Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ones. In emerging market education, there has been so much energy and discussion spent on attempts to make computers affordable enough so that every kid can get their own computer. But for 99% of students in the world, is this ever going to happen in their lifetimes...

                  China isn’t the only country during these troubled times that is looking for creative solutions for how to prepare its workforce for modern, technology-enabled jobs. At the US National Governor’s Association meeting this past Sunday in Washington...

I spent the last week in China learning more about Internet Cafés (or iCafés) , which are becoming a key area of focus for the Unlimited Potential Group. This is part of our “shared access”strategy, where we are developing solutions for computers that are shared by a large number of people throughout...

Gladys Kenfack is a pretty remarkable person. She works on the UPG team where she owns our strategy for web and digital marketing. She owns more than just the strategy because she does the actual work as well. She grew up in Cameroon, went to college in the US, and then worked as a software test engineer...

Last month I had the opportunity to attend NextLab 2008: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users . It was a one-day conference at the MIT Media Lab involving projects from an interdisciplinary class there focused on how to apply cell phone technology to help create social and economic...

Paul Polak is a hero of mine. He created a nonprofit organization called International Development Enterprises (IDE) and spent 25 years there developing creative ways to make poor people in Asia and Africa less poor. His specialty is developing sustainable tools that rural farmers earning $2/day actually...

It’s time again for Microsoft’s Innovative Teacher’s Forum (ITF), an annual event where we celebrate the 100 or so coolest teachers from around the world, all who are doing great things in terms of integrating technology into their classrooms. This year the event is taking place in Hong Kong. You can...

  The Ecosystem Impact of Affordable Computing This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. This past spring Microsoft hired Vital Wave Consulting to create a five year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model to help us and our customers better understand the true cost structure for deploying...

I had the opportunity to participate in a signing ceremony today between Microsoft and the Aga Khan Development Network , a group of agencies administering a broad set of programs in education, health, and social development. Shown here is a photo of Iqbal Noor Ali from Aga Khan along with my UPG colleague...

ICT4D, or "Information and Communication Technologies for Development" is the name for the multidisciplinary academic approach involving the application of high tech to address international development problems. Kentaro Toyama - who leads Microsoft Research's Technology for Emerging Markets...

I haven't seen much about this in the press yet, but yesterday Intel and Carlos Slim in Mexico announced a deal to deploy 50,000 Intel Classmate Netbook computers to poor students in Mexico. These machines will be running Windows and Office. The agreement is between Fundacion Telmex and Intel, and the...

Channel 9 is running an interview with with Tara Prakriya, a solutions architect here in the Unlimited Potential Group, as their featured video right now. Tara focuses on designing education solutions for poor schools and has some interesting ideas on the challenges we face in adapting a Windows-based...

I was out of the office over the last 5 weeks, and during that time we had a lot going on in the Unlimited Potential Group, especially around some of our efforts involving rural computing. For starters, we have posted a video and have engaged in a public discussion around Digital Green , an agriculture...

A group of people from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team are heading out to Western China next week to raise awareness on a firsthand basis around issues involving the digital divide for rural communities in emerging market countries. You can learn more about the project on the UP home page . The...

Today Microsoft and the OLPC are announcing support for Windows on the OLPC XO computer. The two organizations will work together on several pilot programs in emerging market countries starting next month, and the offering will RTM in August or September. Initially it will only be available in emerging...

Bill Gates gave a great speech at Davos this week around the concept of Creative Capitalism , an approach where governments, businesses, and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities...

  A team of Microsoft people flew out to Cambridge, Mass. to meet with engineers from the OLPC Foundation yesterday. Here is a photo of my coworkers Bohdan Raciborski (demoing) and John Gunabal (smiling) as we showed some software to Walter Bender, Richard Smith, and Ivan Krstić from OLPC. I have...

Well, I will be flying out to Cambridge next week for my first meeting with some of the people at the OLPC , and I have to say I am looking forward to it. Some of my UPG co-workers from Microsoft have been meeting with the OLPC team for about a year now, but since I am a relative newcomer to our group...

Well, it seems like the OLPC organization is in the news a lot lately, even more so than usual. Stories that caught my eye over the last  week included a CNN report , a BBC story from Monday, and of course the Wall Street Journal page A1 story that came out this last Saturday. Microsoft's approach...

Yesterday I attended AMD's 50x15 partner summit in Sunnyvale, California. 50x15 is AMD's equivalent to Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, with the idea that 50% of the world's population can achieve access to the Internet and computers by the year 2015. In attendance were representatives from technology...

Will Poole and I did a video blog interview with Chris Pirillo last week, and Chris just posted the interview onto YouTube today. It's a fairly long interview, but as you can see from the screen shot, it had over 1,000 views so far today. Chris is the blogger behind Lockergnome among other things. He...

It has been over a week since I returned from my trip to Helsinki , which makes it three out of the last five weeks that I have been on the road outside of the US. While I was in Finland, some of my colleagues in the Unlimited Potential Group were scattered to other parts of the globe. Orlando Ayala...

Academic Program Managers (APMs) are the people at Microsoft responsible for implementing the Partners in Learning program I wrote about yesterday . We have about a hundred APMs around the world, working with local schools and education ministries on various types of education projects. APMs are the...

Helsinki, October 29, 2007 I am attending the Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum, a "Celebration/Competition" that Microsoft is holding in Helsinki as part of our Innovative Teachers Network , a grassroots community around the world that promotes and celebrates cool uses of technology in the...

October 19, 2007 I had a scary thought in Budapest today. What if the digital divide widens before it narrows? The thought occurred to me on Day 2 of our launch event here. I was attending a meeting of an informal group working on a program called "EUGA", or "EU Grants Advisor." This...