Open Content Alliance, an unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities has announced an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

Members include Yahoo, the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

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To bridge the Digital Divide, MIT and companies like AMD, Motorola, and Yahoo are pushing devices and services aimed at bringing cutting-edge tech to parts of the world that need it most.

Applied Minds, led by inventor Danny Hillis, is developing such imaginative inventions as “touch tables”: the surface of each is a high-resolution computer display showing a satellite-camera view of the world. By putting your hands on the table and spreading them, you zoom into a region, a city, a neighborhood. You can also slide your hand over the table to expose the view as captured at an earlier time.

Google Inc. plans to build up to 1 million square feet of offices at NASA Ames Research Center and collaborate with the space agency on research surrounding topics such as supercomputing that could benefit everything from moon launches to online searches.

It will also involve biotechnology, information technology and nanotechnology.