Living in a Nano World by Lee Cantelon

Inter-connectivity.
Nano seconds separate
one continent from another.
Fiber optics hum, while.
Satellites drift, dream-like
across the midnight sky.
Peering down, the earth
is no longer dark, but
fastly being lit by the
soft glow of cell phones,
and laptop screens.

Someone asked me which country used cell phones the most to access the World Wide Web. I thought about it for a moment. The very way they asked the question prompted me to think that the answer was not going to be the United States.

"Indonesia," they finally said, sensing my hesitation.

"What?!!"

This conversation gave birth to a new Words project that is currently in development, consuming our interest to the setting aside of other ones, that while colorful and of which we are proud, do not offer the impact of using new technology to touch hearts and lives from Bora Bora to Katmandu.

The spread of cell phone technology is something that seems to have snuck up on us. Now it is fastly becoming a Tsunami. Once the domain of the privileged, it is now common in villages far removed from city life, where even peasant cultures are accessing the Internet.

New York writer, Maria Wang, described her return to China earlier this year. "When I left my province in China for the United Sates, I was leaving behind considerable poverty. Ten years later I returned to find the same farmers pushing wheel borrows of straw and manure, all the while updating their cell phones every six months."

prototype design: map project
Words World Map Project
Our team in the Northwest are now at work on a project that would make the people in Cupertino proud, very Apple-like. Dave Murray is creating a navigation page that will allow users to rotate the globe to their location and then click. A dialogue box opens with information about The Words availability in the language of that region. Dave is also designing a flat map of the world that will do the same, easier to navigate on some systems depending on what phone or PDA is being used..

View a preview of the World Map Project here: http://thewords.com/world/

Icons Instead of Words
Where literacy is an issue, we are enhancing the world map with visual navigation, using simple, easily understood icons that indicate whenever audio versions are available. Narrations and music on The Words site can be played or downloaded to phones. The future generation of phones, even in the developing world, dual function as MP3 players. Once downloaded, audio can be outputted to a laptop and burned to CD, spreading the content outside of single use to a wider audience, truly "viral."

Two, three years ago, this might have seemed farfetched. Not any more.

Shout it from the rooftops. No longer in this temple or on that holy mountain will people exclusively congregate to hear the word of truth, but it will shine down from the sky to the most remote place, to the loneliest heart, to the seeker and the one the conventional church will never reach.

Lee Cantelon
Hollywood