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One Laptop Per Child Gets US Release
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation has focused its attention on the poorest kids in the United States, setting up a north American office and approaching state governments to get them interested in the cheapo laptop project.
Dreamt up by former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop project was tasked with helping poorer nations bridge the digital divide, developing a cheap (sub-$100) and rugged ‘XO’ laptop which they hoped would be bought en masse by Third World governments.
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15 January, 2008
One Laptop Per Child Programme Claims 4 Million Orders
Yesterday, a spokesperson for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme revealed that Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have all tendered commitments to purchase one million Linux laptops through the ambitious US-based programme.
As we reported back in November last year, OLPC aims to distribute millions of Linux-based laptop computers to needy children in developing countries around the world, all for free.
The Linux-based laptops come with their own power sources (including wind-up) and offer a dual-mode display, which gives users a full-colour, transmissive DVD mode and a secondary black and white reflective and sunlight-readable display at 3× the resolution.
The hard-disk free machines – still in the ‘concept’ stage – will be powered by a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, and come with 500MB of Flash memory.
Sporting four USB ports, the laptops will be fitted with wireless broadband that allows them to work as a mesh network.
This means that each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbour and create ad hoc, local area networks for sharing data and connections.
The OLPC has stated that it will begin production when it has paid-for orders for between five million and 10m laptops, and plans to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007.
Nicholas Negroponte, head of the OLPC project and former director of MIT Media Labs also sees the project as a means to promote the mass adoption of Linux.
So far, AMD, eBay, Google, Nortel, Red Hat, and a number of other technology companies have all signed up to help support the project
Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the project though, with India’s Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee describing it as “pedagogically suspect,” adding that the country needed to put teachers in classrooms before worrying about buying laptops for students.
(To be honest, we had to look up what ‘pedagogically’ meant, and can tell you that it means “In a didactic manner”)
One Laptop Per Child
1 August, 2006
One Laptop per Child: The Machine, The Impact
The $100 laptop project launched by MIT Media Lab, gained a big boost yesterday when the labs Nicholas Negroponte met with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
Kofi Annan opening address summed up the project and its hopes succinctly, “The true meaning of one laptop per child, is not a matter of just giving a laptop to a child, as if bestowing on them some magic charm. The magic lies within. Within each child there is a scientist, scholar, or just plain citizen in the making. This initiative is design to bring it forth into the light of day.”
No right thinking individual could possibly doubt the value of this project. There may be a lot of commercial concerns, but we’ll get to that later on.
The Specs
It will be Linux-based, full-colour laptop that uses a wind-up handle as a power source. Run at 500MHz, with 1GB of memory and a built in 1 Megapixel camera it should run most applications that could be required (remember Linux doesn’t suck up a lot of the processors power). Just the laptop screen alone is expected to cost around $35, pretty good when a screen on a laptop is normally $150 alone.
“USB ports galore” will be provided as will built-in WiFi. The only thing it will be missing is a hard drive. We’d imagine that this will be down to the additional power drain they have, and to try and maintain the necessary ruggedness. The networking will be via a wireless mesh.
The driving theory of the project is that Learning is seamless – not just something that you do at school. This has lead to the need for an adaptable design, enabling it to be used as an electronic book (with the fingers at the back controlling the cursor), a games machine, TV set and, of course, laptop.
All software will be open source as in Negroponte view “open source software is the key to innovation in software and learning technology.”
It’s been reported that Steve Jobs had offered Apple OSX for nothing for use in the project, but it was turned down as it wasn’t open source.
Availability and impact
The laptops will be financed though domestic resources (ie the countries government), donors, and what was rather mysteriously described as “other arrangements.” It will be at no cost to the recipients themselves.
The current plans call for producing five to ten million units near the start of late 2006 or early 2007, launching in six countries. Not bad considering that Negroponte first publicly announced it in January 2005. The promise is to bring the price down at each technical advance.
Negroponte spoke about “the same laptop being commercially available, at say $200” for small businesses. They hope to announce the construction partners soon.
The impact of this project could be huge on many fronts – if it comes into being – and we’ve no reason to imagine that it won’t. Giving any and every child access to a computer, and teaching them to use it and inspiring them will be the start of a revolution bring free communication and equal learning to all citizens.
We don’t think that the impact will stop there. If the world is aware that there are laptops, perfectly able to carry out most daily required computing functions, that only cost $100, why would anyone want to pay for other ‘full price’ machines? The impact on the supply of hardware in the part of the world that already has computers will be huge.
All power to this project. Let’s help technology change the world for the better.
MIT Media Lab One Laptop Per Child
Watch the Launch video(Real video)
17 November, 2005
OLPC XO Laptop: European Orders Being Taken
Europeans can now can legitimately order their own One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO Laptop.
