MIT TechReview released their, much anticipated, TR-10 list this week. For the not-so-tech-savvy readers, TR-10 is an annual compilation of the list of "top ten technologies that can change the world". It is exciting to see that technologies for developing regions got their share of the pie in TR-10 for 2009. MIT TechReview has selected HashCache, a webcache for the next billion, as one of the top technologies this year. More information is here. You can view the full TR-10 list here. "In most places, networking is more expensive--not only in relative terms but even in absolute terms--than it is in United States," says Vivek Pai, a computer scientist at Princeton University.

In 2002 Randy Bush gave a talk at Rhodes University about the social impact of technology. It is interesting to re-visit this talk with the lens of ICTD research: "Technology is not an end in itself, it is only a tool to assist our humanity, and should be used for good. That is technologists must take responsibility for the social results of our work. Techno-colonialism is as dangerous as political imperialism, at least to us nerds and those we enable. Life is not just about money and capital success; education and privilege come with responsibility to our societies and to humankind which follows us all our lives. And each of us, as individuals, through our daily acts, can and must do what we can to effect positive social evolution and change." Full transcript here.

Evaluation criteria and methods for ICTD research are still evolving. Admittedly defining these will be hard and will take time. Kentaro Toyama (MSR) takes a first stab at describing what a "good" ICTD research paper should be like. The document is available from his website, here. This is an evolving document, so feel free to give your feedback. On a side note, Kentaro and MSR India were recently featured in the NY Times. The article gives a good overview of ICTD research at MSR India. Read the complete article here.

More than a billion people live in sub-standard, unhealthy conditions. Unfortunately, most government and charitable organizations are addressing the housing crisis with short term solutions that are unlikely to catch up with population growth. This is also a big concern in metropolitan areas, where slums continue to grow along with the rest of the cities e.g., in Mumbai. An interesting project out of Princeton, called the Arial Home, looks at a new way of addressing the problem of inadequate housing for poor families. They explore building pre-fabricated cheap homes. A typical home can be assembled by 12 volunteers in a day. More details here.

Check out ChOpaal - an SMS-based communication system that brings together people with similar interests. ChOpaal allows you to make 'tags' about stuff (e.g., earthquake, football, protest, IEEE) and then other people can join these tags to get updates. The system is currently functional only with cellular providers in Pakistan.

Meraki is coming. Well almost. Founded by Ph.D. candidates from MIT (Sanjit Biswas and others), Meraki Networks is hoping to provide consumer wireless mesh Internet network designed to "unwire the world" and bring Internet access to the next billion. Meraki recently closed a $5 million funding with Sequoia Capital. Google is also financing them. Read their ExOR paper to get an idea of the underlying technologies behind Meraki products. This paper actually got the best paper award at SIGCOMM 2005.

Hari Balakrishnan and Robert Morris are on the technical advisory board of Meraki, and what I personally found amusing was this line in Robert Morris's bio in Meraki's team profile:

"In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

For those who don't know that line actually refers to the Morris Worm. Quite an interesting way to refer to the Morris Worm! Meraki wants to enable Internet access for the next billion by solving the "last mile" problem. Their products can make a lot of sense in the urban population of the developing countries where last mile is the main problem.

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Microcredit concept and Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. Yunus has been a supporter for technology research for developing countries and now with the Nobel Peace Prize in his hand he could help bring the attention of world leaders towards ICTD. Read the CNN news article here.

The power of Open Software Development is coming to the Mobile Phones market. Trolltech announced the first Linux-based mobile development device that will open the doors to "unlimited" software innovation. Although the target market for this effort is not developing countries, but this can have an enormous impact on technologies for developing regions. While the fate of the MIT $100 laptop is yet to be decided, some critics (including myself) believe that "somehow" using mobile phones as the primary computing device in third world regions may be the way to go. The Greenphone effort by Trolltech is an encouraging step towards this direction. Completel story here.

The Development Gateway Foundation is calling for nominations from around the globe for the third annual Development Gateway Award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the lives of people in developing countries. More details here.

Developing countries, like Pakistan, have slow-Internet speed (mostly dialup connections) and less number of users covered (as a percent of the overall population). Long-distance WiFi technologies, like Digital Gangetic Plains, are proposed as a solution to rural connectivity. Long-distance WiFi has been used in rural healthcare applications like the famous Aravind Eye Hospital. Read this HotNets 2003 paper for an overview of long-distance WiFi. However, things may change with the arrival of WiMAX. It has the potential to simply override all previous efforts of 802.11 mesh-networking and long-distance WiFi. WiMAX can be an ideal last-mile solution specially in third world countries, where telephony connectivity is less in numbers and of low-quality. Deploying a WiMAX network in developing countries, like Pakistan, seems like a profitable venture. And now we have our first mover! Recently, Motorola has a press release saying "Pakistan to roll out the largest mobile WiMAX network yet". Read the complete story from ZDNet here.