 Hi everyone. We're thrilled to have people here today to talk about the Worldwide Web of Impact and one of our colleagues who is going to be here from the Ministry of ICT in Kenya, unfortunately, sends his regrets. So we're so sorry that he was unable to be here. We will try and fill in in his absence with Kenyan examples, maybe even. We'll see. So I am Heather Loftaus. I'm director of special projects at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley. We are the campus' interdisciplinary hub for poverty action and poverty studies. We bridge scholarship, technology, and practice to solve some of the world's most challenging problems. We do that in various ways. We have competitions for students, but we also compete out dollars to teams of researchers who are calling themselves and we're calling them development engineers who are working on problems that include internet access globally and in communities, especially rural areas that don't have internet access today or have very little penetration. So I'm personally thrilled to be here and I want to introduce our panelists. I'll be asking them a few questions. I'll start with Matt Dalio. He is CEO of Endless, which I'm very excited to hear about. It is a personal computer that is affordable and going to be made available to everyone in the world, basically. So a desktop. We're excited to hear about that and the importance of computer literacy in this day and age cannot be underscored. So I think not only having cell phones, but having computers you will speak to and is going to be really important. Then we have Laura Quintano. She is senior director of corporate affairs for Cisco. She oversees corporate social responsibility for the corporation that includes people who she oversees in 40 countries and activities in 170. And she what she also works on is serving as executive director for something called the Jordan health care initiative. So some of what I've asked her to talk about today will be some health care examples in particular around internet connectivity through Cisco and what their work is doing. Finally, I'm thrilled to announce Vaughn Hester, who is program manager at internet.org at Facebook. And I think it'll be really interesting to hear from her on this new initiative that so many people are discussing in, you know, the popular press and increasingly in academic work. We were just talking about that backstage. So why don't I start with Matt. I have some big broad questions for you, which is why is what you're doing important and why does it matter, first of all, to the world, but then also to Silicon Valley and to people in this room? Why should people in the Bay Area who are doing social enterprise work and social impact work, what do you need to tell them about what you're doing? First, I'll describe a little bit about what it is that we're doing and then speak to those two questions. So we are doing something that is rather counterintuitive these days. So the two big trends these days are mobile and cloud, what happens when you get people on the internet, and we are doing the opposite of both of those. We are building desktop computers for people who don't have clouds. And so the question is why, why desktop and why cloud? If you look at what desktop computers are today, if you look at empirically actually the data on usage, since we started doing this, I think I came up with the idea about five years ago. About 10% of the world has gotten access to desktop computers and the number of hours a day people are using computers each day is actually more today than it was in 2008 when Android was launched. And the reason why, I can sort of look out in the audience and ask all the people who are on their computers, why is it that you still use a computer? And if you look at those reasons, those are actually the same needs in emerging markets, the ability to interact, to create, to do a school research report, right? To do a simple budget as a small business owner. And that today is a need that's not yet met. What we found was that it's actually pretty easy to solve that and you can solve that really in, if you take the two biggest barriers that are blocking people, the first is cost and the second is connectivity. Cost, the three largest item components of cost are one, the processor, two, the operating system, and three, the screen. Well, everyone has a screen, a monitor in their home already, it's called a television. You could take something like a Raspberry Pi and you can basically make a really darn cheap computer and operating systems don't need to be paid for, you can make them free. And so in the process, you can actually make a computer that is a fraction of the cost of a traditional computer and solve cost. Connectivity, you can solve in sort of a very interesting way where we didn't used to have internet and computers were still useful for us. We had CDs within CARTA and we had a little floppy disks with 2.5 megabytes of storage and we would put our applications and our files on there. Now 32 gigabytes fits on, you know, a little micro SD card on your thumb and inside of that you can take the vast majority of Wikipedia content that's actually searched for and it fits on a gigabyte and you can take Khan Academy and it fits on six gigabytes. And so you can effectively pre-install a little micro internet onto every device. Now, what does that mean? What that means is that people can then afford the cost of a wireless data plan to be able to do all of the other things that they want to do. So a 500 megabyte data plan in emerging markets is sort of a nice data plan for a smartphone, I can do all the normal things, Facebook is free. The problem is that the average desktop user uses 2 gigabytes of data per day. So what that means is that if you use a regular internet connection on a desktop computer, you've run out of your 500 megabyte plan by lunch. But if you take most of the data intensive stuff and put it on the device, that means you can do things like Facebook for free and you can get other data, I can actually Google something with the precious megabytes I have. So that's what we're doing. That's sort of a little bit of a step back for context. Why it matters there and why it matters here? And I'm going to speak more generally just about connectivity, access, information, technology, whether it's through a smartphone, a tablet, a computer. 