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This year marks a milestone –  half the world is connected to the Internet.  But they don’t all get the broadband speeds needed to view modern web content and it still leaves half the world disconnected.  What’s more, the expansion of the Internet into new geographic regions is slowing down.  As a result the gap in digital literacy is growing and people, especially in rural communities, are being left behind.

The  Foundation for Overcoming the Digital Divide was created to address this issue with a new idea for curating web content and delivering it to people in remote communities worldwide.  We can improve the lives of billions of people by providing access to a new web domain, for instance .odd, that’s delivered to people by television.  The new domain contains thousands of websites that are used with permission from the other web domains.

Education

Distance learning  is transforming education.  Both undergraduate and graduate courses can be taken for credit online.  Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are available for all age groups in many subjects.

The global E-Learning market is expected to exceed $275 billion by 2022 and there are more than six million students in the US alone.   They benefit by being able to learn from home at their own pace.  But that’s not the whole story.

Nearly one-in-three children worldwide between the ages 12 to 17 do not attend school.  Many of them are beyond the reach of the Internet.  Our data broadcasting network can provide access to distance learning for people everywhere.

Curated Web Domain

There are plenty of domains on the Web today.  They’re available to anyone who can get online.  But the Foundation for Overcoming the Digital Divide is building and delivering something new – a curated web domain containing thousands of sites that are selected by an editorial team based on quality and relevance.

There are millions of web sites.  They vary widely in quality and some are very offensive.   Our curated domain, .odd, contains far fewer sites selected for their quality.

Technology

Pixelstream Information Transfer (PXIT) is like color-by-numbers because the pattern and the color palette are known in advance.  But instead of picking the colors for artistic reasons, we choose them to reflect the contents of a file we want to send.

A video capture device connects the (yellow) video output from  television receiver to the USB port of a computer.  It converts video into a sequence of frames and delivers them one-at-a-time to software.  Once the software recognizes the computer-generated images it has all the information it needs to reconstruct the file.

Data broadcasting is an effective solution for both the long haul and for the final mile.  Satellite television can be used to broadcast data over the entire continent and television white spaces can be used (except in major urban areas) to deliver data to residences.

As files are received they are ingested into a server running on the user’s computer.  The server could be accessed by a web browser that also runs on the user’s computer or by nearby devices using WiFi.

Here’s what a visual datacast looks like on TV.  And to find out how easy it is to get set up to receive and access information please see “Setting Up and Using Your PXIT Information Appliance.”

Technology

Pixelstream Information Transfer (PXIT) is like color-by-numbers because the pattern and the color palette are known in advance.  But instead of picking the colors for artistic reasons, we choose them to reflect the contents of a file we want to send.

A video capture device connects the (yellow) video output from  television receiver to the USB port of a computer.  It converts video into a sequence of frames and delivers them one-at-a-time to software.  Once the software recognizes the computer-generated images it has all the information it needs to reconstruct the file.

Data broadcasting is an effective solution for both the long haul and for the final mile.  Satellite television can be used to broadcast data over the entire continent and television white spaces can be used (except in major urban areas) to deliver data to residences.

As files are received they are ingested into a server running on the user’s computer.  The server could be accessed by a web browser that also runs on the user’s computer or by nearby devices using WiFi.

Here’s what a visual datacast looks like on TV.  And to find out how easy it is to get set up to receive and access information please see “Setting Up and Using Your PXIT Information Appliance.”