Fast Foundation

Just listen to Hammond wax rhapsodic on the potential of the MP3 player as a force for social change: "This basically was invented for a market of rich teenagers to download music and walk around with it," he says, digging unsuccessfully through a sheaf of papers for his own device. "The current model costs $150 and carries an hour's worth of music. So let's envision a world just a year away where we're going to have $50 devices that can store eight hours' worth of speech. Well, poor villages can afford $50. So suppose a village bought one of these things and then went to their local NGO to download compressed speech files that provide AIDS information, agricultural information, and so on. Listeners share the player with their neighbors, and then six months later, the village takes it back and downloads a whole new set of files. You would have an affordable information-transmission system that is under the control of the users."

Hammond has scoured the world looking for on-the-ground examples of his businesslike approach to social change. One is TARAhaat.com, an Internet startup in India that uses the Web to help create rural marketplaces. TARAhaat is a colorful, animated portal (a "haat" is a village market) that can connect villagers to nearly everything that they may need to develop a market or to communicate with the rest of the world. Set up in kiosks to be administered by franchisees, the site enables a sugar-cane farmer to find information about commodity prices, to link directly to large agricultural cooperatives, or to find a place to buy equipment. Spoken information accompanies pictures for users who can't read. The company's profits will come from franchise fees, product sales, and corporate alliances, says founder Ashok Khosla, 60, who points out that rural India is a market of 750 million people, most of whom have a very high savings rate -- some as much as 25% of the family income.

Not every initiative that attracts Hammond's attention comes from the private sector. Another group represented at the conference was Global Forest Watch (GFW), an outgrowth of the WRI that uses digital technology to track the degradation of old-growth forests. GFW is a network of on-site forest-protection groups that are linked to a real-time Web site. Each group receives a digitized satellite map of the forest near them, along with digital-mapping tools. Group members then go to the forest, track how much cutting is being done compared with what each forest's lease allows, and post the results on the Web -- where everyone can see them. For the first time, companies and governments that are cheating can be stopped before the forests are cut down. Already, GFW is operating in more than five countries, including Cameroon, where the group discovered that 90% of a protected forest had secretly been leased to be cut -- shocking news to the UN and to donor countries that had been paying to protect the forest. That's just the beginning, says Hammond. "It's going to be CNN everywhere, all the time. When I really want to scare a company, I say, 'Imagine a world in which there are two or three hundred NGOs focusing on your industry.' Think of this as a digital, environmental version of Human Rights Watch."

With the conference over, Hammond is jubilant. "I'm exhausted but delirious," he says. "This helped to get the industry's attention, and we've started a process." Besides working on a follow-up event, Hammond now wants to start an incubator, and he thinks that the WRI has an advantage over traditional VCs in this area because it can translate a nonprofit idea into a business. And look for more partnerships from a man who, like other innovators that Markle has funded, cares more about getting things done than abiding by the old rules. "We're not your grandfather's NGO if we're starting an incubator, operating a global-monitoring network, and helping the leaders of the free market commit themselves to social change."

New Media Is Child's Play

The Markle Foundation's New York headquarters is austere and minimalist, full of modern doors with no handles and neat offices with sleek furniture. Well, except for where Alice Cahn works. Walk into her office, and, if you're younger than 12, you'll think you've died and gone to heaven. Perched precariously on the window seat is a heap of fuzzy creatures with googly eyes, including Tickle Me Elmo, Cookie Monster, and a couple of Teletubbies. While most foundation bigwigs adorn their offices with framed pictures of themselves hobnobbing with CEOs and cabinet secretaries, Cahn gets fired up by gazing at a glossy of Big Bird.

It's clear that Cahn likes kids. Sometimes she even acts like one, all gangly arms and legs and staccato bursts of laughter, though she's actually 46 years old. Yet when it comes to the business of children and new media, Cahn is as hard-core as they come. "This is a woman who enjoys what she does, who will speak her mind, who knows the seriousness of what the impact of her decisions will be, and who doesn't go through the day with a long face," says Michael Cohen, managing director of Applied Research & Consulting, a market-research and public-policy firm that has worked with Cahn in the past.