The other thing that's a big factor, of course, is the cell phone. We're right at the point now where all phones will go from dumb to smart. And I think that's a major focus for us in terms of how we can bring access to the Internet and some of these technologies, particularly around health care, to this rural poor population. That coupled with online services and more sophisticated software. My dream is that we really can get to the point where it really is do-it-yourself medicine and, to a certain extent, do-it-yourself education. I don't see a way where the world is going to scale up traditional concepts of health and education for another four and a half billion people. Even the United States, which is the wealthiest country in the world, still doesn't have a plan to provide health care to its own citizens, let alone another four to five billion.

Cell phones, low-cost computers, Internet-based services, special types of software addressing those particular challenges, those are the areas where we'll do our research and development and the strategy by which we think IT can help provide a scalable solution to those things.

IDGNS: What are you working on for kids?

Mundie: A lot of work we've been doing in the Unlimited Potential Group is in lowering the entry-level cost of letting kids gain access to IT stuff for the classroom. One of the ones I love the most is MultiPoint.

You can basically give a class one PC and one little projector as a common display they can all look at on the wall, and you give every kid a mouse and all the mice plug into one computer. The cheapest part of a computer is the mouse. So if every kid has a mouse, then you can come up with novel ways where they are all simultaneously using the machine. People have had in classes shared access PCs or little PC labs. And you go to most governments today, and they tend to measure their success in how many PCs exist in a classroom environment or how many PCs they have per student they have, but mostly they don't have enough for it to become an integral part of the curriculum. They'll say oh, look, we have one for every 100 students now and all that means is that each kid probably gets access to the computer for 15 minutes a week, so it's not really integrable into the curriculum. But if you take that one computer and you stick it in a classroom and all day long, 30 kids can all be using it at a time, interacting with it, learning with it, for an investment that you can say is no bigger than governments are already trying to make you take the same machines with these very low-cost extensions and you make it an integrated part of the curriculum. Those are the kinds of initiatives that the UP group does that other groups don't do.

IDGNS: Wouldn't the kids fight? How would that work?

Mundie: The way MultiPoint works, each mouse produces a unique cursor on the screen, you may have your own name up there. So what happens is the curriculum is designed around the system. So you could break kids into groups and have kids solve problems together. So the R&D wasn't just see how to fit 20 mice onto one PC, it was how do you create the software that allows people to come up with applications for education that benefits from the fact that there are 20 cursors on the screen. So it's the whole stack on how you train people on a computer that way as well as the computer science.

IDGNS: You haven't said much about ultra-low-cost laptops. Is that not important for the developing world?