26 hours ago I was walking down a little dirt path in Guatemala and there was two little girls in the place where we parked our car. And they were in a little house out of cinder blocks and with dirt floors and one of the girls walks up two years old and she's got a cold and she's got, you know, faces all, you know, looks like it had a cold. And her older sister had one shoe on, you know, two different not matching shoes. Those little girls today are destined to have the same fate for their children that they have right now for them. 36% of the teachers, the math teachers in Guatemala passed their own math exams. The rest failed. That's for those who are lucky enough to get access to a teacher. Imagine a device in the hands of each of those kids and packed inside of it is a Khan Academy, Code Academy, Wikipedia, the sum of human knowledge, all of this stuff available. Whether it's through a smartphone, a tablet, a computer available. That matters so much more ironically than computers matter to us. If I never touched any device again I'd still have access to an education, I'd still have access to healthcare, I'd still have access to jobs, financial services. To that person they have none of those things and to that person a device means all of those things. To answer that second question, why does that matter now for here? Because financial opportunity for businesses in Silicon Valley is there. When you provide the power of communication to 450 million people that's the largest startup acquisition in history, $19 billion. So when you have something that people want and a lot of them, a business opportunity. Right. So I think that's important but I do want to press a little more on the connectivity issue. Data show there is an issue around connectivity globally, right? So this is the digital divide that we're all talking about. So in the states we have about 87% penetration. People using the internet, most people are using the internet, right? Now if you look at the spread many of them are of higher income than those of lower income. So that's one kind of divide. But then if we compare our nation to other nations there are some countries, especially developed countries, that have few less than or around 10% penetration. So maybe I can speak to you Vaughn and you can tell us a little more about what Facebook and internet.org is doing. A, to bring internet to places where there is an internet. And then to increase penetration where there might already be internet available. Thanks for highlighting the digital divide issue. I mean it's one that was the foundation for the creation of internet.org. Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative that's working to understand and address barriers to access around the world. Our priority countries are the countries with the largest number of unconnected people in them. But of course the barriers and the context really ranges from country to country and region to region. Our research has shown that the primary barriers to access fall into three categories. Infrastructure, affordability and awareness. And so what Facebook is doing is identifying partners in various markets and figuring out what is the role that Facebook and its partners can play to tackle those barriers in a particular market. So our first offering is what's called Free Basics which is a set of essential sites and services that can be accessed by anyone at no cost without needing a mobile data subscription or any sort of minimum plan balance. So we think that's a really really big step forward in terms of approving access to essential services. The second initiative we have is called the Connectivity Labs which is focused on some longer term efforts to develop new technologies, scalable network architecture and just new approaches to rolling out networks and connectivity. And the third initiative which is the one I'm closest to and the most excited about is called Connectivity Deployments. And that's a team looking at what are near term efforts that Facebook can play a part in that will improve access or expand connectivity in the near term. That's super. You mentioned the infamous cost word. So there was one statistic I saw recently that was so interesting to me which was in India of people with smart phones only 57% of those phones are being switched on so the data is enabled. And I think and you would know more than I would that that's largely due to a cost issue. I mean it is cost prohibitive if it's $4 a month to have data. I mean that's too expensive for many of the world's people. So what do we do to work on the cost of connectivity and talk to me about your model is what they call, so it's free, right? It's zero. So yes some of our initiatives are free and I think you've hit on a really important point for people who are working in developing countries that hypersensitivity to data usage, the cost surrounding data usage is really critical. We're learning a lot about the way that various phones consume data in the background, the way that users might not understand that and the confusion that might exist. So again education and awareness about phones and about these data plans is really, really key. But yes for the free basics we are really committed that that has to be no cost and just have as few barriers to entry as possible. Yeah that's terrific. Zero rating is the word I was thinking about. Exactly. Which means zero dollars. So one anecdote I want to mention too on that front is we supported a team, we at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley that is now a social enterprise called Ndaga which sets up village base stations basically. So it wrecks towers and brings cellular connectivity to rural areas and they did a deployment in Papua, Indonesia and one of the anecdotal pieces of feedback among many that were very interesting. Their system has achieved cost recovery so not quite profitable but is doing really well. There's a local person there who's running the cellular network but also there was much anecdotal evidence from teachers and healthcare workers saying now that we have access to something like Facebook Zero and are able to connect with our families back home we are more likely to stay out in this rural area than we would have been. We will stay here longer and so I think that last mile piece cannot be underscored enough and as someone who works at a university I want to emphasize that I think we need more research in this space. We need more rigorous data to tell us what is actually happening when the internet gets to places to where it wasn't in terms of education, in terms of economic mobility and those kinds of things. I know we had some great statistics from Professor Jensen who's now at Wharton years ago, seminal studies about Kerala and India Fishermen when they got their cell phones basically the productivity increases their income increases customers benefited as well because they were able to see information and be more transparent about who was getting what fish and what markets actually needed them and so it just became a more efficient market. So I think a lot of us assume that when we all get the internet it's all going to be terrific and people will have more access to information but I think we need to study more specifically where these changes are going to happen and how we can target interventions based on what we're trying to achieve and what we've