Bruce Lawson’s World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web is a look into how much of the world uses the web and their devices. Here’s but one fascinating example:

Across Africa and Asia, businesses encourage potential customers to send them a “missed call” — that is, to dial their number and then hang up. The business then phones the customer back, so that the cost of the contact is borne by the business, not the customer.

Those of us fortunate enough to be using powerful, late-model equipment at the end of a fat pipe should really be keeping the majority of the world in mind when designing and developing products.