"About 2 billion people on earth have a smartphone with a decent Internet connection, but 5 billion are largely or entirely offline, according to global figures by the ITU."

"That gap is (surprise, surprise) a big opportunity for Silicon Valley. Google and Facebook are already on high-profile campaigns to connect the unconnected. And they're betting they can make billions of dollars getting people without electricity or toilets to pay for the Internet."

"You could call the Google approach inspiring — or bizarre."

"'I'm a balloonatic, and that's a self-coined term,' says Pamela Desrochers, a product development engineer at Google. 'We believe that balloons are going to be the way of the future and we're going to bring Internet to everyone.'"