learned from previous experiments. Now Laura will you talk to us more about how you select activities to work with and how you encourage amplification of impact where you're working and can you give some health examples in particular? Sure happy to do that and to your point it's not just about deploying a solution it's about addressing the area of adoption and then ultimately integration as well so that you can integrate it into countries or cities or rural towns economy as well as societal impact from a healthcare education perspective and so let me give you those examples in the healthcare space but first I'd start by just sharing at Cisco in the area of corporate social responsibility we are leveraging our companies key competencies, our core competencies in terms of our people, our technology, our partnerships to improve the lives of people around the world and in healthcare in particular we've taken a multi-pronged approach and I'll share a couple of examples to bring those approaches to life one is in working with large strategic initiatives where we're partnering with governments and the other is where we partner with non-profit organizations and so the government example in particular the Jordan healthcare initiative I've personally worked in the country of Jordan on the Jordan healthcare initiative partnering with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of ICT as well as a number of other key stakeholders with our shared goal of leveraging technology to improve healthcare delivery and to increase access to quality healthcare services and we started off small if you will to prove out some concepts especially in terms of connecting individuals and rural communities with doctors specialists in the capital Amman for those of you who are not aware according to the World Health Organization over half of the populations in the developing world live in rural areas however those populations are served by less than 25% of the total physician workforce and you can imagine that in least developed countries it's even more abysmal and so with that said in Jordan the access to specialty care so think cardiologists, nephrologists, radiologists if you're in a rural town access to that specialty care becomes a challenge I'll tell you a story about a solution that we set up and a patient that benefited from this solution we set up remote consultations so that these patients in these rural towns could access specialists in Amman using high definition video as well as advanced audio and third party integrated medical devices what we set out to do is to leverage the power of broadband and what that brings to bear in terms of providing a more face-to-face like experience for patients and we set up this network and in terms of a patient example to share Haifa who is a woman who is in her mid 30s married a mother of five living in the remote region of Jordan called Almafrak she had a cardiac condition and I should say has a cardiac condition and was referred to a cardiologist by her local physician however her condition deteriorated because she missed appointments or wasn't able to afford to get to Amman the capital to visit with a cardiologist and that wasn't a good situation for her as you can imagine however she learned about our healthcare clinic at the local hospital and was able to sign up to see a cardiologist and in that first visit he properly diagnosed her and he adjusted her treatment plan because that's another challenge that individuals sometimes will get a treatment plan from a nurse or a general practitioner but if what you really need to see is a cardiologist you need that cardiologist to also have the tools in order to facilitate remote consultation so again think about high definition video you have the advanced audio a cardiologist has a digital stethoscope that he or she uses in order to properly diagnose a patient and I could tell you in the words of Haifa herself she said this changed her life she now has more energy more time to spend with her children and this is just one example of what we're doing to bridge that divide between an individual's personal circumstances and access to quality care and I could tell you all in all over the past four years we've implemented four projects in Jordan where we've leveraged technology to provide improved and high quality healthcare services and we've now served over 150,000 patients in this partnership with the Ministry of Health and others so that's the example of working with a government on a larger scale in terms of our work with nonprofits I think a good example to share is our work with a nonprofit organization by the name of Living Goods Living Goods is doing a phenomenal job in terms of reducing child mortality while at the same time creating livelihoods for enterprising women and we invested and funded a mobile technology platform that they developed to serve their organization and this platform has enabled over 1200 community health promoters that are part of Living Goods network to reach over a million people in Uganda and in Kenya and I could tell you just the power of that of enabling these healthcare workers to go door to door in their communities to visit with families to help families to help mothers learn about how to properly care for their children and how to take preventable actions to improve their health while at the same time selling life changing products such as simple treatments for malaria and diarrhea bed nets, clean cooked stoves, water filters has made a dramatic impact in these communities and they're taking this platform, this technology platform mobile technology platform that they developed to lower their costs and improve their efficiency they're able to manage their inventories manage their product portfolio the performance of the community health promoters as well as offer diagnostic applications that help these individuals properly diagnose patients while at the same time uploading all of this information to their servers so that they can send out notifications to mothers for example and say you know don't forget to give your child this medication don't forget to complete the treatment plan because how many of us have you know gotten antibiotics or what have you and then we say oh we're feeling better we don't need to take this anymore well no you have to complete the treatment plan and what's really exciting I think about the work that they've done is they've been able to reduce child mortality by 25% at a cost of less than $2 per child that's you know that's life changing that's impactful yeah Living Goods is terrific and they're always here at Socap and Chuck Slaughter their CEO is fantastic and to give them credit they've recently done some randomized control trials to find out these numbers which is so important and in the field of social franchising where there was a lack of RCTs and that's been increasing with some