Tapan Parikh, 33

When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have made the decision at random--or, to put it more charitably, by instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That allowed them to call each port and discover where different fishes were poorly stocked, and therefore where they would be likely to get the best price for their goods. That helped the fishermen reap a profit, but it also meant that instead of one port's being stuck with more fish than could be sold while other ports ran short, there was a better chance that supply would be closer to demand at all the ports. The fishermen became more productive, markets became more efficient, and the Keralan economy as a whole got stronger.

This story demonstrates an easily forgotten idea: relatively simple improvements in information and communication technologies can have a dramatic effect on the way businesses and markets work. That idea is central to the work of Tapan Parikh, a doctoral student in computer s­cience and the founder of a company called Ekgaon ­Technologies. Parikh has created information systems tailored for small-business people in the developing world--systems with the mobile phone, rather than the PC, at their core. His goal is to make it easier for these business owners to manage their own operations in an efficient and transparent way, and to build connections both with established financial institutions and with consumers in the developed world. This will help them--they'll be able to get money to expand their operations and, ideally, find better prices for what they sell--and it should be a boon to development as well.

Tapan Parikh demonstrates his mobile-phone-based software to members of a microfinance group in India.

In the developing world, working with mobile phones has obvious advantages: they're ubiquitous even in poorer countries (there are 185 million cell-phone subscribers in India and more than 200 million in Africa); they're relatively affordable; and with the right software, they're easy to use. So Parikh developed Cam (so called because the phone's camera plays a key role in the user interface), a toolkit that makes it simple to use phones to capture images and scan documents, enter and process data, and run interactive audio and video. The Keralan fishermen had been able to improve their business simply by making phone calls. Cam would carry the process a step further, by taking advantage of modern phones' computing capabilities.

Parikh's most important project with Cam has focused on perhaps the trendiest field in economic development: microfinance, in which lending groups grant tiny loans--on the order of $25--to people in the developing world, usually to fund small-business ventures. (Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the best-known microfinance institution, the Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work in establishing the field.) The best-publicized version of microfinance involves a solo entrepreneur getting a small loan from a well-financed bank. But Parikh is collaborating with organizations that are more representative of the way it usually works. A big chunk of the microfinance business in India, for example, is conducted by self-help groups, in which 15 to 20 people (usually women) pool their capital and then meet weekly or monthly to make collective decisions about loans to members of the group. They also use their collective borrowing power to obtain loans from nongovernmental aid organizations or from financial institutions, and then lend that money to their members.

Parikh built a software system on top of Cam to assist self-help groups in managing their information and their operations. Unglamorously called SHG MIS (for "self-help group management and information system"), it includes a Cam-based application for entering and processing data, a text-messaging tool for uploading data to online databases, and a package of Web-based software for managing data and reporting it to any institution that has lent money to the self-help group. Such groups have traditionally relied on paper documentation, however, and because their members still trust paper, the software also includes a bar-code-based system. Loan applications, grants, receipts, and other documents are printed with identifying bar codes; the software enables the phone to scan the code, identify the document, photograph it, process the data it contains, and associate that data with the code. The result is a system that facilitates a quick and accurate flow of data from small villages to bigger cities, and vice versa.