Tech entrepreneurs create ways to expand global network

KEVIN MANEY, USA TODAY

Roksana Boreli, founder of 7-ip, uses her plug-and-play satellite Internet connection. "A schoolteacher in a village should be able to open it up and put the red cable into the red plug and blue cable into the blue plug, and it's ready to go," she says. by National ICT Australia

Inveneo, meet 7-ip. Together you could help an Outer Mongolian village get all the benefits of being on the Internet - you know, so the citizens can buy stuff on eBay for their yurts.

All of a sudden, all kinds of folks in technology want to help create the next billion Internet users. From various corners of the developed world, entities are popping up to make technology that could help people with little money, spotty electricity and no telecommunication networks become part of the MySpace generation.

rival AMD, announcing in May that it will invest $1 billion to make technology for people in developing nations.

If it all sounds like so much JFK-era idealism, in the past few weeks I've run into a couple of entities that show why it seems entirely possible to bring a vast new layer of society onto the Internet.

The most recent is in Sydney, where I poked my nose into Australian startups. Which is what led to me sitting across from 7-ip's Roksana Boreli, who probably gets the award for tallest female tech entrepreneur ever. She hails from the former Yugoslavia and played in Australia's professional women's basketball league. When her sports career ended, she stayed in Sydney and got her engineering Ph.D., then went to work for satellite companies.

While in those jobs, Boreli realized that a bunch of new satellite capacity is going up, and that gave her the idea to create a super-simple, inexpensive Internet node in a box.

Take it anywhere, open it up, find a satellite signal, and you've got a pretty robust data connection. The box might cost as little as $500. Thanks to data compression and other software tricks, Boreli says, the cost of making an Internet phone call or watching a YouTube video can be brought down from, say, $10 a minute in some instances, to 10 cents a minute. The device can run on 12-volt batteries.

"A schoolteacher in a village should be able to open it up and put the red cable into the red plug and blue cable into the blue plug, and it's ready to go," Boreli says.

It's certainly not the first product that allows someone to set up a satellite-based Internet connection in the middle of the Gobi Desert - but existing offerings are big, expensive and need a technician to set them up. They're marketed to oil rigs and peacekeeping forces. Boreli - a beginning entrepreneur just getting her first investments - initially says that's her market, too. But it might turn out that some of her best opportunities are selling to relief agencies and other groups that can take the Internet to the world's rural poor.

Funky place. In one corner stood a bike with the back wheel hooked to a belt that drives a power generator - illustrating one way to get power to a PC in a place far from any electrical grid. One of the founders is Bob Marsh, an original member of the hippy-ish Homebrew Computer Club in the mid-1970s, which made some of the first homemade PCs and included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The folks at Inveneo, a nonprofit, show me the device they unveiled in March. It looks like some sort of evolved descendant of a Homebrew computer - a flat screen, the fist-size guts of a Wyse computer bolted to the back, and super-simple open-source software. It uses about one-tenth the power of a typical PC. Fifteen minutes of pedaling would fill a battery for about an hour of computing time.

Inveneo has also created a crude wireless system that uses an antenna the size of a chaise lounge to send data up to 20 kilometers to a base station that's on the wired telecommunications network. That seems to work fine in a lot of situations, but 7-ip's solution seems to fit with Inveneo's goals pretty nicely.

Inveneo is marketing to clinics, schools and other organizations that work in the developing world. It's not trying to get computers into individuals' hands - a la Negroponte's work - but wants to start by getting a few public Internet outposts set up in villages.

New and vulnerable

Like a lot of these efforts, Inveneo's is still new and vulnerable. "We're just starting to speak to organizations about funding," says co-founder Kristin Peterson. She points to a whiteboard in the room scribbled with a wish list that includes Google, financier George Soros, Wozniak, Bono and Angelina Jolie. None have anted up yet.

Now, you might wonder why there is a blossoming of interest in Third World computing.

I've talked to Negroponte, Intel and lots of others who are jumping into this. To some degree, it really is about a give-something-back impulse.

Maybe Bill Gates' charity and Bono's exhortations to help Africa have had an impact. Maybe old idealists such as Marsh are back in vogue. Maybe the dot-com megamillionaire generation wants to do something more meaningful than trade up to a new Porsche Cayman.

But there is something else: The existing PC market is slowing. Just about everyone in the developed world who wants one has one. And unlike in the past, if you have one, it's probably got more power than you can possibly use, and so there's little reason to trade up anymore.

If companies such as Intel and AMD want to reignite growth, they'll have to create markets. One of them is the next billion computer users - a whole strata the tech industry has until now ignored.

It's not exactly JFK idealism, but that's OK. A little market pressure will do more to drive this trend than anything.

Kevin Maney is USA TODAY's technology columnist and senior technology reporter.