The Space Shuttle Atlantis conducts a rendezvous pitch maneuver--a backflip to reach the same orbital velocity as another spacecraft--before docking with the International Space Station. Atlantis is traveling at an orbital velocity of 17,500 miles per hour and is rotating three-quarters of a degree per second.
India is the fastest-growing mobile communications market in the world. The rural poor are rapidly adopting phones, so the technology could become a platform for providing banking services. Sanjay Swamy, CEO of the mobile-payment platform mChek, talks about the potential.
Mohanjit Jolly, executive director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in India, describes how the country’s rural poor could improve their lives thanks to credit and banking services obtained via increasingly cheap mobile-phone services.
The philanthropic effort dubbed the $100 Laptop has not met its grand initial goals. But its first deployment, in Peru, may turn skeptics into believers.
Apple's plan to release a software kit that lets people create legitimate add-ons for the iPhone could make the device appeal to an even wider audience.
The cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to make $100 laptops available to poor children throughout the world. The next few months will be critical in determining whether the One Laptop per Child project succeeds.