Fast Foundation

Once that happened, says Meyer, "There was an overwhelming sense of dread. Now we really have to do this." Then came the exhausting nights at Kosovo's Boro and Ramizi Sports and Cultural Center trying to make the connections work. Even after the service began functioning, Meyer stuck around, living in miserable conditions, to help keep the site going. The low point, he says, came on Christmas night, 1999, when a diesel shortage forced Meyer to borrow some fuel from a nearby hotel. Dragging the can back, he slipped on some ice and ended up covered in diesel fuel.

The saga ends with good news: Today, IPKO has repaid all of its loans and is a self-sufficient nonprofit. It supplies Internet access to 20 cafés and to 140 institutions, which pay between $800 and $4,000 per month for service. There are close to 30 employees, and the company launched dial-up service last August. "I never dreamed they would become a paying customer," says Mike Labriola, 42, InterPacket's head of business development for Eastern Europe. "IPKO really is the one bright spot in Kosovo." Although Meyer left Kosovo last April to do a fellowship at Markle, he's hardly finished with the project. Now launching is the IPKO Institute, which (with support from Cisco Systems) will train Kosovars in such technical skills as Web development and network administration.

Although IPKO was originally launched as a nonprofit, Meyer's next project will move him closer to the private sector. "I think there's a much more sustainable engine if people have a true profit motive," he says. "It was only a year ago that we had that first conversation about IPKO. And now it's like we've given birth to something. It's grown far beyond what we'd hoped or imagined. It was so satisfying -- and a lot more fun than checking over corporate contracts."

Technology for the (Really) Mass Market

To understand the mind of Allen Hammond, you have to imagine a world in which Coca-Cola uses its global reach to distribute ... condoms. Not that Hammond believes that the maker of brown fizzy beverages would actually broaden its product line in that way. But what if it did? "Our condom-availability problem would just disappear," he declares. "I don't know of any developing-country government that can deliver services in a million places at once every day. Coke does that. If we want to solve some of these social problems, one of the best ways we could do it is to hire the right global companies."

Hammond, 57, senior scientist and chief information officer at the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environmental think tank based in Washington, DC, doesn't really expect to merge safe sex and soda pop. As a scientist and an environmentalist, he's most passionate about using advances in digital technology to address pressing issues in the poorest countries. Unlike most policy wonks, however, he thinks that the private sector is best-equipped to address those issues -- and can do so to its own advantage. Hence the Coke analogy -- and why he spent 18 months putting together a conference called "Creating Digital Dividends," which took place in Seattle last October.

The conference, which was sponsored in part by the Markle Foundation -- along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others -- brought together big-time technology executives such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard (via videotape), and Bill Gates; strategy gurus such as the University of Michigan's C.K. Prahalad; and entrepreneurs with technology-based solutions to development problems. But the event was not your normal parade of egos and platitudes. Hammond's goal was to convince high-tech companies that it is in their interest to treat the digital divide as a business opportunity, rather than merely as a social problem; hence the name of the conference. Hammond wants to prove that the developing world, contrary to popular opinion, is an enormously underserved market for technology. "If you took the average business executive and said, 'Poor people are an important market for you,' he wouldn't believe it, " says Hammond. "Executives have to be shown that these are big markets -- that they get to improve their company's bottom line and be a hero at the same time."

Hammond, a Harvard PhD in applied mathematics who grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, founded the award-winning magazine Science 80. After that magazine closed, Hammond worked as a publishing consultant, then came to the WRI. Although Hammond appears unassuming in person, his agenda is far-reaching. "He is a quiet man with a big vision and, more importantly, he makes things happen in a big way -- not through fanfare but through perseverance, persistence, and obvious passion," says Jonathan Campaigne, 57, chairman and founder of Pride Africa, a regional microfinance institution that presented at the conference.