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A Danish company has developed a drinking straw with an inbuilt water cleansing system. The straw is meant to fight diseases from polluted drinking water in Third World countries

A Danish company has invented a drinking straw to fight cholera, typhus, and other dangerous diseases spread with polluted drinking water in Third World countries.

The straw, which looks more like a flute than a conventional drinking straw, contains a built in water cleansing system, daily newspaper Politiken reported. The water needs to be sucked through two layers of textile and two chambers of chemical cleansers before it reaches the user's mouth.

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Microsoft said Tuesday that it is expanding its Windows XP Starter Edition to include Mexico, with plans to eventually offer the low-cost operating system throughout Latin America.

The software maker said that the Spanish-language Windows XP Starter Edition will be made available on new PCs starting immediately in Mexico and Argentina, with a goal of offering the OS throughout Latin America in the coming months. XP Starter Edition is similar to other flavors of Windows XP, but is offered only as part of new low-end PCs in developing countries. It also has some limitations, such as the ability to run only three programs simultaneously.

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One of the critical ingredients for the $100 computer is probably in your garage.

In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard "thin clients" of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices. Adding a monitor doubles the price to $150, but the company will offer used displays to keep the cost down.

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BPOs are moving to villages

Kizhanur is like any other village in Tamil Nadu’s Thiruvallur district, surrounded by paddy fields and grazing cows. But look closely at No:1 Sivan Koil street which is awash with a new phenomenon – a business process outsourcing (BPO) version of ITC’s e-choupal.

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Ask the head of leading African mobile phone operator Vodacom why last year's profits were so huge, and he points to the long lines of South Africans snaking from the company's flagship store in Johannesburg.

"Just look at all these people signing up for phones," marvels Alan Knott-Craig. "They can't seem to get enough of them and these are ordinary folk, not white executives."

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Lessons that companies have picked up from the bottom of the pyramid

Management thinker C K Prahalad strongly believes that focusing on the poor represents an opportunity rather than a problem. In India, companies that subscribe to this view, from ITC to HLL, have been constantly trying to cater to rural India, spread across 6,27,000 villages, which is home to 70 per cent of India’s population. What’s more, 90 per cent of the rural population is concentrated in villages with a population of less than 2,000 (Source: HLL).

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The apparatus which comes as a set comprising an aluminium funnel, a tripod stand, a pot and safety device against reflection of sun rays, has been tested with different kinds of raw foods which were successfully cooked into edible meals. "This stove can prepare all manner of food including beans, yam, infact all staple foods consumed in Nigeria can be cooked with this appliance," says Sogunro, adding "you can even make eba with it if the required amount of garri and normal quantity of water is put in the pot for a short time."

Another benefit of the product he says, apart from its cost efficiency, is time-friendly. It requires less amount of time to cook a measure of beans on the stove than it would if kerosine is used depending on the availability of solar energy gotten from the sun. So does it mean that without the sun, funnel solar cooker cannot be used? "Not exactly," says the CEO. He explains emphatically that though the appliance cannot function when it rains, its speed of operation depends on the intensity of sunlight available outside at a point in time. "In any case what this innovation seeks to achieve is saving cost that would have gone in for fuel and take advantage of God-given energy from the sun instead," he says.

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The shea nut trees grow easily in the savannah belt that separates the Sahara desert from the verdant, tropical coast of West Africa. They only start to bear fruit after 20 years, reach maturity after 45, but can go on producing for two centuries.

Several countries in the region export 60,000 to 80,000 metric tonnes of shea nuts each year, but the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization says that could increase ten fold.

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This province's community-led micro-hydro power projects will be replicated in Nueva Ecija and Nueva Vizcaya to energize farming communities there.

The establishment of the micro-hydro plants in the two provinces will provide electricity to the farming villages of Minuli and Capintalan in Carranglan, Nueva Ecija, and some villages in Sta. Fe, Nueva Vizcaya, said Shubert Ciencia, spokesperson of the Rice Watch and Action Network of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement here.

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President Hugo Chavez toured a house made of plastic and promised to build thousands more like it for Venezuela's poor as he marked the creation of a national petrochemical company.

Chavez said the new Corporacion Venezolana de Petroquimica, or Pequiven, will step up production of products from plastics to fertilizer as it begins operating independently from the state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A.

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