Phenomenally cool piece about an emergent email infrastructure in rural Cambodia: via Wifi-enabled motorcycle. Backed by aid agencies and conceptualized by the Media Lab.
"...It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail".
Absolutely killer piece that highlights so many metatrends. First, how dominant designs emerge - as much to do with the economics and institutional structures of a market as to do with technology, if not more. Second, how simple technology can be recombined to create a seismic value shift for people beyond the edges of a network. Third, the emergent nature of recombinative innovation - all the pieces to put this together have been available for years and years.