Today Grameen Phone has more than 10 million subscribers, connects 100 million people through 250,000 phone ladies, who buy phones on microloans from the Grameen Bank and lease air time to villagers to make a living after paying off their loans. Today a phone lady earns on an average $750 a year, which is double the average annual income of a Bangladeshi. Grameen Phone has revenues of $1 billion and annual profits of $200 million.

Despite the success of microfinance around the world, nearly two billion people still lack access to financial services. In several countries, technology approaches are emerging that have the potential to bring financial services to those that microfinance has found difficult to reach up to now. Brazil’s banks use 90,000 electronic terminals in retail outlets as a low-cost channel for hard-to-reach areas. Millions of people in the Philippines receive remittances and make purchases using their mobile phones. Banks in India are sharing their technology platforms with microfinance institutions (MFIs) to expand their product range and reduce costs. Mobile technologies can be used to serve those without access to formal financial services.

Mobiles will be the PC for the people who don’ t have the resources to get computers and connect to the Net. Some 70-80% of poor consumers in the world are still without mobile phones, but millions of subscribers are added each year as the price of handsets drops and coverage expands.

Research by the London Business School has shown that 10 phones per 100 people add 0.6% to the GDP of a country and the United Nations estimates that 0.6% growth cuts poverty by 1.2%. 4 billion people living on less than $2 at the bottom of the pyramid. A recently report estimates that these 4 billion people in poverty are a $5 trillion market.

Our inspiration is the notable story of Grameen Phone. The project will provide rural families in the Andes of Peru with access to microfinancial services in their communities for the first time. The project will in particular employ an extremely economical open source technology for cellphones, " OpenMoko ", which support all Web2.0 services and an unique, cost-efficient and effective way to deliver, commercialize and financing these services.

We have found 2 major problems that the Internet presents for both the western world and the 3 billion people living on less than $2/day (see http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp):
1) Those without Internet have comparatively no information
2) Those with the Internet have information overload

What if we were to solve 2 problems at one time? What if we delivered information to people without Internet access via the quickly expanding 2 billion cellular phone users worldwide? And what if we did it all through keyword-filtering of RSS feeds of their favorite sites and information?

What if we created a partnership of CellAlert.net with non-profits that can apply to use a CellAlert Open API which allows them a completely customized mashup of their own design (within the CellAlert Open API rules)?

In short, we have so many mashup possibilities, we hope you'll want to mash CellAlert.net and FreeAlert.org with non-profit organizations anywhere they need to distribute urgent content to the 2 billion cell phones in the world. So why not go with the approach of an "API mashup"?

I am the co-founder and CEO of FreeAlert.org and of CellAlert.net. My applications are RSS search technologies that instantly notify subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the items that the subscribers are seeking when the item appears in any RSS feed they search worldwide. The flagship application we started with is called FreeAlert.org. Since that time, we've expanded to include http://www.cellalert.net and expanding soon to http://www.Africalert.org, http://www.Asialert.org and http://www.Americasalert.org

FreeAlert.org is an RSS search technology that instantly notifies subscribers 24 hours per day by cell phone and/or email of the *free* items that they are seeking on Craigslist whenever the item appears in any Craigslist RSS feed they search worldwide.

We hope that one of our mashup ideas will be something that you will facilitate.

Currently we are focused on El Salvador, but we see tremendous potential for good purposes being served and facilitated by text alerts in developing nations worldwide!

People are becoming more socially responsible, and want to be up-to-date with news about social change and impact. Plus, they are self organizing in online and real world communities to work together and bring change.

CBC (Change Broadcasting Channels) allows users to select channels of social change, and receive instant news about these channels on a mobile phone through SMS or twitter. Every channel has a community of subsribers that use the community tools to promote and share big stories and events. create momentum to find solutions to problems and trigger change.

Today there are a few barriers to getting instant access to socially relevant news:

· Relevant news needs to be obtained from sites dedicated to socially responsibility.

· Most of these sites have information from blogs and RSS feeds. Very few if any, have information from global news wires.

· These sites by nature offer a pull-based model, rather than an alert-based one where the user is notified of any news of interest as it happens.

· The user does not have much flexibility in choosing the news they want to track.

The idea of Change Broadcasting Channel is to create channels of news about issues of social change, and the endpoint for these channels is your mobile phone. Twitter serves basic phones with only SMS functionality. Flurry serves phones with a data plan.

A user can subscribe to an existing channel or create their own, based on a set of keywords.

Each channel has a community which is the group of subscribers to the channel. And this community gets triggers (the SMSes/twitters from a river of news) that create momentum, driving them to address their cause.

CBC will also integrate with http://www.groundreport.com to bring real user-reporting on channels mixed with mainstream media news from Daylife.

Change Broadcasting Channels will change the world by instantly informing socially active individuals of news of their interest, eliminating any delay in action. These users are part of communities where they actively use the modern tools to bring out the most relevant stories and issues and cultivate a discussion to find solutions.