Gates gets degree, urges Harvard grads to fight global poverty
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Thirty-three years after dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft, Chairman Bill Gates returned to the Cambridge, Mass., campus to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree and called on graduates to fight global poverty and disease.
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In a major strategy shift, the Cambridge foundation that plans to provide laptop computers to poor children around the globe is asking wealthy individuals and corporations to help pick up the tab by purchasing hundreds or thousands of the machines.
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Internet censorship in nations such as China won't work because business needs will outweigh efforts to restrict information, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told students at Stanford University.
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SEATTLE - The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged $3 million to provide aid to South Asian countries devastated by an earthquake and tsunamis.
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The Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation took its support of AIDS-related research and care to a new level Wednesday, announcing a $500 million grant to an international fund that provides AIDS assistance in poor countries.
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CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos and Declan McCullagh offer their thoughts on Bill Gates' call for businesses to help out more in the developing world.
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Microsoft's Bill Gates calls on firms to engage in creative capitalism that creates a profit while helping the poor.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday pledged $83.5 million to fight malaria by paying for better controls, vaccine research and prevention of a disease that kills more than a million people a year.
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Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, told a gathering of students of the University of California at Berkeley yesterday that computers would be the ticket to a good career in the near future.
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Microsoft founder Bill Gates has donated  $900,000 to set up a training facility for health professionals  working with AIDS in Africa's Great Lakes region.
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BERLIN, Oct 4 (IPS) - Imagine the world's poorest trading their way  out of poverty. A grand vision indeed, but how to turn it into  reality?
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Students from around the world pitched Bill Gates as part of a worldwide software development challenge.
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One Laptop Per Child project leader encouraging wealthy countries to buy $100 laptops for poor economies.
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(InfoWorld) - Forty students from around the world got to pitch their software projects to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Tuesday as part of a worldwide software development challenge. Gates as well as Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, asked questions about and tried out software innovations from the students, who visited Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters from Egypt, Japan, France, Poland, Korea, the U.S., and the U.K. TheÂ Imagine CupÂ is Microsoft's worldwide software design competition for students. This year it challenged participating teams to build a product that can enable better education for everyone. It has attracted 100,000 students in 100 countries. The final competition will happen in Korea in August and Tuesday's event was an opportunity for some of the leading teams to present their ideas to Gates on Microsoft's campus. The group from Egypt designed software that would allow teachers to input test questions and automatically generate a test that is modified for students with special needs, such as dyslexia or attention deficit disorder. A math test, for example, suited for a dyslexic student would use images of houses rather than numbers in addition problems. The U.K. team's project would allow kids to learn software programming. Looking at an image of a fish bowl, a user could, for example, move one of the fish and then see on the side of the screen the code that makes the fish move. Gates called the software "fantastic." "The magic of software can do far more amazing things than people imagine," Gates said in his introduction to the event. Some of the other teams have developed social networking services that let students with similar interests from around the world meet online. The U.S. team had a service that allows students to help each other learn languages, improving their rankings on the site each time they help out another member. The Imagine Cup started five years ago and initially attracted 10,000 participants. Then, the contest had a more general technology focus. "It took off when we connected technology to a social cause," said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism Group. Last year students were challenged to focus on medical innovations. The winner of the first Imagine Cup, Tu Nguyen, spoke to the competitors visiting Microsoft's campus, urging them to let the judges see their passion for their projects. A student at the University of Nebraska when he won, Nguyen has since built a company, DocCenter, to commercialize his invention and recently received a $375 million investment. He developed a system for his parents' Vietnamese restaurant that lets wait staff take orders in English using handheld devices and then translates the orders into other languages understood by the cooks, displaying them on monitors in the kitchen. He built the system because his family relied on him for that translation service and he wanted to get out of the restaurant business. While some of the bright students progressing in the competition could be targets for jobs at high-tech companies like Microsoft, such companies say they are severely restricted in doing so by the limited number of worker visas made available by the government. U.S.Â lawmakers are currently wranglingÂ over new immigration legislation and high-tech companies are lobbying them to dramatically raise the number of visas the government issues for foreign workers and students. Currently, the government issues yearly 65,000 work visas plus an additional 20,000 visas for students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.
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Working in poverty-stricken areas gives corporate travelers an up-close look at global problems such as disease, illiteracy or injustice. It also puts them in a position to bring about change.
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Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will sign a co-operation agreement with Unesco today to improve access to computers, the Internet and IT training in developing countries.
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A campaign to get life-saving vaccines  to millions of children in poor countries received a $1 billion  cash boost from Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and the  government of Norway on Tuesday.