Thank you for your insightful opening reply. At the first headline of this larger piece I wanted it to be straw man and easily criticized. I was starting from Mr. Carr's early publications like "IT doesn't matter" (ungated link) . After swallowing my impulses and reading this article, Nick Carr is presenting a reasonable synthesis of a number of studies that have released important results in recent months.

To your comment: I think that though legitimate education-oriented aspects almost never come with the initial threshold of technology, they do dawdle into the classroom eventually when the perfect corner of context appears to foster it, not always fully recognized immediately. I barely need to mention Wikipedia. Video demonstrations are now a vital part of the exploratory learning process.

We are just now, suddenly, starting to really culturally appreciate ebooks in the US with the right enabling form factor. The argument for long-term paper book investment in distant classrooms is getting weaker by the month as the ebook market blooms--especially when you consider the huge overhead involved in publishing and shipping to classrooms abroad.

Regardless of the prior existence of one of these tricky corners that fosters actual clear educational uses, Video and ebooks won't spread as quickly as they might just left alone so I think we're still justified in thinking about keeping ICT moving toward the potential that Carr refers to in his title.

The links http://m.google.com/?dc=gbackstop and http://m.gmail.com/?dc=gbackstop will allow you to use the completely stripped down mobile version of Google Apps even when you are not on a phone.

One of my contacts on twitter recently posted concerning PesaPal in Kenya: http://beta.pesapal.com/

Paint.NET (www.getpaint.net/download.html) is freeware written on the .NET platform (you'll need to have the framework installed on WinXP). It has many of the Gimp/Photoshop features like layers, photoshop like UI for things like the Clipboard, has a tiny memory footprint and the GUI is very fun to use!

Personally I find GIMPs UI too cumbersome for quick tasks but between Paint.NET and the Gimp I can get along without Photoshop.

Is this the model? I'm guessing from your two example questions. Feel free to squelch at admin approval level if so:

Question service run by low-cost librarians supported by essentially "Adwords for NGOs" You, of course, need an evaluation metric for NGO's return on value just like Google does, for that perhaps you could use Acumen/Google.org tools, though I admit I don't understand the details of those. http://www.acumenfund.org/knowledge-center.html?d...

It might be difficult to get NGOs to fund it on a per-Ugandan-served basis but as long as there are charitable organizations like Google.org who are interested in a data-proven approach, it has a strong chance to succeed if you've dotted your i's and crossed your t's and your librarians are affordable. The inevitable phone call cost born by the caller/questioner will help keep calls shorter than they might be on a similar service in the US. SMS would complicate a little but might still work.

There is a definite information vacuum and access problem around these parts and I suspect there are some parties which honestly want to clear that up, especially with respect to Microfinance, HIV/AIDs, Malaria, Maternity, Corruption, Girls Empowerment, Human Rights, Agriculture, tools & resources from abroad. Too many NGO leaders sit in the capital with only a faint connection with the ground outlook. As time goes on I expect you might expand into tools & resources with a more commercial focus but for now the market, as in most of Africa, is too small to matter compared to the NGOs "market". I bet, as Google has noticed, you will find that when people are "searching" for information, they are in a powerful mode to find customers in which beats seminars and other weak NGO methods. The biggest problem is the reliance on the call center but I bet it will work better than SMS based solutions which are too impersonal and thin.

Have a good time at TEDGlobal, Jon & hongera sana (congrats) on being offered a "Fellows" status. I'm trying to sketch my status going forward out of Peace Corps at year-end. Keep in touch.

At $100/mo with current conversion it Nigeria still quite expensive.
Zain Tanzania is offering slightly cheaper rates with $75 for "Unlimited" 2GB, of course here there is little-to-no 3G.
http://tz.zain.com/en/personal-plans/gprs-tariff/...
Safaricom Kenya had some very reasonable data rates ($30/1GB/mo prepaid) when I was visiting, more importantly though, the locked dongle was heavily subsidized making it $50 instead of $170 as the Zain KE store across the mall. http://www.safaricom.co.ke/index.php?id=613
I wonder, how is Uganda doing with its many-provider market like TZ? It is funny that the Kenya Safaricom monopoly is the clear winner in East Africa.

What is the cost-benefit of Generator vs. Inverter? We use a sizable generator here to deal with outages. I don't see the bills so I'm not really sure how the petrol cost compares with utility, but also maintenance cost of an inverter/battery solution. I would suspect a generator will last longer without replacement or maintenance but might result in some unclean voltage for the computers.