Tapan Parikh, 33

In other words, if you wanted to know how that organic coffee was grown and whether a fair price was paid for it, Randi would let you find out. In the long run, the system would allow today's simple labels to become more nuanced, and in the process it would allow prices to more accurately reflect what consumers really value. "At the moment, prices are good at transmitting the value of goods in strict economic terms," Parikh says. "But they're not so good at transmitting other kinds of information, like what the production of a good has taken away from the environment, or the experience of the workers producing that good. One of the things technologies allow us to do is actually convey more of that information."

It would be a mistake to see Cam and technologies like it as a panacea for the problem of underdevelopment. While it's easy to become infatuated with the promise of microfinance and small-scale entrepreneurship, it's also easy to overestimate how much influence these things can exert on developing economies, which often face structural problems that won't be solved by making local markets more efficient. And it's also the case that, in the short run at least, the arrival of new technologies can widen the gap between the prosperous and the struggling: if you're buying more from the Cam-equipped farmers, you'll probably buy less from the non-Cam-equipped ones. In other words, not everyone will win.

Parikh seems well aware of the limits of technology in general and Cam in particular. But he is also convinced that mobile phones have the capability to become far more powerful tools, which is why he has other applications in mind for Cam--such as tracking disease outbreaks and improving the coördination of relief after disasters. In each case, one can observe Parikh's respect for the virtues of decentralized organization and the conviction that bringing more information and more transparency to social systems is better. Parikh is focused more on solving real problems than on developing complex technologies. "I think oftentimes with formal and well-established disciplines like computer s­cience, you run into the problem of inertia, a kind of hesitancy to accept new ideas about what should count as important," he says. "But I'm cautiously optimistic that within academia as a whole, there's a broad sense that the real-world impact of someone's work is an important criterion by which to judge it. Ultimately, I think that's what counts: how can the work we do have a practical impact? How can it make a difference in the way people live?"

--James Surowiecki