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A Cellphone with no Flips, no Folds – Just a Very Low Price
PARIS: It looks a bit like a child’s toy, a walkie-talkie circa 1975, a cheap plastic throwback to the good old days when telephones were made for talking. But to Spice Ltd., a telecommunications company in the world’s fastest-growing phone market, this new product embodies the latest, greatest innovation in cellphone technology today: a handset priced at less than $20. Spice, which is based in Noida, India, unveiled what it is branding the People’s Pho...
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- South Asia
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In India, How Do Rooftop Gardens Grow?
HYDERABAD, India -- Can growing vegetables on India’s slum rooftops and holding cooking classes in slum alleyways make a difference? That is the contention of a new program that’s about to begin in a 100-acre slum in the capital city of India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh. The country has seen hundreds of programs over the years designed to combat malnutrition. The latest aims to clear out the garbage, create a patchwork of small organic farms to grow vegetables th...
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- South Asia
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Nurture Entrepreneurship to Eradicate Poverty
Speaking at the launch of T.S. Srinivasan Chair Professorship of Entrepreneurship at city-based Great Lakes Institute of Management for Entrepreneurship by TVS Capital Funds Ltd here Wednesday, Prahalad said: Entrepreneurship in India could be divided into three phases. The first phase was after the country’s independence and up till 1990. The second phase is from 1990 when India opened its doors and the third phase is when Indian companies started acquiring oversea...
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- South Asia
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Bangladeshi Microfinance Firm ASA Gets Largest Funding Of $125 Million
Bangladesh is the home of grameen banking. Now the country will have another distinction with a microfinance institution (MFI) headquartered in that country receiving the world’s largest ever funding for an MFI. ASA International, which has presence in Asia and Africa, will receive about $125 million from Catalyst Microfinance Investors (CMI), a leading private equity fund focused on investing in microfinance institutions on a commercial basis. CMI has achieved its final privat...
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- South Asia
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Connecting the Poor With World Class Healthcare
C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid; Eradicating Poverty through Profit, has long championed the notion that business, rather than government hand-outs, represents the most effective solution to poverty. At the recent TiE Entrepreneurship Summit in New Delhi, Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya, a pediatric heart hospital in Bangalore, offered an example of Prahalad’s principles at work in health care. The hospital operates a low-cos...
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C.K. Prahalad: ’The Poor Deserve World-Class Products and Services’
C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid; Eradicating Poverty through Profit (Wharton School Publishing, 2004), has long championed the notion that business -- rather than government handouts -- represents the most effective solution to poverty. In a keynote speech at the recent TiE Entrepreneurship Summit in New Delhi, he noted that India must pay more attention to entrepreneurship, which he described as the essence of development. We ne...
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- South Asia
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If I.T. Merged With E.T.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Well, here?s something you don?t see every day. I was visiting an Indian village 350 miles east of Hyderabad and got to watch a very elderly Indian man undergo an EKG in a remote clinic, while a heart specialist, hundreds of miles away in Bangalore, watched via satellite TV and dispensed a diagnosis. This kind of telemedicine is the I.T. revolution at its best. But what struck me most was that just underneath the TV screen, powering the whole endeavor, were 16...
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BiD Challenge India 2007: Awarding Entrepreneurship for Development
Jointly organized by the Business in Development (BiD) Network Foundation and Intellecap , the BiD Challenge India 2007 business plan competition awarded six amazing entrepreneurs who are making a difference and rewriting the rules for running profitable enterprises for development.
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- South Asia
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