 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2015 in Budapest in Hungary and I'm very pleased to be joined by Professor Nicholas Negroponte, who is Chairman Emeritus of the MIT Media Lab amongst other things, including one of the first people I understand to have used the internet, and an author of such seminal books as Being Digital, which very much has impacted on our digital world today. And I'd like to talk to you, start off by talking to you about the theme of ITU Telecom World 2015. It's accelerating innovation for social impact. How have you seen ICT innovation directly impacting on socio-economic development and people's lives? Well, I think there's no question that connectivity in general has created both prosperity, wealth, health education and learning in the poorest as well as the richest countries. I think that the theme of the ITU to accelerate it probably needs a little bit of a parenthesis after the word accelerate to accelerate where normal market forces might not ordinarily accelerate. Because if you look at the landscape globally, the absence of connectivity is noticeably in poor countries and rural parts of richer countries. So that's not only true, but it's a natural fallout of market forces and what would make sense to develop as a business. My thesis, which is what I came to this meeting to present, is to consider telecommunications as part of civil society, not just a corporate opportunity. What concrete measures do you think that governments and industry can take to encourage entrepreneurship and foster the growth of SMEs in the ICT sector? Would just making it easier to start and do a company of some sort is going to make that flourish? It turns out it's very hard in some places, even things that you might not think of like the bankruptcy laws are very discouraging. So there are many things you can do on a regulatory side which I'm convinced the ITU will do. I ask that question because here we're surrounded by a number of pavilions here on the show floor that are brought to SMEs along. We have another section here where SMEs are displaying their projects and their projects. I wanted to ask you what's the most important advice that you would give as a mentor to budding ICT entrepreneurs? I've been involved with the startup economy for many years. I've funded over 60, 60 startups personally, so I've been deeply involved with that. I give slightly different advice today because I think the startup economy has perhaps gone a little too far and is sucking a lot of the talent out and you are getting the quick turns, the app, the this and that and the percentage of students that go on to work on really hard, really long-term problems has gone down. There's a deficit today for those that want to work on hard problems. I'm actually pushing a little bit the other way, asking people to join civic society to do NGOs, to address big problems, whether it's ITU-type problems, whether it's fusion, whether it's eliminating poverty. I mean there are many things you could do that are part of global civic society that aren't just a startup or a small company. What's the value for you of attending events such as ITU Telecom World 2015? The value to me is a little bit the fox and the chicken coop, where the audience is the chicken coop and I get to have a podium where most people might disagree. If everybody agreed with me then I wouldn't be worth coming, but in general my theories and beliefs and actions right now are quite orthogonal to the person who would come to a meeting like this. Now they may agree or they may disagree, but one thing is for certain that when you do say something that people do listen and they take notice of your vision and I wanted to ask you for people who weren't able to attend your talk today, what's your main message to participants here at ITU Telecom World? My main message to all the participants is that connectivity shouldn't be just affordable, it should be free. It's not as if making more and more and more affordable gets you closer to free. There's actually a jump. It's not an asymptotic or it doesn't cross the line. There's a real jump in belief and the analogy I use is if I came to you and you're ahead of state and I say I will provide education for all of your children, kindergarten through 12th grade, but it's going to be private education and you say no, that can't be, no I can't let you do that. So that's okay, I have another idea. I'm going to charge half the children twice as much and give it free to the other half. It's not quite right either and then I'm going to lower the price. So in the end obviously price matters whether it's being paid through taxes and government or whether it's being paid and of course the prices must come down as much as possible, but there is a point where something flips and even if you don't call it a human right, which I happen to, at least it's a civic responsibility and one thing about civics and human rights is they're free and people have said loosely they think that connectivity should be a human right, access to the internet is a human right, but they say that and they don't really realize all human rights are free and so you have to make that leap and believe is it really part of our essence and I think it is. Thank you very much for being with us today. You're very welcome. Thank you.