Can an entire library be put in your pocket? Most people would say yes. All you need is a mobile phone with access to the internet.
But what about for the many people in the world that lack internet connectivity? The answer is still yes – at least according to Syed Karim, who explained how at TEDGlobal.
The entrepreneur had been invited to the human ingenuity-themed event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to speak about his company, Outernet.
The business aims to address the fact that about two-thirds of the world’s population still has no internet access.
“When you talk about the internet, you talk about two main functions – communication and information access,” he told the BBC.
“It’s the communication part that makes it so expensive.”
So, Outernet focuses instead on information. The project aims to create a “core archive” of the world’s most valuable knowledge, culled from websites including Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, a collection of copyright-free e-books. This would be updated on roughly a monthly basis.
[Source: bbc.com, 14 Oct 2014 ]