If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.

In fact, that's where my vision of the coming digital opportunity is somewhat different from other people's. I divide it into three parts. One is the office. That's the one I'm most excited about and is the most concrete.

The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software.

In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren [Buffett] things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.

If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.

Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.