We all know how fast technology can change markets and businesses. Now the web and the mass proliferation of mobile phones, as well as falling costs for all kinds of technologies, are allowing rapid change to affect more than just the developed world.

And advances in technology and the falling cost of delivery are driving big corporations as well as entrepreneurs to take new or renewed interest in solving some of the most seemingly intractable issues we face as a global community, from health care to education, from economic development and rolling out affordable alternative energy to coping with the social and economic fallout from natural disasters.

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