Endless blog: Access To Freedom Through Personal Computers

Creating worthwhile and unbiased access to technology for the world’s next 2 billion users.

By Robert McQueen

Earth’s nighttime lights do not show our world’s next personal computing growth areas. (Visible Earth, NASA.)

Where will the world’s NEXT 2 billion users come from? – not from the lights on this image.

I was reading to my daughter recently and her book included the picture above from NASA, with a caption along the lines of “you can see where people live in the world from the lights of the cities”. Leaving aside energy politics, this description just isn’t accurate. Many of the nations in the dark on this image are some of the most populous regions in the world. They simply lack access to essentials that many in the world take for granted, like a stable and robust power grid to support needs like lighting, and our focus at Endless: a healthy and growing new-PC-user ecosystem that enriches users’ lives in a myriad of ways. However, lack of access to computers for these parts of the world will change in the coming years.

We feel this is a very important topic for technology and education nonprofits, engineers, and designers to be discussing. The United Nations population division says that the world will grow from its current population of 7.5 billion to 9.8 billion people around 2050. The majority of that growth will come from nations that are in the dark on this map: 1.2 billion in Africa, 0.7 billion in Asia. Along with our partners, we are thinking about what their roadmap to digital computer access, and the subsequent user experience will look like.

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