work out of UCSF and otherwise I think it's so important now so Living Goods in particular deals with peri-urban and rural villages right so maybe you can give me and then I'm coming back to you Matt a couple examples of novel ways that Facebook and internet.org are thinking about or piloting getting connectivity to areas where Living Goods is so that this technology you spoke about can be used definitely I'm so excited about the myriad use cases that a reliable internet connection would make possible for development actors and governments etc the team that I'm working with at Facebook is called Express Wi-Fi I'm really excited because it's a model that will allow local entrepreneurs to purchase an inexpensive set of tools and technology to offer a business selling affordable internet access to his or her local community it's a really interesting combination of technology and a business model that's geared at sustainability which we're really proud of so we're trialing this model in India at the moment it is a last mile solution we're working at in 12 sites that are rural populations of 3 to 20,000 the initial trials are going really well we have 12 retailers using Express Wi-Fi uptake on the part of their community members has been really really strong our goal with these trials is to validate not just the software we're using but the business model and by that we mean our costs of deploying these solutions in conjunction with local partners need to be lower than their revenue that the retailer can make selling these plans so that's really the question is can we strike this sustainability can we hit a break even point for the retailer and our ISP partner if so we feel really good about scaling this to more countries and hopefully making even bigger impact that's terrific and as so many of us know many telcos these big companies they don't have the financial incentive to go far far away from an urban area so we do need these innovative micro enterprise models so it's terrific that you're wrapping that around the hardware and software solutions that you are already working on so super interesting now Matt I had a couple questions for you one was so you mentioned that you know all these great things that people are going to have access to on this desktop that you're creating which I saw it looks very cool so there must be some human centered design that went into it I'm assuming but my question is about behavior change so I at UC Berkeley in the Blum Center in this development engineering program we oversee we really encourage students who are developing a novel approach or a novel widget for a developing country to think holistically we need to think about pricing we need to think about policy and we need to think about actual uptake of these new devices or this approach again it could be a government it could be an NGO it could be through the market through the private sector but so what have you and your company thought about in terms of behavior change and what is going to be required for one of the young people that you mentioned in Guatemala to start actually using that computer we had one laptop per child and that didn't go well so now what are you doing that's different and what are you doing that really takes the consumer and a developing country consumer in particular reveals the demand and integrates that into what you're doing so with you at the heart of your questions I interpret really is this question of user centered design and understanding really the reality of how they interact with this thing and that was at the heart I think the third person we hired was a user researcher it was a designer and then a user researcher and from back in the day when all we had was a little pdf of what the desktop looked like it was a paper pdf and we're sitting there we had people using it's funny people fell in love with what we were doing when they couldn't shut the computer down we hadn't built the shutdown button yet and at the core it was just this very iterative process of understanding what didn't work and there were a thousand things about our first assumptions that didn't work what it really came down to was design according to something that they already know and the two paradigms that we use that they already know are first a smartphone so great put all the desktops on the you know all the icons and all the apps on the desktop and then the second was Facebook the two things they know very well but I'm so with you it has to start with that one of the things that we have to our advantage is that people already know they want a computer it's not a hard thing to convince people of when I began this thing really I did about six months of research here and still had no idea if it was a good idea because I hadn't gone and asked people so I spent three months traveling through China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh all these places and that was it did not matter where you went it did not matter where on the socioeconomic strata they were do you want the computer? if they were under 35 the answer was you know they looked at me like I was stupid asking the question I was just like no no no you'd ask why they don't have one and you get to the same things of cost connectivity and then you're right about the other things around if they don't know exactly you know where is Wikipedia or Code Academy or these other things then it's not as you told to them as it could be otherwise so I love what you're doing with the Facebook zero stuff because it's two things I love about it first of all it's presenting the stuff that they don't know is there that's good for them and second is it's one thing to try to rebuild the world's infrastructure that's a long process that's a long process but the infrastructure is there and if you can reutilize it in certain ways by tweaking either the technology or the business model my god you can deliver access in incredible ways so true so on I have one other Facebook related question just thinking about I mean even on NPR the other day there was this neat story in Cuba and this gentleman who had never used the internet and was now able to do it with his smartphone and was using Facebook zero to connect with people or maybe Facebook Facebook to connect with people and he was in awe I mean he was just so excited but then I read a study where it said 11% of users in the Philippines when they use Facebook zero didn't realize they were on the internet so how do we address the fact that we want to make sure that people understand what the internet is the vastness of it the potential of it and then and they're different models right there are some there's this really interesting company called M cent which John originated which basically you probably know more than I do but in developing countries you're able to download an app that's a sponsored app and once you have downloaded that