Knowledge@Wharton writes about CK Prahalad's forthcoming book "presents 11 in-depth case stories from India, Peru, Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela. They range from salt to soap, banking to cell phones, healthcare to housing."

At the core of Prahalad’s argument for targeting the world’s poorest as a potential market is the sheer size of that market – an estimated 4 billion people constituting two-thirds of the world’s population. More importantly, the market will grow to an estimated 6 billion people within 40 years because the bulk of the world’s population growth is occurring among the poor.

A central point in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is that the effort to help the poorest people can be successful across different countries and different industries ranging from health care and finance to fast-moving consumer goods and energy. The exceptions, Prahalad notes, are countries that are essentially lawless, like Somalia and the Congo, and industries that are among the most basic, particularly some of the purely extractive industries that employ many people but have little incentive or ability to empower them. Otherwise, Prahalad says, his approach “can work 90% of the time.”

He expects this book to resonate with a wide audience, including executives at large companies, business school professors, students, and government and development agencies. “This is the first time that someone has put together a coherent point of view on why the private sector can be an integral part of development and social transformation,” he says. He notes, too, that he has served on a United Nations Commission under U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to examine private sector developing. The commission is scheduled to issue its report soon. Already, he says, “this kind of thinking is having an impact.”

when technology has been made available to them, Prahalad has found residents of the bottom of the pyramid to be readily accepting of technology. In Bangladesh, women entrepreneurs with cell phones do a brisk business renting out the phone by the minute to other villagers. Indeed, Prahalad finds in the spread of wireless devices proof of the size and viability of the market at the bottom of the pyramid. By the end of 2003, for example, China had an installed base of 250 million cell phones. The market for wireless devices in India stood at about 30 million installations and was growing at the rate of 1.5 million handsets per month.

Where connectivity exists it is resulting in major efficiencies in traditional occupations. Within three months of the installation of personal computers in some Indian villages the farmers there were making decisions about planting based on futures prices being quoted on the Chicago Board of Trade. In Kerala, India, satellite-based images of fish shoals are downloaded on village PCs and read and interpreted by women who then direct their husbands where to fish. The husbands, after a day of fishing, use their cell phones to check prices at various ports along the coast to obtain the highest bid for their catch.

To Prahalad, all these examples are evidence that there are market solutions to the problem of poverty.

Adam Curry has an idea (similar to Rahul Dave's Blog News Network):

Dave Winer once wrote about triangulation. The process of forming an opinion about an event or story by reading a minimum of 3 different blogs reporting the news. This enables bloggers who also read blogs the unique opportunity to form an opinion based on the 'truth' from different viewpoints. A luxury most news companies don't have, purely due to cost.

Imagine a world where BigPubs could purchase triangulated facts from a single source, an aggregation of weblogs. Just like a news agency.

BigPubs are already used to purchasing news from agencies. If it's from AP for example, a newspaper doesn't care about the depth or truth. If it's from AP, then it's ok. It's a valid source and is credited as such.

All the BigPub does is copy-paste the story, select an appropriate picture (also provided by the agency) and package it to fit their format and audience.

Here's the beauty part: Thje money flow is already aggreed to. Either by subscription or on a piece meal basis.

If information from an agency is used (words pix or video), a payment is made. The agency takes a cut off the top and passes the rest on to the reporters.

BigPubs already scour weblogs for news and often copy-paste directly from those reports. Why not make them pay for it?

Weblogs are everywhere, and it's easy to start a new one if a story breaks in a place where there isn't one. All you need is feet on the street. Technology takes care of the rest, including photos, audio and video.

So what's stopping us from creating this global blog news agency? Nothing at all.