The UN says the digital divide is narrowing, but Murali Shanmugavelan tells us to think twice about leaving the job to telecoms industry giants.

When I grew up in Madurai, the second largest city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, there was only one private telephone line in a street of about 100 families. It took seven years for my father to get a phone thanks to a long waiting list and inadequate infrastructure. Today my parents have one landline and three mobile phones in a household of seven. India is now the world’s third largest telecoms market with more than 250 million telephones for a population of 1.1 billion.

Over the last decade many developing countries have witnessed a similar expansion. Telephones, computers, the internet, and satellite have connected millions of people who previously had little contact with the outside world. The number of mobile phone connections has overtaken fixed lines, and the trend is set to continue.

Private telecom firms have played a pivotal role by reducing calling costs and revamping payment packages. The invention of ‘pay-as-you-go’, which allows those without a credit history to own a mobile telephone, has given people with few means a chance to take part in the information revolution.

A recent report by the consultancy firm Intelecon predicts that 90 per cent of the global market will have access to a mobile phone operator by 2010. However, between two and five per cent of the world’s population (120 to 300 million people) is expected to be too unprofitable to benefit from these services. This digital underclass is likely to be concentrated in the world’s poorest countries.

We decided to go audio for this edition of Technology Tuesday.  I spoke by phone with Development Seed's co-Founder and Strategist Eric Gundersen about the various ways open source web products are helping NGOs of all sizes. Eric is a specialist in helping organizations working in international development adapt and take advantage of the new opportunities presented by ever expanding web access and mobile technology. Eric spoke to me from DrupalCon, a massive gathering of people from around the world who are utlizing the Drupal Content Management System.  Download or listen to the interview here.

With less than 1% of Africans able to access a broadband connection, Intel's chairman Craig Barrett is advocating for a wireless solution to Africa's long stagnating connectivity problems.

While computer access and Internet connections stagnates in Africa, mobile phone penetration is expanding exponentially. Africa’s mobile phone growth rate has been the highest of any region over the past 5 years, averaging yearly increases of almost 25%.

Mr Barrett, who is in Africa as part of the Intel World Ahead programme, said: "In every African country, except some of the more established economies, cell phones vastly outnumber fixed line phones.

Many African NGOs are now beginning to utilize mobile phones in their campaning work. In Gugulethu a small city near Cape Town, an experimental SMS-based software program called Cell-Life is being used to help administer antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV/AIDS. Two doctors and one nurse keep in contact with one another and their 500 patients via text messages sent from local counselors  "The doctors don't get to see as many patients as they would like," Anand said. "This allows them to pinpoint patients who aren't doing well. And, of course, monitor those patients that are benefiting from drug therapy."  (http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/06/wireless06_ed3_.php).

Last week, Nicholas Negroponte, the Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) participated in a panel discussion about OLPC in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). While celebrating many successes of the project, the forum served more as an opportunity for Negroponte to point out flaws in the original distribution plan and to announce the new "Give One Get One," business model.

The so-called, "$100 laptop" was promoted as a key tool to bridge the digital

Masaiti District, Zambia, July 2007 -- The vaccination assessment team from the capital city of Lusaka listens intently as a village official describes local participation in the recent measles vaccination campaign. He believes that all eligible children in the village were taken to the vaccination posts, but urges the team to verify this for themselves.

In a nation where many households have no phone and no address, collecting health data is a daunting task.

It means getting out into some of the most remote districts, like the Masaiti District, and going from house to house, asking "Did your children get vaccinated? May I see the vaccination card?" This kind of fieldwork can generate hundreds of pages of paperwork: multiple sheets of information for each household multiplied by the hundreds or even thousands of households that are visited.

But through a year-old pilot program, Zambia is replacing paper-based health surveys with those used on PDAs (personal digital assistants). This means no data entry, no cumbersome clipboards, and most importantly no waiting weeks or months for data entry clerks to enter stacks of paper into a computer for analysis.

Apple. Google. Anhueser-Busch. Nike. Did you know that some of your favorite brand name companies are profiled in Climate Counts' rating of climate-friendly companies?

This past week Climate Counts, a new non-profit group, ranked 56 companies widely known in the British and North American mainstream as leaders in their respective industries. Based on four categories subdivided into 22 criteria, the list provides a snapshot of environmentally conscious- and the not so environmentally conscious practices of popular companies. In effect, it offers interested consumers an opportunity to make environmentally sound choices.

Each company was scored on a 100 point scale with the most weight given to the amount of carbon reduction ( other points were distributed around global warming impact, support of carbon reduction public policies and accessibility of climate change information.) Starbuck's scored the highest in the sector -food services- that scored the worst overall (the Colonel was part of the food services company, Yum Brands, that fared poorly). Meanwhile, rising to the top was the electronics/computer sector with Canon leading the way.