In the Morena District in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India, an illiterate woman approaches the local soochak, the manager of an Internet kiosk. She complains about a water well that is not operating, and the soochak, for a small fee, uses a PC to enter her complaint on an electronic form, uploading it to a local hub, where it is registered with the authorities.

In Cuzco, Peru, a woman needs to contact her emigrant son in New York City for money to pay a doctor's bill. An international phone call would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, she goes to the local cabina pública, a small public computer center, where voice-over-Internet capability allows her to make a short call to her son for a sol or less—about 30 US cents. She has been communicating with him in this way for the past seven years.

In Eastern Hungary, a man named Laszló, who hunts rabbits to sell to restaurants, talks about his business with János, the local operator of a teleház, a small public facility with PCs. János surfs the Web to locate a government grant for the growing of special seed corn. Laszló can use this corn to feed the rabbits through the winter, so they'll be fatter for spring hunting.

These three cases are all strong examples of people in less-developed areas reaping real benefits from Internet access. The value of the Internet as a development tool manifests itself in surprising ways; none of these users needed to become computer literate to benefit from Internet access.

In fact, only about 10 percent of the people on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do. Most of them live in industrialized countries, or if they live in developing countries, they are part of the well-off, well-educated, and often English-speaking minority that resides in urban areas. Few come from the poor and sometimes illiterate masses.

The split between those with and those without access to digital technologies is referred to as the digital divide. But that phrase hides the complexity of the problem, because it focuses on the "having" and the "not having" of technology. Instead, what really matters is the ability to benefit from technology, whether or not that technology is personally owned.

Although many people and organizations know that simply giving away computers is hardly sufficient to bridge the digital divide, it's far less clear what else should be done. Conditions in Tokyo don't match those in Lima, Peru; those in New York City don't match those in Bangalore, India. And, as it turns out, technology alone isn't the solution. What the Indian, Peruvian, and Hungarian examples have in common is the careful study of social networks and the local business entrepreneurship that yielded the key insights that led to successful applications.

As ethnographers employed by Intel Corp.'s People and Practices Group, based in Hillsboro, Ore., we spent nearly four years, from 2001 to 2005, circling the world to find out how computers are being used by typical people in different cultures. We investigated communities in more than 10 countries in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North Africa, visiting more than 100 homes and businesses. We followed people around, participated in their daily activities, and held countless conversations intended to elicit the insights we needed for our work [see photos, "Around the World"].

Our purpose was not to sell Intel Pentium chips, or even to figure out what kinds of computers would sell in emerging markets. Our 10-person, self-directed group is chartered instead to look for socially significant topics that will affect the company in the future—usually five to 10 years into the future. Corporate benefits, particularly at the beginning, were not obvious, but our results are just now being felt companywide in new organizational structures and new product directions. The first new product influenced by this project, the rugged "community computer," was demonstrated in San Francisco this past August.

All over the developing world, public Internet facilities like the ones mentioned above are springing up to fill niches and make lives better. These facilities are far different from the Internet cafés that are well established on the urban scene, where people who are already Internet savvy access their e-mail or play games. As we'll show in the following cases, public Internet facilities are solving real problems, defying cookie-cutter categorizations of nonoriginality, and becoming a growing and vital force in the vast developing world.