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Al Hammond recently finished posting his series on ‘Technology Innovations at the Edge.’ The full series is now available as a downloadable PDF file here.

One of the premises of the report is that technologies created for developed countries may actually be more useful and financially successful in developing countries. In fact, a recent informal survey of patents granted to Cornell University revealed that 50% of them had potential BOP applications.

I came across a couple of interesting articles today that illustrates the point nicely. The first piece discussed the increasingly well-known wireless broadband technology WiMax. Sometimes referred to as "Wi-Fi on steroids”, it can provide high speed connectivity at a distance of up to 30 miles or more. More than 400 companies are backing the technology, including Intel which expects to begin selling WiMax-enabled processors within 2 years. Although there is some debate over how quickly the standard can be commercialized, demand from Asia and Africa might push up the timetable:

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"With the private sector booming, industry and services have overtaken farming to account for 54 percent of rural income."

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Regular NextBillion readers won't be shocked by a recent AP news article about cell phone use in Africa. It's even been noted as a "worldchanging" leapfrog technology - and rightly so. However, this article sticks out from the rest when it analyzes why cell phones came from nowhere to become a huge business and a big BOP friendly technology:

"The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed. The real reason for weak demand was that land lines were expensive, subscribers had to wait for months to get hooked up, and the lines often went down because of poor maintenance, floods and theft of copper cables. Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems."

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The World Business Council for Sustainable Development is hosting a new online discussion on 'The business of development.' The forum follows in the footsteps of this spring’s online discussion ‘Business & Development - What is the right approach?’ and will give stakeholders a platform to voice their opinions and share their experiences on the role of business in creating wealth and opportunities in developing countries. The various contributions and questions raised during the previous discussion were taken into account in the production of the latest WBCSD report, titled Business for Development - Business solutions in support of the MDGs.

For more details, please visit the WBCSD's Web site.

With little legacy infrastructure, inefficient markets, and a vast amount of unmet needs, the BOP represents an enormous opportunity for research and development firms looking to translate new technologies into financial returns.

Some of the best prospects today are in the energy industry, where investments in alternative or clean energy technologies has doubled in recent years. For example, venture capital firms have increased their investments in solar cell start-ups based on nanotechnology, anticipating cost breakthroughs that would enable them to tap the huge, unmet demand for energy in emerging markets, especially in rural areas. The idea is to incorporate solar cells into thin flexible sheets of plastics that could serve as roofing or building materials. The companies developing the technology estimate it will be able to provide energy for as little as $1 per watt - as low as the electricity currently provided by utilities.

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Given the right business model, high-tech devices can also find appropriate uses in developing countries.

Wireless Access

When a group of emerging market cellular operators put out a tender for low-cost basic GSM phones, nobody paid much attention until Motorola won the tender by promising to produce the phones at prices as low as $35 each. The company started shipping the first 6 million phones this past summer. Not long after, Sony-Ericsson also announced low cost phones for low-income, BOP markets. Most recently, Germany-based Infineon Technologies announced their intentions to begin selling handsets for under $20 beginning in early 2006. Since the most rapidly growing cellular markets are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – with more than 500 million customers in China, India, and Brazil alone – this should not be surprising. Nonetheless, it marks the emergence of meaningful consumer market power in telecommunications equipment for the developing world.

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Google has announced the creation of a foundation with the explicit goal of “giving on world poverty and the environment, an unusual move in the world of corporate philanthropy, which usually picks safer causes such as education.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the fund is that it will support for-profit enterprises.

``They're taking the approach of, `Let’s spend a little bit of money to figure out what would be the best way to spend a lot more money,' in the hopes of creating a philanthropic organization that could ``eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact.''

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The dream of a low-cost computer for the masses has been around for a long time, gaining increased momentum earlier this decade as awareness grew about the opportunities associated with bridging the global digital divide, as well as the consequences of failing to do so. Initial entrants in this market included Wipro's Janata PC, the Simputer, the iStation, and Brazil’s Popular PC. Despite the promise and hype surrounding these devices, none managed to reach commercial viability or the level of success that was initially hoped for.

In spite of such early setbacks, the demand for low-cost computers continues to grow. Even a small drop in price creates millions of new customers. As a result, manufacturers are aggressively developing new devices aimed at this market. Nowhere is this more apparent than in India, where several companies are trying to break the $200 barrier.

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NextBillion.net is pleased to announce the creation of a new Resources section of the site. Content is organized into five categories:

* Featured Content: Research and interviews produced exclusively by the Development Through Enterprise team.

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Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals focus specifically on improving the health of the world's poor, but improving healthcare is critical if any of the goals are to be achieved. Much of the medical equipment produced for rich countries is too expensive for use in rural developing areas, despite the need for improved care. Tackling this contradiction are several initiatives that are reinventing medical devices and procedures with the needs and resources of poor countries in mind.

Disease Detection

Recognizing that conventional laboratory diagnosis of diseases can be prohibitively expensive in developing countries, San Francisco-based Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) is helping public health workers in poor areas take advantage of the latest advances in molecular and biological technology. The group has demonstrated how - with a basic knowledge of the processes - DNA, blood and urine analysis can be done without expensive equipment for one-hundredth the cost of traditional methods.

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