I was brought up in a very open rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so my imagination was crazy.

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.

It wasn't not being famous any more or even not being a recording artist. It was having nobody who needed me no phones ringing nothing to do. Because I'm still too young to do nothing. I was only 24 when all that happened. Now at 40 I feel I've got more to give than I ever have.

Like a lot of you I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

There are 4 billion cell phones in use today. Many of them are in the hands of market vendors rickshaw drivers and others who've historically lacked access to education and opportunity. Information networks have become a great leveler and we should use them together to help lift people out of poverty and give them a freedom from want.

I used to listen to my dad a lot as a way of trying to be close to him as well because my parents were divorced and I didn't spend that much time with him. And I used to put headphones on and listen to my dad talk and sing and I found that quite... bonding with him in a weird way.

Personally I just got one of these Vonage IP phones. It's actually pretty cool. It comes with one of these Cisco ATA routers where you just plug an analog handset in.

I actually bought a travel guitar and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar and you can plug headphones into it but it's acoustic or semi-acoustic.

Equipped with cell phones beepers and handheld computers the 'conspicuously industrious' blur the line between home and office by working anytime anywhere.

I'm looking to evolve the concept of the new renaissance artist taking the world by storm through the art of public display and demonstration with technical savvy using cell phones and computers.