OLPC

One laptop per child

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others formerly at the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to acknowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, open source, and so energy efficient that they can be powered by a child manually. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal will start near $100 and then steadily decrease

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Main_Page

Mission:

The mission of this non-profit association is to develop a low-cost laptop—the "$100 Laptop"—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. Our goal is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves.

Why do children in developing nations need laptops? Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration.

OLPC espouses five core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and (5) free and open source.

http://www.xogiving.org/ buy 2 give 1

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Main_Page

Educators

see more: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators

One Laptop per Child is an education project, not a laptop project. Our goal is to provide children with access to libraries of knowledge, ideas, experiments, and art. Our hope is that this material will act as a window into the world, complete with examples and references on which to build.

This page is designed for the community of educators who are interested in contributing to these libraries of knowledge, and supporting the community of teachers using XOs in their classrooms. If you are a teacher currently using (or about to use) XOs in your classroom, you may be interested in the community page for XO Teachers.

Already, hundreds of prototype laptops have been distributed to children in pilot schools around the world. This summer, the final "B4" beta-test laptop will go (went?) out to another thousand children. The production prototypes are done, and the first real production run is planned to begin in the next few weeks (Oct?).

It's an exciting time to get involved with OLPC. This page is designed to help you get started.

Hardware

see full spec"s: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification

To get info in: (does not have CD rom), but does have:

USB: Three Type-A USB 2.0 connectors; Up to 1A power supplied (total);

Flash Expansion: SD Card slot.

Internet connectivity

Although OLPC itself is assuming that there won't be connections in many places, some laptops will be deployed in cities that have some type of Internet connectivity, even if it is more expensive and lower bandwidth than what Americans are used to.

Since the OLPC is primarily an educational project, we are less concerned with providing Internet access to kids and more concerned with providing a laptop that is capable of networking locally. Since both the Internet, and the OLPC laptop use the standard IP protocols, there are numerous ways in which schools, towns and countries can extend connectivity beyond the built-in mesh network.

Software & Uses

see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components

Current Status:

The XO laptop is the center of One Laptop Per Child. After two years of development, it is approaching mass production, with several thousand Beta test (B2) units deployed to developers and for testing in schools in participating countries. The laptop design has just undergone a final minor update to keep up with advancements in technology.

The final test build (C Test 1), on the final production line, has been done. The next step is mass production, expected around October '07.

School Server Hardware

Not required, but recommended for schools

While the laptop is rightfully at the center of OLPC, a valuable peripheral is the school server. OLPC will be building and distributing school servers along with the laptops, to extend the storage and computation provided by each laptop, as well as providing a local library and a mesh portal to the Internet.

Unlike the laptop, the school server is more of a collection of services than a hardware platform. In a manner identical to the laptop, OLPC will collaborate with manufacturing partners to provide a cost-efficient hardware platform for running the recommended software. Unlike the laptop, the manufacturing collaboration will not be exclusive. Individual countries will be free (even encouraged) to design and manufacture their own school servers running derivatives of the OLPC school server software.

Commercializing?

One Laptop per Child Has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-(Business Wire)-January 13, 2007 - One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization with the goal of providing children in developing nations with laptop computers, today announced that contrary to previously published reports OLPC has no plans to make the XO laptops available for sale to the general public. OLPC's focus is getting XO laptops into the hands of children in developing nations. Currently, official OLPC launch countries include Libya, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uruguay.

"Contrary to recent reports, One Laptop per Child is not planning a consumer version of its current XO laptop, designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world. XO will be made available to governments in very large quantities to be given to all children free, as part of the education system. Many commercial ventures have been considered and proposed that may surface in 2008 or beyond, one of which is 'buy 2 and get 1.' In addition, OLPC is launching OLPC Foundation later this month, specifically to accommodate the huge goodwill and charity that has surfaced around the idea of a $100 laptop."

Criticisms

The OLPC project, which is cutting production costs of computers through the use of innovative power techniques and cutting out expensive software, has come in for criticism from some technology leaders. Intel boss Craig Barrett dismissed it as a "$100 gadget", while Microsoft chairman Bill Gates sideswiped the plans by claiming a low-cost machine would not be able to function properly.

"Geez... get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," he was quoted as saying last year.

But Walter Bender, the president of software and content for OLPC, said the outbursts were simply professional jealousy. Last summer, he told the Guardian that the attacks were "transparent" attempts to promote competing products.

Competition with Intel

Be careful how you structure your company’s board – At first, it looked smart for the One Laptop Per Child computer company to appoint an Intel representative to its board. But the partnership between Intel and OLPC hit the rocks when an Intel saleswoman tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs. NYTimes has details. 

More competition

Agam Shah / New York Times:

Other news

Quanta Computer, the world’s largest manufacturer of notebook computers, will start making ultra-low-cost computers that could be sold in developed markets for as little as $200 this year or the next, according to its president.

The Taiwanese contract manufacturer is already producing a laptop developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers that will be distributed to children in third-world countries – under a non-profit project called One Laptop Per Child – for as little as $150.

But Michael Wang, Quanta’s president, said on Tuesday that the concepts developed through the OLPC project could be applied to create commercially viable machines that are cheaper than anything on the market so far.

“We will definitely at the right time launch a commercialised product similar to the OLPC,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding that several of Quanta’s customers were seeking to launch such a product.

Quanta designs and manufactures the computers sold by the world’s largest branded companies, including HP, Dell and Acer.

Mr Wang’s remarks follow Dell’s launch last week of a desktop computer in China selling for as little as $336. Other big technology companies have also announced plans to give more people in low-income countries access to computers, including Intel’s low-cost “classmate” PC and computer kiosks supported by Microsoft.

But Mr Wang said the low-cost machines would not remain limited to developing markets. “There are a lot of poor people in developed countries, too,” he said.

Quanta has now created a new business unit for “emerging PCs” with the explicit aim of creating a new market for the low-cost machines.

He said the cheapest models were likely to be sold without hard disks, have small screens and run on open-source software, like the OLPC version.

Alvin Kwock, an analyst at JP Morgan in Taipei, said:

“OLPC has kick-started a debate over the question: What is needed in a PC?” He estimated that the new ultra-low-cost machines could expand the global PC market, which now measures 250m units a year, by as much as 10 per cent.

Competition from Wal-Mart

The amazing $200 Ubuntu Linux “green” PC at Wal-Mart — The price of this computer is truly in the basement. It runs OpenOffice software and comes pre-configured with links to all of Google’s online applications. See Wired story for more details. It stands in stark contrast to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop for the poor, began at a price of $100, but which now has crept upward to….$200. So apparently, there’s no need for the poor laptop any more. The developing world may as well order a Linux version straight from Wal-Mart.

News

Robert A. Guth / Wall Street Journal:20 minutes ago

Microsoft:

Microsoft Statement on Expanding Support for Low Cost Flash Based Computing Devices