Although today the skies above the Swiss village of Davos were clear and a toothachingly chill blue, everything else was a blur.

I saw panels discuss the future of journalism (the verdict? Health uncertain), debate what should happen after the failed Copenhagen summit on the climate (the answer? No one really knew), and consider the benefits of nuclear power (attractive! But the planet would need to build more than 20 plants a year to really reduce the use of coal, and the politicians said that would be hard to sell). I watched Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, interview the gentlemanly, reasonable King Abdullah of Jordan. (And I was amused when, after the king had entered the room and the Europeans and Arabs in the audience stood as the courtesy due a reigning monarch, the Americans struggled to their feet with varying degrees of democratic resentment or sheepishness.) Like any other conference I attend, importunate entrepreneurs insisted I see their demos. I was busy.

But for the readers of Technology Review, perhaps the most interesting event was a panel discussion on "Technology for Society," moderated by Adam Lashinsky, editor-at-large at Fortune. Lashinsky was tasked by the World Economic Forum to inquire whether technology could be effectively applied to fields like education, development, and health care. He asked, "Can it make a difference?"

On his panel were Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google; Rainer Bruderle, the minister of economics and technology for Germany; William Green, the chairman and chief executive of Accenture; Didier Lombard, the chairman and chief executive of France Telecom; Michael Laphen, the chairman and chief executive of CSC, an IT services firm; and Joel Selanikio, a pediatrician who works in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and Asia, and the director of DataDyne, a mobile medical services venture.

What surprised was that there was such broad, optimistic consensus amongst men who had little in common except their general age, race, and professional responsibilities. They agreed: very suddenly, smart, mobile devices were transforming societies around the planet, and for the better. Talking about the various pressing problems that faced the world, such as poverty, conflicts, and untreated diseases, Schmidt said, "But the thing is, most of these things were true 20 or even 60 years ago, but people all over the world now have a powerful computer on their belts."

Green had begun this theme at the beginning of the session by noting, "For technologists, the future was always 10 years in the future, but now it's here." Selanikio agreed, giving an example. He said, "Every single health worker in Africa is walking around with a small computer. These low-cost devices make a real difference in the places I work. These health workers might not have much education, they may have no books, but now I can give them a drug dosage by SMS [Short Message Service]."

Schmidt gave two slightly more futuristic examples. "We can use augmented reality to give people really useful information about wherever they are. Or, we're getting to the point where a cell phone can do 100 [percent accurate] to 100 [percent accurate] translation [between languages]. Now what these two things have in common is that they're magic--people couldn't do them by themselves--and they really allow us to be better human beings."

Did anything dampen the panelists' enthusiasm? Not so much. Indeed, too many people were still without such technologies. Lombard said, "We need to connect more people with devices. It's all very well to say that two billion can use the Internet. But we're missing the other four billion. We can't say that we are truly egalitarian with respect to technology until we connect everybody."

This sentiment did not seem to be inspired only by the businessmen's lust for ever-larger markets. Curiosity and generosity contributed, too. With transparent sincerity, Schmidt said, "Imagine you could hear the four billion people you can't hear today, because they're not connected. That would be interesting, right?"

Perhaps one thing troubled them. "I worry a little bit that these instantaneous technologies might be bad for deep reading of longer things like books and magazines. We don't know what that means for cognition." In general, Schmidt said, we're going to have to learn, as humans, how to be always on. "Instantaneous technologies increase volatility of all kinds. You're going to have more financial bubbles and more scandals, because you're more interconnected, but you're still human."

Follow me at Davos on twitter @jason_pontin.

The snow was falling heavily upon the Swiss resort town of Davos as I trudged down the Promenade, hurrying to attend a session at a grand hotel outside the main Congress Center, titled "Redesigning with Technology Pioneers."

Hosted by Tom Standage, the business affairs editor of The Economist, the session was ostensibly meant to address the following: "How can Technology Pioneers help to redesign society, values, and institutions?" In fact, as Standage readily admitted, "This is a beauty show--except it's not." Standage was joined on stage by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Bernard Liautaud, a general partner at Balderton Capital, a venture capital firm, and David Spreng, also a venture capitalist, at Crescendo Ventures. The Forum participants who came to the session were asked to listen to the pitches of the 2010 Technology Pioneers (the 26 startups the Forum believes are the most innovative in the world), and chose the five they liked most. Then, the VCs and Arrington would ask these winning Pioneers searching, useful questions.

In the event, it was hard for the attendees to choose, because the companies were so various. Then, too, the criterion was a difficult one for the investors in the audience to fully grok: they were asked which companies would have the greatest, sustainable, positive impact on society. (Finally, not all the Pioneers were present to pitch their ventures: past winners were roped in to stand in their stead.)

But in the end the companies that particularly struck the attendees were Aura Biosciences, a startup which delivers cancer therapeutics using nano-sized proteinshells; BioFuelBox, which converts waste fats into biodiesel; Dilithium Networks , which helps communications carriers deliver multimedia content over any network to any device; Nivio, which cheaply rents licensed software as a service for PCs, netbooks, or set-top devices; and Obopay, a mobile payment service for people who are, in the jargon of the financial industry, "unbanked" or "underbanked"--usually, poor people in poor countries such as India and Kenya.

Obopay, founded by Carol Realini, particularly struck my imagination, and was enthusiastically explained by Tom Standage when Arrington and others were bemused by the company's service and business. But the opportunity was clear enough, without Standage's endorsement. Obopay offered people who had never had a credit or cheque card the means to send money to relatives, or pay for utilities or food using their phones. Realini had an example: mobile payments have transformed Kenya. Three years ago there was no mobile payment system in Kenya, and only 3 percent of the population had any banking service: today, through a service set up by Safaricom, nearly one quarter of Kenyans bank using their cell phones, and each Kenyan who uses mobile banking uses it more than 21 times a month.

"Half of the world's adults [or 2.5 billion people] have no access to banking," Realini said. Obopay, and companies like it such as MChek, could empower those people, making them more economically productive, and overturn banking. That's the kind of thing I look to technology to achieve.

Today, I am following the technology track at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

At this morning's Technology Pioneers breakfast, the technologists attending the World Economic Forum discussed how successful technology startups must be flexible--how, whatever they thought they were at their founding, such companies change as their customers use their products and they come to understand the business models that will support their business. (An idea close to my heart.) We discussed the different "exits" currently possible for a startup, other than an initial public offering or an acquisition. (One founder of a popular online video platform company suggested that a company with a particularly rich cash flow could repurchase the shares of its investors, and essentially "go private.")

Children of the era following the dot.com bust, the entrepreneurs at my table seemed mostly indifferent to the allure of a dizzyingly successful IPO. They thought the possibility of a public offering was a good recruitment tool for sought-after developers, and they thought it conferred status and transparency. Otherwise, they didn't care: the idea appeared abstract to them. The entrepreneurs were wholly focused on the business of "making my company into an institution" (as one of them put it).

Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter, was opposite me. Since this was a gathering of the princes and princesses of the Innovation Economy, and he was at ease amongst his peers, he candidly explained Twitter's business model and "exit"--but, alas, I cannot tell you them, since the session, at the insistence of our moderator, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, was off the record.

I'll be posting again later in the day from Davos, and you can follow me on Twitter @jason_pontin.