app you get double your airtime and so basically you are you sponsors are buying airtime for you and then once you have that app you don't have to use it and you can access anything else in the world so they really consider themselves net neutral so while that first app is sponsored then everything thereafter is not so that's another interesting model that's out there in terms of getting data in this airtime but so what else what else do we do on the education piece in addition so now there's internet connectivity what are some other lessons you all have learned about how to ensure people understand what this means and are taking advantage of every single aspect of it you're right that the awareness barrier is really really broad it encompasses a lot we're focused on a lot of the nuances of like the design of our software because first time internet users or people who aren't as experienced with mobile phones or with basic web browsing will struggle they'll struggle with account creation they'll struggle with browser navigation they'll struggle with understanding Facebook and you know how it does or does not use their data for example we're trying to calibrate our software and our technical offerings in a way that's really sensitive to that we're also trying hard to surround all of our deployments all of our technology with that sort of educational layer whether it comes in the form of the express wifi entrepreneurs that I was telling you about or not only probably selling other goods and services to their community in addition to express wifi plans but hopefully being an assistant to new internet users or people who might be holding a device for the first time really trying to layer that coaching into our training for these retailers so that they understand they're an ambassador and an educator for these communities in addition to a business person that's one example that's super helpful you know so some of what Matt and Vaughn you know you've been talking about is you know addressing some of that awareness going into communities where folks don't even understand how to use these computers so I could tell you that at Cisco through one of our CSR corporate social responsibility flagship programs Cisco Networking Academy we are addressing areas like digital literacy how do we drive digital inclusion especially for marginalized communities and I'm proud to say one of our courses actually originated out of Brazil and it was developed initially in Brazilian Portuguese that we are now tailoring for the rest of the world and it's because I'm working with local communities in Brazil getting access to technology for individuals living in favelas for example whether they're older individuals or even younger how do you educate individuals so that they can be part of you know everything digital that's going on not to mention through the Networking Academy we also provide e-learning curriculum simulation software access to a learning platform so that students around the world we reach a million students a year through academic partnerships community partnerships with over 9,500 institutions so that individuals can acquire skills whether it's skills around basic PC hardware software repair two skills associated with networking and how to set up a network troubleshoot a network maintain a network those things are all very critical to driving adoption you have to address the area of human capacity building I believe no without a doubt and to follow up on that what criteria do you consider are important or do you look at when you're thinking of making investments and finding projects to work with oh I'm sure so the two examples that I started out with so when it comes to a very large strategic initiative such as the Jordan Health Care Initiative we're looking to work with governments who have a shared vision mission goals if we can't align at the very top along those lines it's going to be hard for us to get certain things done so that becomes very important not to mention that we do quite a bit of due diligence to ensure that we're going to have measurable impact and that that impact has the potential to be replicable and that it has the potential to be sustainable and I say potential because you start out with pilots you start small but you think really big in terms of what the opportunity could be so that's as it relates to large strategic initiatives when it comes to nonprofits the example I gave with Living Goods and we funded a mobile technology platform we're coming at it from a perspective of applying what venture capitalists do when they invest so we apply a venture capitalist type approach to investing in social innovation and so we're going to come in early stage we're looking for technology based solutions we're looking for solutions that have that potential to be replicable and we also want to ensure that the work that's being done is targeted towards the underserved and it's interesting because it's a space where we find that some of the nonprofits that work with us say that there's not a lot of funding out there sometimes like seed funding for early stage and for things that are technology based but I think we all share a shared view that technology has the power to really extend one's reach to communities that are the most vulnerable and underserved and so by providing the seed funding we allow these nonprofits to prove out their models to prove out concepts which they can then leverage to go and raise money from other funders if I could say something that you're hitting on something that I think is so important which is the largest startup acquisition in history was because of emerging markets 450 million emerging market users Kenya as you said we talk about something happening in Kenya 33% of Kenya's GDP runs through M-Pesa oh my god if you go to Kenya and Nigeria there's something called checke.com it's basically cars.com it sells cars that cost between $5,000 and $50,000 it has a billion page views a month these are financial opportunities if you look at Bain and McKinsey both did two studies and said what's the next trend of the next what are the next largest trends of the next decade far and away about three times the size of the next largest trend larger than the baby boomers and all of this was the next billion consumers and this is the thing that I think Silicon Valley needs to really understand not just philanthropic opportunity it is where Uber started because people needed a black limo on demand at two in the morning now what is it $50 billion we have such small needs here it's so hard to fill our needs there are so many needs there that people have money and are willing to pay Guatemala is a country that more than half the population is under the poverty line and spends 25% of their income on education if you can deliver a better educational solution than the alternative which is not very hard my god that's an