On Friday, April 25, 2008, Bill Thies, a final-year graduate student from Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave a talk to the Carnegie Mellon Community on "Extending the Capabilities of the Internet to the Rural Developing World."
In many rural areas, email is the only viable technology. Bill described the TEK system ("Time Equals Knowledge"), which provides a full Internet experience using only an email account. Bill further described ongoing research on new infrastructures to foster grassroots content creation.
Examples include an Audio Wiki accessible from a phone that contains purely spoken content and a lightweight medical data collection system that is being deployed in a tuberculosis treatment program in rural India.