Random Accesses

There are two ways to look at the explosive growth of the Internet: One is to celebrate the fact that in the 15 years since it became commercially available, what began as an obscure military technology morphed into a global phenomenon that is regularly accessed by over a billion people. The other is to ask why the world's other five billion folks aren't online yet.

Enter Meraki. Meraki Networks, Inc., is a three-year-old company headed by Sanjit Biswas, a polite and bespectacled Massachusetts Institute of Technology student-cum-CEO on permanent hiatus from the pursuit of a doctoral degree in computer science.

Biswas says his goal, and that of Meraki, is to "connect the next billion people." Biswas and his engineers are almost exclusively programmers, yet Meraki doesn't sell software. Instead it sells Wi-Fi hardware—relatively cheap, commodity hardware built by outside vendors. It's a combination of this hardware and Meraki's software that yields a kind of magic that Biswas believes will go viral the way few things have.

Source: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa025&articleID=38462CAE-E7F2-99DF-321E78970AEB35C0