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There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors, rickshaw drivers, and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler, and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.

Technologies, including cell phones, have the potential to help millions of poor people out of poverty by enabling access to a range of safe, affordable financial services - most importantly, savings accounts - that have long been out of reach.

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.

Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.

Phone networks can capture life on our planet.

Mobile phones play a really wonderful role in enabling civil society. As well as empowering people economically and socially, they are a wonderful political tool.

I have a cell phone that doesn't behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don't start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.

The cellphone is humanity's biggest platform. If we can't use it to change education or health care, then shame on us.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they'll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

I don't foresee a future where people don't have some sort of phone that's like a computer. I don't foresee a future where those phones don't have cameras in them. That spells a future where smartphones are the status quo. You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives.