Ken Banks jokingly and lovingly calls SMS technology "software with an attention deficit disorder." He’s referring to Short Message Service – also known as text messaging -- and he knows it’s no joke that SMS can help make social happen quickly, profoundly, and in very hard-to access locations.

Katherine Lucey asks women how they want to use solar-powered LED lanterns because their answers are different from what men say. For example, she found that a woman named Rebecca wanted to put the light in the chicken room, overruling her husband’s choice.  

by Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of Samasource
 
Why are women so undervalued compared to men?

I've heard many explanations, ranging from culture and religion to evolutionary biology. But none seem quite as salient as this one: women are faced with a dramatic lack of access to opportunities that allow them to use their brains, rather than their bodies, to earn income.

Like many trailblazing solutions, Hilmi Quraishi's wildly popular mobile phone games that teach players about AIDS found success through not just hard work, but a novel idea and a bit of serendipity. The novel idea was approaching education about this very serious problem through the universal language of entertainment and using a widely-accessible technology to do it.

For those activists, journalists, students, and organizations that find it difficult to be heard among the clutter of opinions mounting on the web, the founders of a website called MixedInk.com think the resounding chorus of collaborative expression can be a more powerful tool for making change than the songs of a thousand soloists.