Broadband makes tiny town an English-teaching hub

The nearest Wal-Mart is two hours away, and only foul weather, a deer in the road or a Washakie County sheriff's deputy would slow down anyone with a mind to drive there faster.

Yet Ten Sleep, population 350, is just as connected as any place these days, and home to a new company that is outsourcing jobs not from the United States to the Far East, but in the opposite direction.

Eleutian Technology hires people in towns across northern Wyoming to teach English to Koreans of all ages using Skype, the free online calling and person-to-person video service. Two years old, Eleutian already is one of Wyoming's fastest-growing businesses.

The company has close to 300 teachers hooked up to more than 15,000 students in Korea, and CEO Kent Holiday said he's just getting started.

"Our plan was never to be a company that had a few thousand subscribers," Holiday said. "It's a $100 billion market just between Korea, Japan and China, and so we wanted to be the leader and we wanted to have millions of users."

Holiday got the idea for the company after a short stint teaching English in Korea in the early 1990s. He went to work in Korea's telecommunications industry and eventually became a top executive of Korea Telecom (nyse: KTC - news - people ).

All along, he kept in mind that language education someday would be possible online. He made his move in 2006, getting grief from friends about quitting his high-six-figures job. "I said `You know what? The time's right,'" he said.