The balloon that helped me take this selfie could help us win the fight against poverty. It’s part of an amazing project called FarmBeats. Here’s how it works: The whole system is powered by solar panels. You place a small number of sensors in the ground. You then attach your smart phone with the camera facing down to either a balloon (like I did) or a drone. You walk around the fields with the camera, creating an aerial map of the farm. Data from both the sensors and the phone are transmitted via TV white space to your computer, where an edge device stitches everything together into a data map.