Webaroo

This is a very interesting startup that aims to bring the entire Internet on to your harddisk! Well, not exactly. They have products to prepare knowledge-packs of couple of Gigabytes on different topics, that you can download on to your laptop and access the resources without needing an active Internet connection. So, for example, if you were to download a knowledge pack on New York, then you will have access to all information about subways, restaurants, and night clubs of NYC, without requiring an Internet connection. They employ interesting information retrieval techniques to gather useful and relevant information through Google, Wikipedia, and other resources.

Such a tool can be very useful for rural Internet kiosks as well, where information can be downloaded and cached locally. This information can be on things like basic healthcare, or educational material, or agricultural information. My friend, Maheedhar Kolla, is quite interested in exploring these things further.