ARTICLE: "Connecting With Developing World: Millicom Grows Rapidly By Selling Wireless to Customers a Second at a Time," by Sarah Childress, Wall Street Journal, 28 August 2007, p. A8.

In a nutshell, why the Gap gets shrunk on all sorts of levels:

As markets in the U.S., Europe and much of Asia become saturated with wireless phones, an increasing number of telecommunications companies have looked to emerging markets. But this has created a challenge: squeezing profits out of a population that has little disposable income.

Classic bottom-of-the-pyramid packaging and selling by Millicom.

Want better governments in the Gap? Create connectivity that makes transaction possible and then watch the people demand it for themselves on the basis of volume. Make the pie bigger and show the government it can have more so much more easily by letting the public get more.

You'll say, "Cells are easier and don't portend much for other stuff," & I'll say you're wrong.

Every time we fill up Asia, we not only have to find new customers on that subject, but we've created the productive capacity and the new smarts to sell at the BOP.

Marx beget Lenin beget Mao beget Pol Pot and so on, with each going further back in time. Well, by adding Asia "too fast" to capitalism (all those poor!), we're finally doing the same: going historically upstream.