The XO Laptop has been available for around a year in the US under two schemes – buying one to donate and Give One. Get One, which for double the price of a machine the purchaser would feel good for giving one away as well as receiving one themselves.
It’s the Give One. Get One. scheme that will be operating in Europe.
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18 November, 2008
RM Gets HP 2133 Mini-Note PC On UK Education Exclusive
English computing stalwarts, RM announced that they have the exclusive contract to distribute new HP 2133 Mini-Note PC to schools, colleges and universities in the UK.
A mere day before, HP global had announced the machine would be sold into education.
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11 April, 2008
The Wired Store, NYC: Gadget Feast: Photo Essay
Well worth a visit in Manhattan, New York is tech magazine’s Wired’s “pop-up retail store” at 160 Wooster Street, SoHo.
Opened for the holiday shopping season, the warehouse space stokes gadget lust to the max, letting punters test drive the latest consumer gadgets and gear.
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20 December, 2007
Microsoft Plans To Double Global PC Ownership To 2 Billion By 2015
Microsoft is hell bent on doubling the numbers of PCs on the planet by 2015, and is prepared to put its vast pots of money where its mouth is.
The company has announced that it will be charging governments in developing countries a paltry three dollars for copies of Windows and Office – so long as the software is being installed on computers given to schoolchildren.
Naturally, such a move would also have the happy side effect of getting the world’s young hooked into the Wonderful World o’Windows at an early stage and should reduce the amount of dodgy software slopping around undeveloped countries where piracy often runs rife.
Microsoft’s bargain basement software sale opens opportunities for tie-ins with the One Laptop Per Child project and Intel’s World Ahead Program , but Bill Gates maintains the hardware issue isn’t the toughest nut to crack.
“It’s not just the cost of the PC, but rather these issues of connectivity, of the training, the maintenance, the support, all of those have to come together,” said Gates.
More Microsoft moves
In its quest to stamp its size nines all over emerging markets, Microsoft announced that it was teaming up with Lenovo to undergo joint research at Lenovo’s Beijing lab and that they intended to double the number of global training centres to 200 by 2009.
Microsoft also revealed plans to build a Web portal for training prospective Indian IT workers and its intention to form public-private partnerships to help governments in five developing countries improve public services through technology.
Source
23 April, 2007
OLPC: Production Machine Arrives: Photos
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement got a boost this week when their first production model arrived at their offices.
There’s little surprise that at such a tech’d up organisation that someone had a digital camera there to capture the moment.
Have a flick though the snaps and you’ll see the sheer joy of those involved as they get to touch the baby that they’ve been working so hard on.
For us, the biggest surprise is the sheer smallness of it – when you see it sitting on top another ‘normal’ laptop it will be clear.
The design on the first OLPC machine has stayed pretty similar to the version that was floated when it was ‘virtually’ ready, with the exception of the lack on handle to produce electricity.
Details of who will supply key components are also starting to emerge with ChiLin of Taiwan, manufacturing the display using specialized plastic optical components by 3M. Interestingly the rest of it will be manufactured by Quanta, who are, in OLPC words,
possibly the largest company few people have heard of. Quanta manufactures more laptops than any other company in the world (almost 1/3rd of the total made), whether branded HP or Apple or others.
OLPC are planning three generations of laptops with the first shipping in early 2007.
We’ve been avid followers of the OLPC or $100 laptop as it used to be called since the announcement of an order for 4 million machines.
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
22 November, 2006
Mesh Networks Discovered By The Mainstream
Mesh Networks are going to grow enormously by the end of the decade, according to ABI research. This ‘revalation’ is following years technical-types raving on about them.
While predicting “stellar growth rate”, they don’t think it will eat into current providers of current infrastructure, but instead new markets will emerge such as alternative service providers, municipalities and college campus’s. Oh and buy happy co-incidence, ABI have a report that you can buy about the subject, “Wireless Mesh Networking: Technologies and Deployment Strategies for Metropolitan and Campus Networks.”
Indeed, at the launch of the One Laptop Per Child event earlier in the week, Nicholas Negroponte explained that Mesh Networking was intrinsic to the success of the project, as many countries it would be used in do not have communication infrastructures.
Mesh Networks explained
Mesh Networks, have been spoken about, and set up by some, for many years. The idea behind it is simple. Each user of the network expands the reach of the network, by letting information pass through their machine to its eventual destination, be that another user of the network, or an external connection.
Using this a small community of people could share a single network connection. The network is ‘organic’ – everyone who uses it, contributes to it.
There are technical challenges. As each person on the network could disappear at any time, the routing of the information needs to be highly dynamic.
At the start of this week, Cisco announced their first Mesh network products, following their purchase of Airespace for $450 million in December of 2004.
ABI Research
18 November, 2005

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