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a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have

been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching

some very innovative projects.

One of my favorites is Jeremy Hockenstein, a young man who first followed a

time-honored path of studying at Harvard and going to work for the McKinsey consulting

firm, but then, with a colleague from McKinsey, veered totally off course and decided

to start a not-for-profit data-entryfirm that does outsourced data entry for American

companies in one of the least hospitable business environments in the world, post-Pol

Pot Cambodia.

Only in a flat world!

In February 2001, Hockenstein and some colleagues from McKinsey decided to go to Phnom

Penh, half on vacation and half on a scouting mission for some social entrepreneurship.

They were surprised to find a city salted with Internet cafes and schools for learning

English-but with no jobs, or at best limited jobs, for those who graduated.

"We decided we would leverage our connections in North America to try to bridge the

gap and create some income-generating opportunities

for people," Hockenstein said. That summer, after another trip funded by themselves,

Hockenstein and his colleagues opened Digital Divide Data, with a plan to start a

small operation in Phnom Penh that would do data entry-hiring locals to type into

computers printed materials that companies in the United States wanted in digitized

form, so that it could be stored on databases and retrieved and searched on computers.

The material would be scanned in the United States and the files transmitted over

the Internet. Their first move was to hire two local Cambodian managers. Hockenstein's

partner from McKinsey, Jaeson Rosenfeld, went to New Delhi and knocked on the doors

of Indian data-entry companies to see if he could find one -just one-that would take

on his two Cambodian managers as trainees. Nine of the Indian companies slammed their

doors. The last thingthey wanted was even lower-cost competition emerging in Cambodia.

But a generous Hindu soul agreed, and Hockenstein got his managers trained. They then

hired their first twenty data-entry operators, many of whom were Cambodian war

refugees, and bought twenty computers and an Internet line that costthem $100 a month.

The project was financed with $25,000 of their own money and a $25,000 grant from

a Silicon Valley foundation. They opened for business in July 2001, and their first

work assignment was for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's undergraduate daily newspaper.

"The Crimson was digitizing their archives to make them available online, and because

we were Harvard grads they threw some business our way," said Hockenstein. "So our

first project was having Cambodians typing news articles from the Harvard Crimson

from 1873 to 1899, which reported on Harvard-Yale crew races. Later, actually, when

we got to the years 1969 to 1971, when the turmoil in Cambodia was all happening,

they were typing [Crimson stories] about their own story . . . We would convert the

old Crimsons, which were on microfilm, to digital images in the United States through

a company in Oklahoma that specialized in that sort of thing, and then we would just

transfer the digital images to Cambodia by FTP [file transfer protocol]. Now you can

go to thecrimson.com and download these stories." The Cambodian typists did not have

to know English, only how to type English charac365

ters; they worked inpairs, eachtyping the same article, andthen the computer program

compared their work to make sure that there were no errors.

Hockenstein said that each of the typists works six hours a day, six days a week,

and is paid $75 a month, twice the minimum wage in Cambodia, where the average annual

income is less than $400. In addition, each typist receives a matching scholarship

for the rest of the workday to go to school, which for most means completing high

school but for some has meant going to college. "Our goal was to break the vicious

cycle there of [young people] having to drop out of school to support families," said

Hockenstein. "We have tried to pioneer socially responsible outsourcing. The U.S.

companies working with us are not just saving money they can invest somewhere else.

They are actually creating better lives for some of the poor citizens of the world."

Four years after starting up, Digital Divide Data now has 170 employees in three

offices: Phnom Penh; Battambang, the second-largest city in Cambodia; and a new office

in Vientiane, Laos. "We recruited our first two managers in Phnom Penh and sent them

to India to get trained in data entry, and then, when we opened the Laos office, we

recruited two managers who were trained by our staff in the Phnom Penh office,"

Hockenstein said.

This tree has scattered all kinds of seeds. Besides the Harvard Crimson, one of the

biggest sources of data-entry work was NGOs, which wanted the results of their surveys

about health or families or labor conditions digitized. So some of the first wave

of Digital Divide Data's Cambodian workers left the company and spun off their own

firm to design databases for NGOs that want to do surveys! Why? Because while they

were working for Digital Divide Data, said Hockenstein, they kept getting survey work

from NGOs that needed to be digitized, but because the NGOs had not done enough work

in advance to standardize all the data they were collecting, it was very hard to

digitize in any efficient manner. So these Cambodian workers realized that there was

value earlier in the supply chain and that they could get paid more for it-not for

typing but for designing standardized formats for NGOs to collect survey

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data, which would make the surveys easier and cheaper to digitize, collate, and

manipulate. So they started their own company to do just that-out of Cambodia.

Hockenstein argued that none of the jobs being done in Cambodia came from the United

States. This sort of basic data-entry work got outsourced to India and the Caribbean

a long time ago, and, if anywhere, that is where the jobs were taken from. But none

of this would have been possible to set up in Cambodia a decade ago. It all came

together in just the last few years.

"My partner is a Cambodian," said Hockenstein. "His name is Sophary, and until 1992

he was living in a refugee camp on the Cambodia-Thai border while I was living in

Harvard Square as an un-dergrad. We were worlds apart. After the UN peace treaty [in

Cambodia], he walked home ten days to his village, and now today he lives in Phnom

Penh running Digital Divide Data's office." They now instant-message each other each

night to collaborate in the delivery of services to people and companies around the

world. The type of collaboration that is possible today "allows us to be partners

and equals," said Hockenstein. "It is not one of us dominating the other; it is real

collaboration that is creating better futures for the people at the bottom and the

top. It is making my life more meaningful and creating concrete opportunities for

people living on a dollar or two a day . . . We see the self-respect and confidence

that blossoms in people who never before would have had an on-ramp into the global

economy."

