olpc.tv

Watch the video at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2008/jan/09/negroponte.olpc

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

A new version of the 60 minutes episode first aired in May.

Watch it at CBSnews.com

- Uruguay 100,000
- Peru 260,000
- Mexico 50,000
- G1G1 190,000 (so far, continues until 31st December)
- Ethiopia 50,000 (donated by Italy, though I haven’t seen the latest confirmation)
- Give Many program (the numbers are not available yet, I think it should be at least tens of thousands)
- India is in talks for getting large numbers (it seems at least that those talks are advancing at the state government level and not the national government level) which will be distributed to schools might also be sold in India commercially.

More than 95,000 from the Give 1 Get 1 program so far (with one month to go) are going to larger trials in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia and Cambodia according to some sources talking about the possible target countries for the G1G1 program.

Following all the articles about OLPC during the past months, following are the possible targets for XO laptops which agreements could be announced I would say at any minute (please don’t quote me, I have no inside information, this is only based on the past months Google News articles):

- Brazil large numbers (they might want to wait for other countries to show that it works before committing to a million or more XO)
- Thailand (it seems the new government might be a bit hesitant to be the first)
- Costa Rica (I thought there was some talk about it going there)
- Nigeria (since Give Many program does let the country buy XOs in the quantities of tens of thousands, since this is not a large commitment, I think it is likely that Nigeria will finally order at least some tens of thousands because of the the success of the OLPC pilot projects.)
- Birmingham Alabama in the USA should be getting 15,000 but the final confirmation seems to be awaiting confirmation by the city council. Some of the final questions from the city council might be about support and implementation. If all goes well with the city council, the children in Alabama will ge getting the XO in January.

Source: The Boston Globe

Interview with Nicholas Negroponte - Speaking on behalf of the One Laptop per Child Foundation (OLPC).

Nicholas Negroponte is founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit organization. He is currently on leave from MIT, where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology.

One Laptop Per Child will be offering a Give One Get One Program in North America through December 31, 2007. For $399, you will be purchasing two XO laptops—one that will be sent to empower a child to learn in a developing nation, and one that will be sent to your child at home.

For more information, please call 1-877-70-LAPTOP or visit http://www.laptopgiving.org/

Nicholas Negroponte says having no shareholders means he can work to his own timetable.

Posted at BBC.co.uk

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

Watch it here: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2007/11/14/whitfield.intv.negroponte.one.laptop.cnn.cnn