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Mobile phone services are improving agricultural yield and profits by providing farmers advice on crops, weather and market prices

"Syria has disappeared from the internet. That's not an exaggeration either, nearly the entire Middle Eastern country has been cut off from the web. A post from research company Renesys reveals that what effectively amounts to all of Syria's internet connectivity shut down earlier today: Starting at 10:26 UTC (12:26pm in Damascus), Syria's international Internet connectivity shut down. In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet. We are investigating the dynamics of the outage and will post updates as they become available. A more detailed post reveals that 77 networks, representing 92% of the routed networks in the country experienced an outage. The outage comes among increasing violence in the country. According to the Daily Star, the government cut off internet as well as cell phone activity amid increasingly fierce clashes between government troops and rebels."

Across the African continent, internet penetration is low, computers are often too expensive to purchase, and online business transactions can be logistically complicated to execute. But the surge in mobile phone use - there are currently 695 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa - has given Africans a simple and pervasive means of sharing information and conducting business.

"SolarAid chief executive Steve Andrews hopes simple devices will be adopted as widely as mobile phones"

Read this. It is a great summary of a range of issues