So Hockenstein and his partners are getting calls now from Mongolia, Pakistan, Iran,

and Jordan from people who want to provide IT services to the world and are wondering

how they can get started. In mid-2004, a client approached Digital Divide Data to

digitize an English-Arabic dictionary. Around the same time, Hockenstein's office

received an unsolicited e-mail from a company in Iran that was running a data-entry

firm there. "They found us through a Google search in trying to find ways of expanding

their local data-entry business beyond the borders of Iran," said Hockenstein. So

Hockenstein asked the Iranians whether they could do an English-Arabic dictionary,

even though the language of Iran is Farsi, which uses some but not all of the same

letters as Arabic. "He said

they could," said Hockenstein, "so we partnered on a joint project for this client

to digitize an Arabic dictionary." What I like most about the story, and why it is

so telling of the flat world, is Hockenstein's kicker: "I still have never met the

guy [in Iran]. We did the whole deal over Yahoo! instant messenger and e-mail. We

wired him the money through Cambodia ... I invited him to my wedding, but he wasn't

able to come."

:::::Geopolitics and the Flat World

::::: ELEVEN

The Vnflat World

No Guns or Cell Phones Allowed

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the

thoughtless act of a single day. -Sir Winston Churchill

On a trip back home to Minnesota in the winter of 2004, I was having lunch with my

friends Ken and Jill Greer at Perkins pancake house when Jill mentioned that the state

had recently passed a new gun law. The conceal and carry law, passed on May 28, 2003,

established that local sheriffs had to issue permits for anyone-other than those with

felony records or declared mentally ill-who requested to carry concealed firearms

to work (unless the person's employer explicitly restricted that right). This law

is supposed to deter criminals, because if they try to hold you up, they can't be

sure that you too are not packing a weapon. The law, though, contained a provision

to allow business owners to prevent nonemployees from bringing concealed weapons into

a place of business, like a restaurant or health club. It said that any business could

ban concealed handguns on its premises if it posted a sign at each entrance indicating

that guns were not allowed there. (This reportedly led to some very creative signage,

with one church suingthe state for the right to use a biblical quote as its gun-banning

sign and a restaurant using a picture of a woman in a cooking apron toting a machine

gun.) The reason this all came up at our lunch was that Jill mentioned that at health

clubs around the city, where she

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played tennis, she noticed two signs now popping up regularly, one right after the

other. At their tennis club in Bloomington, for example, there is a sign right by

the front door that says, "NoGuns Allowed." And then nearby, outside the locker rooms,

is another sign: "No Cell Phones Allowed."

Hmrara. No guns or cell phones allowed? Guns I understand, I said, but why cell phones?

Silly me. It was because some people were bringing cell phones with cameras intolocker

rooms, covertly taking pictures of naked men and women and then e-mailing them around

the world. What will they think of next? Whatever the innovation, people will find

a way to use it and abuse it.

While interviewing Promod Haque at Norwest Venture Partners in Palo Alto, I was helped

by the firm's public relations director, Katie Belding, who later sent me this e-mail:

"I was chatting with my husband about your meeting with Promod the other day... He

is a history teacher at a high school in San Mateo. I asked him, 'Where were you when

the world went flat?' He said it just happened the other day at school when he was

in a faculty meeting. A student was suspended for helping another student cheat on

a test-we're not talking the traditional writing answers on the bottom of your shoe

or passing a note, though . . ." Intrigued, I called her husband, Brian, and he picked

up the story: "At the end of the period, when all of the tests were being passed up

to the front of the classroom, this student very quickly and slyly pulled out his

cell phone and somehow snapped a picture of some test questions, and instantly

e-mailed it to his friend who was taking the same test the next period. His friend

also had a cell phone with a digital camera and e-mail capabilities and was apparently

able to view the questions before the next period. The student was caught by another

teacher when he pulled out the cell phone between periods. It is against the rules

to have a cell phone on campus-even though we know that all the kids do-so the teacher

confiscated it and saw that the kid had a test on it. So the dean of discipline, at

our regular faculty meeting, opened by saying, 'We have something new to worry about.'

Essentially he said, 'Beware, keep your

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eyes open, because the kids are so far ahead of us in terms of the technology.'"

But things aren't all bad with this new technology, noted Brian: "I went to a Jimmy

Buffett concert earlier this year. Cameras were not allowed, but cell phones were.

So then the concert starts and everyone suddenly starts holding up their cell phones

and taking pictures of Jimmy Buffett. I've got one right on my wall. We were sitting

in the second row and the guy next to us held up his cell phone, and I said, 'Hey,

would you mind e-mailing me some of those? No one will believe we sat this close.'

He said 'Sure,' and we gave him a card with our e-mail [address]. We didn't really

expect to see any, but the next day he e-mailed us a bunch."

My trip to Beijing described earlier fell right after the fifteenth anniversary of

the Tiananmen Square massacre, which happened on June 4, 1989, that is, 6/4/89. My

colleagues at the Times bureau informed me that on that day the Chinese government

censors were blocking SMS messages on cell phones that contained any reference to

Tiananmen Square or even the numbers 6 and 4. So if you happened to be dialing the

phone number 664-6464, or sending a message in which you told someone you would meet

at 6 p.m. on the 4th floor, the Chinese censors blocked it using their jamming

technology.

Mark Steyn, writing in the National Review (October 25, 2004), related a story from

the London Arabic newspaper paper Al-Quds al-Arabi about a panic that broke out in

Khartoum, Sudan, after a crazy rumor swept the city, claiming that if an infidel shook