The world of consumer electronics thrives on the latest, greatest and fastest gadgets. New inventions tend to target a wealthy minority, but most of the world operates at a far slower pace than that of Moore's Law.
More than a billion people around the globe lack safe drinking water, some 2 billion have no electricity, and many millions die each year from easily preventable diseases. Billions of people earn less than a dollar each day. A growing number of companies and nonprofits are applying novel technologies to solve vexing problems among the majority of the world's population--known as the "other 90 percent."
In addition to addressing basic survival needs, efforts to alleviate poverty focus on increasing access to information. The best-known, most-recent example of the high-tech sector reaching out to the developing world may be the $100 computer from the One Laptop Per Child project out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The open-source, Linux-based notebooks, which now cost closer to $200, go into production next month. The program announced on Monday its "Give 1 Get 1" marketing program, in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399.
Caption text by Elsa Wenzel, associate editor, CNET.
Photo by One Laptop Per Child