opportunity as a business and this is the thing I think that should be talked about a little bit more in Silicon Valley the opportunity that is there I think so too and especially at SoCAP this is it but we also have to remember that a lot of these business models we cannot forget the poorest of the poor so as long as we are not bringing mobile money to middle income and higher income people I mean we need to make sure that that bottom of the pyramid is really not just talked about but actually gotten to access and improved so the mobile money example I mean it's so tough so yes M-Pesa is doing phenomenally well but a lot of these financial models around mobile money there is not a lot of uptake yet and so and the poorest of the poor if they do use financial transactions in this mobile way there are small amounts and they are taken out immediately and there is no savings aspect to it so I think all of the things you said are so important and the promise is there and the markets are there but we have to be able to tweak the enterprises so that whether it's cross subsidies or whether it's just the way we launch things or whether it's the way we market we need to include that bottom cadre of consumer on that economic pyramid and we have to be so careful about that and I think that's what so many people here at Socap are interested in doing I think you are so right that there needs to be solutions for the base of the pyramid the interesting thing is so 40 years ago when the term was coined base of pyramid the world's income distribution looked like this in such a way that you could call it a pyramid today a billion people have been brought out of poverty and so actually the world is a very normal distribution most people are in the middle and if you look at the needs they have there they have spending power the richest man in the world I guess he was just by Bill Gates but was Carlos Slim why? because he delivered technology to the middle of the so called pyramid the middle of the bell curve and one of the things that I think is a very unfortunate misconception if I could be is that people think the money is up here and the need is down here and they forget that most of the world is here with both money and need and the solutions that you make here are very different than the solutions you make here and so much easier oh my god I could tell you people we sit down with 16 teachers and we show our computer and 14 computers are sold they need financing but this is a solution and this is a more expensive computer than the stuff that's possible that's not possible at the base of the pyramid and so what that means is that the solutions become a lot less scalable so it's actually you're hitting on exactly one of my most passionate topics which is most people are in the middle and that is the opportunity I believe to change the world at scale that was never before possible I mean I think the graph continues to shift so we will see where the bulk is in the middle in say 10, 20, 30, 40 years but that gap still exists between there is inequality and growing inequality in many countries but there are successful models of bottom of the pyramid like living goods for example I mean their average products are very inexpensive and while many of them have a co-benefit of you know it's something pleasurable but it's also something that will benefit people like toothpaste so things like that so I do think they're models now selfishly because I work for a university I'm curious the topic of this panel is impact so what are how would you determine that impact has happened in the way you wanted it to when you set out on your project whether it's express wifi care initiative in Jordan and your business if you were to have a dream team of professors right here and researchers and you were thinking about impact I'm curious what are the questions that you would like to have answered including not just you know I've sold however many computers but what are the secondary effects you'd be looking to see that would mean that you have achieved impact and done things you wanted to do and what is that do you want to start Matt I think there's two answers one is the statistical data so I would want to see obviously educational improvements in terms of outcomes when you see a story of a kid who's learned English taught himself English because of a device and is now teaching himself programming because of a device that's in his hands and you sit down you know 12-year-old Jimmy it's not quantifiable you can go and you can quantify the elements that make up their life so I would want to understand where was his English scores before where his English scores after it's really easy to measure he speaks to you conversationally but the thing I think is so important in this is to remember that these are stories and that if you meet the people and understand the nature of what their lives look like like the Facebook has these incredible beautiful videos of people who have been connected and now what that difference makes and you can quantify that but if you try to quantify those as a whole you actually lose the power of those stories and so I would say that it's important to do both it's important to do both we need to do a lot more different stories these stories are compelling don't get me wrong I think that what helps others relate the impact has to be there because otherwise it's like anything else you need to look at the return on the investment it's not just I could tell you at Cisco for us it's not just about cutting a check right you know if it's about cutting a check you just cut a check you know and you're done with it but it's really we measure impact in so many different ways from surveying students online relative to the quality of their instructor to the quality of the curriculum to outcomes how many of them got a new job as a result of participating in our program how many got a better job acquired skills such that they now got a promotion or expanded responsibilities or increased salary how many went on to pursue ongoing educational opportunities and I can tell you are I'm proud to say that the numbers are pretty compelling 52% of students that participate in our Cisco certified networking associate curriculum 52% attribute their participation to getting a new job these are global figures 72% attribute their participation to a better job opportunity and upwards of 92% plus and by the way these are cumulative so 52 to 72 to 92% plus say that participating in the program either got a new job a new opportunity or an educational opportunity and that's just with the networking academy program we've dove in even deeper and we've looked at the body of students that have taken our Cisco certified network associate courses and from 2005 to 2013 I can tell you that the projects were attributed to participation in our program so that's the kind of impact we want