I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together. I was very sad when I heard of his passin

I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together. I was very sad when I heard of his passing. I'm sure I made no impression on him, but he made a big one on me: He was very enthusiastic about technology making information available (and of course books) to the developing world. I wasn't sure how that would happen, but he told me cellphones would do it. In my head, I wasn't convinced-- remember in 2006 computers were still prohibitively expensive for much of the world and so were just about any cellphones with > 1.5" screen, not to mention very slow data speeds. OLPC had been launched a year earlier and it seemed to me that cheap devices of that sort were a more likely inroad to less well-off countries. Turns out, I was an idiot.