The latest issue of MIT Technology Review magazine focuses on "world changing ideas" -- innovative approaches to ICTs, R&D, and high tech in general from different parts of the world.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/issue/feature_gp.asp

They profile tech trends in around half a dozen countries. Amongst the most interesting are the articles on Brazil (CDI's telecentre work and other digital divide projects from around the country) and South Africa (local language content and open source). Here are direct links to those two articles:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/issue/feature_gp_brazil.asp
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/issue/feature_gp_safrica.asp

Meanwhile, the issue includes a series of world maps that identify each country as high, medium or low in a range of metrics related to ICTs and the digital divide. Here are the maps:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/images/feature_gp_g1.gif
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/images/feature_gp_g2.gif

Since the maps don't have a text version, I've taken the liberty of typing up the top five rankings of the most relevant maps.

Top R&D spending as a percentage of GDP
Israel
Sweden
Finland
Japan
Iceland

Top ICT spending per capita
US
Switzerland
Mexico
Denmark
Sweden

Most Mobile Phone Users per 1000 People
Luxembourg
Israel
Italy
Iceland
Sweden

Internet Use Per 1000 people
Sweden
South Korea
US
Canada
Demark

Highest Cost of Internet Access
Central African Republic
Sudan
Haiti
Gabon
Republic of the Congo   

Personally, I wish the maps weren't divided into rather vague rankings (how "high" is high? What does "low" mean?), but they still make for interesting representations on the relative state of ICTs around the world.

Thanks,
Andy


-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.

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