What is the best way to make the benefits of technology more widely available to people in poor countries? Mobile phones are spreading fast even in the poorest parts of the world...PCs are far more powerful than phones, but they are also much more expensive...Several initiatives to bridge this gap are under way. The hope is that the right combination of technologies and business models could dramatically broaden access to computers and the internet. Perhaps the best-known project is...[from] Massachusetts Institute of Technology...called “One Laptop Per Child” [it] aims to use a variety of novel technologies to reduce the cost of a laptop to $100 and to distribute millions of the machines to children in poor countries, paid for by governments...[I]n Cambridge, England, another band of brainy types...have devised a device that allows one PC to be used by many people at once. The organisation is called Ndiyo...and was founded by Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former researcher at AT&T. “We don't want to have cut-down computers for poor people,” he says. “We want them to have what we have...”...Another approach is being taken by Microsoft...[it] has devised a plan to provide PCs to the poor using a business model borrowed from pre-paid mobile phones...Mark Shuttleworth, a South African software entrepreneur...is developing Ubuntu, an easy-to-use open-source desktop operating system that is meant to overcome this problem [hard to use software]. His Shuttleworth Foundation has also created something called the “Freedom Toaster”, a kiosk that distributes open-source software by letting people pick programs and burn them on to free CDs. So far around 30 kiosks have been set up in South Africa...To help train future techies, Cisco, the leading maker of network equipment, supports free “networking academies” run by local technical experts in 63 developing countries.