Digicel is the first recipient from a $10 million fund set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the project is designed to speed up the arrival of cellphone banking in Haiti. The effort follows other mobile banking projects such as the M-PESA program in Kenya.

For now, the Haiti Tcho Tcho service, as the banking program is known, allows customers to make deposits and withdrawals at retail outlets, as well as transfer money between Tcho Tcho accounts. Over time, the service is designed to expand to bill payment and international transfers, as well as the ability to pay for government services.

Bill Gates has been a big advocate of establishing banking and savings in emerging markets as a means of breaking the cycle of poverty in developing countries, and cellphones have shown particular promise as a means to provide authentication as well as to deal with the fact that many of the poor live in remote rural areas, making traditional branch-based banking not economically feasible. He touted the Kenyan program during a tour of U.S. colleges last year.

The grant comes at just about the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake on that island nation. Even before the quake, only one in 10 Haitians had access to a traditional bank. Digicel got the grant for being the first company to set up a mobile banking service in the country. A further $1.5 million will go to the next operator to launch service there, while the remaining $6 million will be handed out proportionally to the companies that handle the first five million transactions.

U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten said that the move is part of America’s effort to provide long-term assistance “to help the Haitian people build back better.”

“The role of innovative companies like Digicel will be critical to ensuring the sustainability of our investments here,” Merten said in a statement.

BoomTown provided continuing coverage of the Yahoo (YHOO) merry-go-round. This time, PR head Jill Nash announced her departure. As the company’s chief communications officer, she’s had a challenging two-year run. New CEO Carol Bartz definitely has some PR ideas of her own, including offering cash prizes to employees who provide info on their colleagues who leak information to the press. Not a huge deterrent yet, apparently–it didn’t take long for BoomTown to get info on both Nash’s farewell memo and Bartz’s bounty system. Next, New Networks, the publisher behind BarelyPolitical and its hugely viral Obama Girl videos, has widened its purview to include the tech sector with BarelyDigital, which the online network has envisioned to include regular shows, tech news remixes and the like. It’s rumored that Obama Girl will be making a cameo appearance or two. If the first two features are any indication, the future looks pretty funny. In another round of executive musical chairs, Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL ad head Lynda Clarizio will be leaving the online service, to be replaced by former Yahoo ad exec Greg Coleman. Microsoft (MSFT) is launching a slick new celebrity site on MSN called Wonderwall, created, designed and produced by BermanBraun Interactive, a Hollywood company run by former Yahoo media chief Lloyd Braun. And speaking of musical chairs, MSN is clearly upping its content ante–earlier this week, it hired Yahoo’s recent media head Scott Moore, who used to work at Microsoft.

MediaMemo asked: What happens when one of the world’s richest men lets loose a swarm (a small swarm) of mosquitoes at a high-end conference? Nothing too exciting, really, but when you consider that the stunt was the publicity-generating part of Bill Gates’s talk at TED, which was a discussion of malaria and some of the problems the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is facing head-on, it gets pretty compelling. Kindle 2.0, the new generation of the device dubbed the “iPod of the book world” will be unveiled Monday at a New York press event, but how many of the devices have been sold thus far? Amazon’s (AMZN) not telling, but Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimates the number at 500,000–and believes that the Kindle will be a $1.2 billion business next year. Obviously, a lot will depend on Monday and the new device’s reception. MediaMemo also took some time out this week to wish Facebook a happy fifth birthday, and to stack its track record next to Google’s at the same age, with interesting results. Even the pros are getting hit hard these days–in its quarterly earnings report this week, News Corp. (NWS) missed its estimates, recorded an $8.4 billion write-off and lowered its guidance. CEO Rupert Murdoch admitted that the downturn is worse than he thought. He also admitted that he spent $2.8 billion too much for Dow Jones. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

Digital Daily followed the trial of four Google executives this week on criminal charges of defamation and breach of privacy after a much-publicized two-year investigation. Google (GOOG) insists the charges are unwarranted and “akin to prosecuting mail service employees for hate speech letters sent in the post.” Clearly, the ultimate outcome will have a huge impact on the future of a free, open Internet. MySpace said this week that it has identified and ousted 90,000 registered sex offenders–and those are just the ones brilliant enough to use their real names. There’s no way of knowing how many are actually using the service or how to prevent them from re-registering once they’re deleted. A free an open Internet, indeed. DD also pondered the future (or lack thereof) of the Motorola (MOT) handset division. Co-CEO Sanjay Jha says the company is committed to making the business work, but its products are looking boring and outdated, and a turnaround would be prohibitively expensive to execute. In the words of one analyst, the company’s problems are “gruesome.” On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft continues to vehemently deny reports that it’ll be producing its own smartphone. In a report this week, analysts from Broadpoint.AmTech speculated that the device could be uncrated later this month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Meanwhile, it’s been up in the air for two years whether or not iPhones will ever be uncrated in historic Georgetown. Apple (AAPL) has been around the table a few times now with preservationists wary of the architectural impact of an Apple store, no matter how much the business traffic is needed in the neighborhood. Looks like perseverance may have finally paid off, though–Georgetown’s Apple store could open later this year.

