The Economist writes:

Rather than trying to close the divide for the sake of it, the more sensible goal is to determine how best to use technology to promote bottom-up development. And the answer to that question turns out to be remarkably clear: by promoting the spread not of PCs and the internet, but of mobile phones.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the mobile phone is the technology with the greatest impact on development. A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.

And when it comes to mobile phones, there is no need for intervention or funding from the UN: even the world's poorest people are already rushing to embrace mobile phones, because their economic benefits are so apparent. Mobile phones do not rely on a permanent electricity supply and can be used by people who cannot read or write.

Given the mixed opinions on the ground, then, the real issue is not whether investing in ICTs can help development (it can, in some cases, and for some people), but whether the overall benefits of doing so outweigh those of investing in, say, education or health. Leonard Waverman of the London Business School has compared the impact on GDP of increases in teledensity (the number of telephones per 100 people) and the primary-school completion rate. He found that an increase of 100 basis points in teledensity raised GDP by about twice as much as the same increase in primary-school completion. As Dr Waverman acknowledges, however, his calculations do not take into account the respective investment costs—and it is the cost of ICTs that makes people such as Mr Gates so sceptical of their applicability to the developing world.

Indeed, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai (formerly Madras), argues that cost is the “deciding factor” in determining whether the digital divide will ever be bridged. To that end, Dr Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues are working on a number of low-cost devices, including a remote banking machine and a fixed wireless system that cuts the cost of access by more than half. But such innovation takes time and is itself expensive.

1. Multimedia-enabled thin clients: think of them as phones with bigger I/O capabilities and peripheral options. In the developed world, we call the PCs :-) The TCs will have the same internal specs as the phones -- as we have also seen with the Blackfin device we are building. The big I/O is needed for many things.

2. Grid Services: centralised apps and data storage. Because the cellphone has a wireless connection, it can connect to the network. Do all the heavyweight lifting on the server.

The TCs and Mobile phones will complement each other -- needed between them is seamless mobility. This is where the "virtual Desktop" comes in -- I can start reading a book on a mobile phone, and continue reading it on my TC, and then perhaps back on the phone, for example. All of this is possible if state (what the user is doing) is stored on the server.

This is how commPuting in emerging markets will look like.

The Internet Stock Blog has an excerpt from Sean O'Rourke, author of the Organized Shopping Blog on some of the trends:

1. I think we are in the early stages of shopping search, judging by how much visitor volume still comes via blunt keyword searching. As with other types of web searching, consumers are often using the wrong tools for the job, simply because they don’t know other tools exist.

2. In other words, many shopping searches today are the equivalent of hunt 'n' peck keyboarding, IMO.

3. Part of the problem is that the structured shopping web is relatively small compared to the rest of the unstructured shopping web. Part of the problem is usability: making tomorrow’s richer shopping searches as simple as today’s general keyword searches.

4. Small, specialized shopping search engines are quietly launching in several categories, using category-specific rules to bring structure to the larger unstructured marketplaces.

5. The problem is many of these niche engines do not have volume, and there is only so much "top of mind" real estate available for new tools. The general shopping comparison engines could acquire some of these smaller search tools and give them the necessary exposure.

6. The general shopping comparison engines are also expanding on their own into other markets, such as travel, autos, financial services, you name it. These services might not be category-leaders on their own, but longer-term could lead to interesting integration.
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15. I think all this leads us to an incredible amount of aggregation of technologies and/or companies in the next few years.

16. This aggregation should also provide more compelling experiences for the user… to the point where people will not need to do general web searches for an increasing number of products and services. One way or another, the tools will already be at their fingertips.

Jonathan Schwartz writes about his 3GSM visit: "the majority of the world will first experience the internet through their mobile phones. We sometimes forget that 10 times as many people bought handsets last year as PC's. Round numbers, there were a BILLION wireless devices sold last year, and around 100 million PC's. To that end, the odds are much higher you'll watch broadcast broadband content on your phone than on your PC - and now that Nokia (and their peers) are the world's largest camera manufacturers (just think about that for a moment), the odds are far higher you'll even create broadband content on your handset. Talk about change. Comdex is dead, long live 3GSM...Another interesting meeting was with the CEO of Oberthur, who predicts we'll see 1 GigaBYTE SIM cards by years end - that's right, a Gig on an interchangeable SIM card. For extra credit, what happens when a significant portion of that memory is executable? That's a mighty small computer. "