colors, bright orange, blue and green, because "in areas where there is no electricity, the bright colors will help people see [the devices] better," he said.
The next step is to do a pilot test with the latest version of the device and take 50 to 100 devices to the Ghanaian villagers who will be using them, Schmidt said.
Moreover, Schmidt said on his last trip to Ghana he took a bunch of digital voice recorders and distributed them to local universities so that they could record content useful for the villagers.
For its part, Literacy Bridge chose Ghana as its first target because it "had the right balance of need versus support" for literacy learning and knowledge sharing, Schmidt said. He acknowledged that the need is probably greater in places like Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, "but there is less support and also more challenges" in those locations. Schmidt said India is the next country Literacy Bridge will go to, followed by Kenya.
Showing his conviction, Schmidt cited former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as stating in 2003 that the U.N. was kicking off the literacy decade. Back then studies showed there were more than 880 million illiterate people in the world, and yet more recent studies say by 2015 there will still be more than 600 million illiterate people.
"That's two years after the U.N. literacy decade is to end," Schmidt said. "And that's not fast enough for me."
Cliff Schmidt is a determined man. He is certainly a man capable of making this effort a success. I count him among my actual friends in the industry. He is a multifaceted guy -- an MIT graduate who later put in time protecting the free world by serving as an officer on nuclear submarines on missions bordering hostile waters. Or maybe, in fact more likely, he even entered hostile waters. He doesn't give a lot of information about those days. However, Schmidt is not one of those fake-ass "If I told you I'd have to kill you" types who have worked in mostly innocuous military and intelligence situations. He's the real deal. The tall, slight, soft-spoken Schmidt is no softie. Well, he did formerly work at Microsoft on some of its more illustrious projects, and also at BEA Systems. Schmidt has also done a stint in film making.
Maybe we'll even see a movie about this some day if Literacy Bridge achieves the success it envisions. Just who will play Schmidt? Take Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, make him a geek and put him in charge of a nonprofit aiming to help the world ... and you'll have Cliff Schmidt.