In Personal Technology this week, Walt Mossberg took a look at a program called Foxmarks, which sets out to synchronize bookmarks among all of your browsers and all of your machines. Sound a little too handy to actually work well? Walt found it does a pretty good job, with a few caveats. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt responds to readers who want to know more about doing “techie” maintenance on their PCs to keep them running well, whether or not to buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and options for email within Windows 7, which won’t ship with a built-in email program. In the Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret tests Google Latitude, an opt-in program that lets users track one another’s movements on their smartphones using GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell towers. Kind of like Gawker Stalker, only with permission and without Lindsay Lohan (unless you happen to be Lindsay Lohan).

Last but not least, Silicon Valley lost one of its own this week. The widely admired and much loved Mike Homer, whose rare, severe illness was a rallying point for many over the past months, passed away last weekend and was laid to rest on Thursday.

More next week.

Before she ever dated Bill Gates, let alone married him, Melinda French was a damned good product manager at Microsoft. She brought to market Microsoft Publisher, which popularized the step-by-step wizards that have since spread through software everywhere. And she made a valiant, if failed, effort to radically simplify computers with Microsoft Bob. Now, with her husband, she heads the world’s largest charitable foundation, bringing to philanthropy a rare combination of compassion and the business skills she honed at Microsoft. Ms. Gates received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics from Duke University in 1986 and a master’s in business administration from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in 1987. She is a mother of three and a former member of the board of trustees of Duke and a former co-chair of the Washington State Governor’s Commission on Early Learning.

• Walt welcomes Gates to the stage. Gates recalls her first meeting with Walt, years ago in Washington, D.C., to discuss Microsoft Publisher. Walt notes that he gave the product a positive review.
• So you’re the co-chair of the Gates Foundation now, Walt notes. Is there any similarity between what you’re doing now and what you did at Microsoft (MSFT)? Gates thinks there is. The crossover, she says, is that there are amazing advances in technology, yet these profound advances are not available to the developing world. She’s using her experience from Microsoft to bring those advances to the developing world: “The skill-set I developed at Microsoft is very transferable to what I do now.”

  

• Discussing the foundation’s financial resources, Gates notes that she could tap out its wealth simply by attempting to fix the education system in California alone. Solving problems outright is not its role. The Gates Foundation’s role, she says, is to take the financial risks that often prohibit governments from beginning to address societal problems.

• For example, the foundation invests in the development of new vaccines that governments or pharmaceutical companies might not be willing to devote resources to. The foundation essentially aids the development of tools that others can use to solve health problems worldwide, Gates says. Its role is a “catalytic” one, she explains. It “incents” people to cure health problems.
• You must be bombarded by people who like to tell you how to spend that money, says Walt. How do you handle that? Gates says it’s gotten easier. Once we really defined who we were and what we stand for–”All lives have equal value”–it became easier to manage our goals, she says.
• Gates says that if we just took the vaccinations we give to children in the states and brought them to the Third World, we’d save millions of lives. Notes the irony of this: There is a cure for tetanus in the rich world, for example, but it’s not available in the poor world.
• Walt asks how the foundation is run. Gates says the CEO runs it. She and Bill set strategy. That said, they don’t want to be actively involved in its day-to-day management. There must be a family presence, though.

  

• How will things change with Bill’s transition? I know things will change with Bill’s new role, she says, but “I don’t expect him to wear a tool belt around the house or anything.” Gates says the overall picture remains to be seen. She expects he’ll spend two to three days a week working on foundation issues.
• Talk turns to education, and the high number of kids who drop out of high school. No tracking of their progress, she notes, something she calls an “absolute travesty.” On other fronts, why aren’t we exciting our children about education? she asks. Why aren’t we offering them hope, possibilities? Why don’t we stress the need for four years of high school and the option of college? Why is it that we’re willing to allow so many of our children to fail out of high school? She says we must determine what’s working in successful public-school systems and recreate it in others.
• What are the elements of a successful system? Walt asks. Gates: A rigorous curriculum, great teachers and great relationships with the kids–which means smaller learning communities. And you need bold change agents in the system itself. People who are willing to take risks.
• What do you think about the teachers union? Walt asks. Gates notes that it’s very difficult to move out underperformers under the current model. That needs to change, she says, adding that we do need to incentivize teachers. Why not change that mindset then? asks Walt. That’s not our role, says Gates. Our role is to develop the right model, not negotiate the contracts themselves.
• What about teacher colleges? Do we need to do something to change the way we train teachers? Gates feels the system could be better. Teachers need rewards, stimulation, autonomy, and an ability to make changes in students’ lives.
• Q&A: What is the time-frame for the foundation to reach its goals? Gates says that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is mandated to spend all of its resources 50 years after their deaths, which is part of creating a model for others to follow.
• Another question: How can the D6 audience help? Gates says that tech-focused audience members need to think of how to transfer what works in their business to the problems of the world. Whatever tugs your heart, she advises, go there.

For more coverage: See The Wall Street Journal.

A note about our coverage: This live blog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations expeditiously written and posted to the Web as quickly as we were able. It was not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.