Guardian UK audio interview with Nicholas Negroponte at CES 2008
Stream the Interview in an ASX playlist
Posted in the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast at http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/
January 16, 2008
Mary Lou Jepsen on NPR
Mary Lou Jepsen, who invented, co-invented and coordinated the development of many of the most innovative parts of the OLPC XO laptop as chief technology officer, talks about her business project Pixel Qi to bring the OLPC technologies to commercial products, to drive the cost down.
Listen to it at: http://www.npr.org/
December 3, 2007
Nicholas Negroponte talks about the $188 Laptop on NPR
It’s not possible for a commercial entity to “compete” with OLPC. When we see laptops [Classmate PC] that are being sold for $230 or $200 and we scratch deeper and we find that that’s promise if they order several million 3 years from now. Because otherwise it would be sheer dumping. You can’t make it for that price. So what we find ourselves doing ironically and it has slowed us down but not very much, is competing on laptops. And that’s what is a shame. The number 300,000 is what we are building by the end of this year, and we just started building last week, that still multiplies to several million machines next year without even counting on significant growth.
By analogy: If I were the world food program and I were in a remote village serving food to the children at school and McDonalds sets up something into that village, McDonalds might view the world food program as a competitor but the world food program does not view mcdonalds as a competitor. And that’s the situation I’m in. And if McDonalds can serve the whole village then the world food program would actually retreat. And I don’t have any needs to sell laptops, I just want to make sure that the children get them. The problem is, and let me use some of the specific machines on the market, they don’t even come close. We do indeed have a crank in contrary to the Wall Street Journal’s story and we can crank the laptops, we distribute the crank with the laptops and you can run it on human power, you don’t need to plug it in, a solar panel smaller than a normal piece of paper can also drive it. The sunlight readable display of this laptop is very important cause kids use it outdoors and you can use it in that mode for 23 hours on one battery charge. There is the mesh network that allows them all to communicate to each other and at very low cost you connect one child to the Internet and a thousand are connected. Those are very important features. We don’t do side by side comparisons at OLPC, but if you did them, the other machines don’t even come close. Not even close. So we still have to keep doing what we are doing, and weather it is to get people to copy what we are doing, help people copy it, everything that we do is open source, everything we do is made available for others to copy.
Listen in the Real Audio format (Nicholas Negroponte starts at 5 minutes 10 seconds in)
Posted by npr.org
November 23, 2007
PBS Interview
Interview with Nicholas Negroponte.
“The problem is poverty. The idea is to eliminate poverty through education. 50% of children in this world don’t get education.”
http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/11/22/20071122_laptop28.mp3
Posted at http://pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues/july-dec07/laptop_11-22.html
September 27, 2007
Report from Nigeria on the Danish P1 radio (danish)
Download the Mp3 recording (9mb) (danish)
Anders Morgensen from Seismonaut reports from the Galadima primary school’s first day after the summer break on the 3rd of September where hundreds of children are testing a beta version of the XO-1 laptop. He says this was an impressive experience for him to see what the Children were able to do with those laptops.
September 24, 2007
Wbur.org story (audio)
Read their coverage of the “Give 1, Get 1″ project that is going to be launched at http://xogiving.org where people in North America can buy two XO laptops for $400, have one delivered by Christmas and have the other one given to a kid in the developing world.