to have with regard to other initiatives and again I'll go back to the Jordan healthcare initiative we in fact will pay for research to be done I provided a grant to the Jordan University of Science and Technology you probably I don't know if many of you have heard of it it would be the Harvard of Jordan and they conducted research on the projects that we put in place for dermatology for dermatology and telemedicine for nephrology and they were able to report back in terms of comparing the solution we put in place to what patients might experience otherwise and we're able to demonstrate that yes there were improvements in a patient's treatment plan yes that this benefited the Ministry of Health in terms of their own cost savings but it also benefit the patients who are working with the Department of Health to make sure that they are not only doing investments that we make in nonprofits whether it be living goods or others when I say we apply a venture capital approach I mean it we have a team our public benefit investment team they are setting metrics from the get-go and they are working with these nonprofits to say said, I would say for us, the two kind of key research questions in the long term are is Express Wi-Fi and the broader set of Internet.org initiatives truly creating, recurring Internet users. So, you know, regardless of what technology or offering a person has connected with or tried, do they convert into a regular, hopefully paid Internet user through some of the channels available to them? That's really hard to measure. So, again, I would say if there are partners or academics who are really interested in that, it's certainly worth discussing further. The second question for us is just the economic and financial one. Do the cost of these deployments and the cost for ISP partners, can we recoup them through the sale of these paid plans? We're optimistic that we can, but again, we're looking at a very small geographical area right now for some of our trials. So, what does breakeven look like, kind of globally, and what is the, what's the timeline to breakeven that is going to be appealing for individual retailers who buy into this program, and then for ISPs who are providing these networks, in some cases, building new networks? That's a bigger question, and so I do think from a finance and economic perspective, some deeper analysis and optimization is really going to be key to us scaling this. Yeah, and then I think phase 2.0 would then be, okay, now we have these repeat users, right? What is that meant for their job situation? What is that meant for the amount their kids are studying? What is it you're now staying in school? So I think those secondary effects are going to be so important once we have that baseline data. So we have about eight minutes left. I wanted to know if anyone in the audience had any questions. I think I was allowed to ask that. I see two hands, and I don't know, three hands. This is like an auction, four hands, and I don't, oh, you have two hands, and I don't see a mic, so can you please shout and tell us who you are and where you're from, because that's interesting. I'm getting over this, too. You touched on content a little bit in your talk, but not a ton, and I think there's connecting and then there's getting people content that matters, and so I'd just love to hear some comments about how you source content, you know, how do you make sure it's both culturally and, you know, locally sensitive, and then at the end of the day, useful. That's great. So I can address that, and I'll come at it from the perspective of our Cisco Networking Academy program. I mentioned earlier that we provide the academic institutions that we work with, with e-learning curriculum, and we, in fact, source the content a couple of ways. Primarily, we work on developing the content. So, for example, I mentioned our Cisco Networking courses, Networking is a core competency of the company, and so we will develop that content. In some cases, we will work with partners to develop content as well, and you're right, that content is critical, but not only the content, but also the various modalities you would consider in terms of how an individual learns. So it's very important for us to incorporate in hands-on activities, so labs, because you know that, you know, many kids learn by doing. We have simulation software, because some young people learn better that way as well, and a big part of our content, if you will, is also assessment, both summative, formative assessments with personalized feedback. It's been a feature that we hear time and again very positive feedback on. I could tell you I have three kids, and I've yet to ever hear my children come to me and say, Mom, I love exams, but I could tell you having visited our Cisco Networking Academy's around the world when I ask students, you know, what is it, you know, that you like about the program? I will get students say, well, I love your assessments, and I'm like, okay, tell me more, and it's the personalized feedback. They say time and again, when a student is in a class, typically you experience that, you know, you got something wrong, but you don't know why, whereas if you can use technology to let an individual know this is what you got wrong, and oh, by the way, here's where you can go to figure out how to get it right, you know, that's powerful, and so happy to talk to you more about this particular area. We also have invested in Mind Research Institute that is, that's a non-profit that teaches math skills to elementary school students, and they are taking a similar approach of what you explained. No language, it's using GG, the penguin, to help students learn math. And you said it was CodeSpark? Okay. CodeSpark, okay. Yes, you have the mic. I think, yes, I do have the mic. My name is Amy, and I work for a company called M Survey. It's actually based in Kenya, and we conduct surveys through SMS text messaging. So there's two arms, one is market research, so surveys are sent out. For example, Java House, which is like the Starbucks of Kenya, will send out a survey after someone makes a transaction saying, how was your coffee? Did you enjoy it? And then they can reply, it's two-way messaging, so they can reply and say, yes, good coffee. I work for Health and Academic Research, so they're following patients, maybe after a woman goes to an anti-nail care visit, they follow up with whether she gave birth, where she gave birth. Anyway, my question is, we are starting to sort of dabble in this idea of impact measurement, because I think lots of people are looking for that. And the idea being we would send, organizations would be able to send surveys to their actual people who they're serving and say, how did you, how did you receive this service? I was actually kind of thinking, I think, Vaan, you were saying about, you know, asking about the people connecting, so