplar places where they're having a huge impact.

I can't commit to a date, but I think we're being conservative saying 2019. Sensor array systems and other things are already getting close.