Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.

The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply.

Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.

A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.

Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007.

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links and Amazon lists.

Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.

At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been talking about going next?

A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," they say they're just selling something. But it adds up.

When Yahoo announced its Content Acquisition Program on March 2, press coverage zeroed in on its controversial paid inclusion program, whereby customers can pony up in exchange for enhanced search coverage and a vaunted "trusted feed" status. But lost amid the inevitable search-wars storyline was another, more intriguing development: the unlocking of the deep Web.

Those of us who place our faith in the Googlebot may be surprised to learn that the big search engines crawl less than 1 percent of the known Web. Beneath the surface layer of company sites, blogs and porn lies another, hidden Web. The "deep Web" is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page.

Today, the deep Web remains invisible except when we engage in a focused transaction: searching a catalog, booking a flight, looking for a job. That's about to change. In addition to Yahoo, outfits like Google and IBM, along with a raft of startups, are developing new approaches for trawling the deep Web. And while their solutions differ, they are all pursuing the same goal: to expand the reach of search engines into our cultural, economic and civic lives.

A new paper questions the notion of a worsening digital divide between rich and poor

That there are more telephones, computers and internet connections in rich countries than there are in poor ones is obvious. There are also more cars, televisions and air-conditioners. But the difference in the availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is the focus of particular concern among policymakers, academics and non-governmental organisations. Such technology, it is generally agreed, boosts productivity, though how quickly and by how much is the subject of much debate. The far wider availability of ICTs in rich countries, goes the argument, will therefore enable the rich to get richer, while the poor are left behind. In short, not only is there a worrying “digital divide” between rich and poor, the divide is widening—with ominous consequences.

These beliefs are widely held. But a new paper by two economists at the World Bank, Carsten Fink and Charles Kenny, questions the logic of this argument and highlights the woolly thinking that pervades the digital-divide discussion. The authors conclude that the divide's size and importance have been overstated, and that current trends suggest that it is actually shrinking, not growing—which means policies designed to “bridge the digital divide” may need rethinking.