you could access them through SMS text messaging. Most people do have access to a simple phone. But I'm kind of wondering if you know of any other strategies about impact measurement, where you're actually sourcing the information from the public, I guess, instead of these secondary sources where you're getting information to measure. I would just say that we're seeing a tremendous need slash opportunity to incorporate partners like yourself, third-party agencies or companies who have either a simple or scalable technology for that feedback or that survey mechanism into these deployments, because we just, we don't have the reach or the coverage to be doing high-touch qualitative or quantitative follow-up among all of our users. So in all of our markets where we're either deployed or considering deploying, we are looking for, you know, third-party marketing agencies, research agencies who can help us get that feedback in real time, both from our retailer network and the broader set of users. And I'd have to plug Open Data Kit out of the University of Washington, which is a terrific tool that other people are, people all over the world, whether it's small NGOs, USAID are now using, you must know about it. So I feel like they have many use cases and it's amazing to see how many people are using Open Data Kit right now. So that might be informative in one way or another to visit their latest and greatest update. Who has the mic? Yes. Hi, my name is Catherine Chaney and I cover the West Coast Global Development Community for DEVET. So we write for an audience of global development professionals. And when it comes to innovations for connectivity, a lot of that's coming from private sector. And I'm just wondering how you think the international development for an aid community can kind of keep up with and support some of these solutions. So I think about the Alliance for Affordable Internet, for example, kind of a coalition. How do you think that the global development community can link up with you all so that there's more momentum? Right. I'll speak to that really quickly. So I think the global development community is keeping up. So the project I talked about and Daga that is bringing rural connectivity in multiple places across the globe now, again, that flag chick example was Indonesia, that was funded via USAID through UC Berkeley. And then we were the ones who were sourcing, right, and trying to find promising technologies, but they continue to flag for us that ICT is an area, ICT for accountability, ICT for the sake of ICT, ICT in terms of elections, ICT, I mean, it really is, I would say a priority for USAID who I work closely with. So I know that in terms of other aspects of how the development community can keep up. I'll just say, you know, in some cases for us, it'll come down to an overlap in the coverage area between our team, a local ISP and maybe some other local partners. So I would just say making those introductions and connections early kind of at the country or market level, such that if an opportunity arises for collaboration in a particular site, people are already connected and informed about their respective offerings, that can be really, really good. We have one more question. Yes, please. Brad Kane formally head of a e-learning organization. I have a quick question for the panel. Of course, it's the answer that's not quick. It's about the conundrum about the device. Yes, often devices or cell phones, which are, as we all know, predominant in many parts of the world, are ideal for checking crop prices or different things like that or alerts. But what happens with e-learning when typically there's a good e-learning platform is very robust. For example, how can you teach CAD-CAM on a cell phone or smartphone? Well, I think Matt might be the one to answer that question. Call me crazy. That's why we're doing what we're doing. I mean, that's the crux of it. I think smartphones are incredible for a lot of things, really incredible things. And computers are also incredible for really incredible things. And they each are good at different things. I mean, it's sort of, I don't know, at this point, it's the essence of why we do what we do is precisely because of that that you can't do the things that you were describing along with about a million other things through a device that's three or four inches in screen size. So I'm totally with you. And there are interesting things happening with different mobile devices, tablets and micro Pico projectors. And we run several competitions where we're trying to encourage new uses around existing technologies for the sake of literacy, financial and, you know, phonetic literacy as well. And we, yes, last question, and I'll find you afterwards, I promise, or you can come up. It's working now. Sorry. I am from France. I just have the question about languages, because when I see here, like so many interesting projects that are based in India, in Kenya, where obviously, you know, English is, you know, the main language. So it just, you know, is, you know, deployment of this project. But how do you deal with the number of languages in Africa? That is not neither English or French. And I would love if French were like white spread based. It's not the case. So how do you deal with that? You know, talking about content, I mean, this content doesn't exist in in those languages, maybe like the game without any, you know, with only picture would help, I guess. But you know, that's kind of an issue. I find so I don't know how we deal with that. It's just like very open question. Sorry. Oh, I could tell you with the work we do around the world, you hit on an important point translation. And in some cases, it's not even just translation. I think to one of the questions earlier, it's also localization, right? What's appropriate to use within certain cultures. We have our courses translated last I checked at least 16 different languages. I could tell you we've made a strategic decision to translate most of our most popular curriculum into the six UN languages, which includes English. And that's because if you with the six UN languages, you will reach 60% or more of the world's population. With that said, we have processes in place to enable our partners, our local partners to translate using translation tools. So you're right. I will tell you, the further down you go in the education system, the more translation becomes important. Once you're at the university level, it's like we still have countries where you know, I can tell you French is the one you know, French, Spanish, etc. are still really critical. But English becomes easier for adoption purposes. Terrific, I think that's all the time we have. But you there is one more question. So I get grant you access to come up on stage. But let's have a round of applause for our panelists. And thank you to you all for coming. Thank you.