LibriVox aims to provide audio of books in the public domain. Not many entries yet but I was able to find one of my favorite poems - The Tiger by William Blake (click on the link to hear)

They do have the disclaimer below -

LibriVox recordings are Public Domain in the USA. If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.

And interestingly audio is provide not in only in mp3 format but also in the Open Source ogg vorbis format.

With Google providing so many public domain books with enough volunteer readers there could well be an excellent collection at LibriVox.

This is certainly good use of technology - providing farmers with information via SMS instead of PC kiosks.

Sean Blagsvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan of Microsoft Research India (blog) explain -

We replaced the client PCs with SMS enabled phones. On the server, we attached a smart phone through USB to their PC server. So, we effectively have an SMS gateway that receives incoming SMS messages and converts into database calls and the response was also converted to an SMS message and the result sent back to the phone that sent it. The authentication was through the SIM card (essentially the phone number).

With widespread mobile phone usage in the developing world, smart solutions like these might effectively replace PCs as we know them and open up a market for "smart" phones and other "sub-PC" devices.

Unix is a large part of my work life and it was interesting to read Marc Hedlund's blog on O'Reilly Radar where he notes -

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, and bash is in the process of becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.