What is One Laptop Per Child?
It’s a not-for-profit foundation run by Nicholas Negroponte, whose aim is to empower and educate children in the developing world by giving them super-cheap laptops. For several years One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), whose aims are educational, has been bitterly critical of commercial rival Intel, which started manufacturing its similar Classmate PC this spring. But earlier this month Intel and OLPC made peace, with Intel joining the board of Negroponte’s organisation. The deal looks as if it will give a clear run to OLPC’s XO laptop, due to start full-scale manufacturing in late September. The XO will be assembled in Taiwan by Quanta, the world’s biggest laptop maker, using 800 suppliers, including AMD, which makes the low-power processor at the core of the machine. So far, seven governments have signed up to buy at least a million each of the budget laptops. Currently, the price is $175, but the aim is to get that down to under $100.
Who is Nicholas Negroponte?
Negroponte is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-founded MIT’s visionary Media Lab in 1980, and has been a high-profile proselytiser for the digital revolution over the past three decades. He’s a best-selling author, a successful venture capitalist, and is supremely well connected: his brother John D. Negroponte is the US deputy secretary of state. Since 2003, with help from his brother in forging contacts with world leaders, Negroponte has toured the world promoting his OLPC project to anyone who will listen. He’s met with much criticism along the way. Intel’s Craig Barrett, before his about-turn, criticised the laptop as not so much a computer as a $100 “gadget”. Others questioned the need for computers in developing countries when primary health care and other basic needs aren’t yet met.
Who’s backing him?
Donors, including Google, News Corp and AMD, have given $31m dollars to fund research and set-up costs. But just as vital, the OLPC project has from the start been a collaborative effort based on the ‘wiki’ concept of an open website to which all parties can contribute. As such, the XO has no single designer. Instead, Negroponte opened up its development to technology experts around the world and set up a now-sprawling website with hundreds of pages on every aspect of the laptop’s goals, specs, software and development. The whole approach has been “open and viral”, says Negroponte. “A command and control model, the way one runs an army, is not well-suited for new ideas.”
Sounds risky – has it worked?
All signs are that yes, it has. The XO’s designers had a range of challenging criteria to meet. They needed a well-specified, super-tough computer that functions in wet and humid climates and can be read in bright sunlight. It had to use minimal power in order to operate where power-supplies are not dependable, and have powerful antenna to pick up and emit signals in isolated areas. It had to look striking and be simple to use so children would want one. And it had to be cheap. The XO developers have come up with a radical new product full of useful and potentially significant innovations.
What sort of innovations, exactly?
Power consumption is just a tenth of most existing laptops – the XO can be booted up using hand/foot-operated generators or solar panels. The frugal power use is due partly to the super-efficient ‘central processing unit’ and the absence of a hard drive (the laptop uses a small flash memory to store data and its Linus-based operating system). No built in drives also means no need for power-hungry cooling fans. But the real power-saver is the 7.5 inch, 1,200 x 900 pixel display, which uses a bank of LEDs to backlight the screen, instead of conventional high-voltage fluorescent tubes. The screen can be read in strong sunlight because the backlight can be switched off – it then converts to a high-contrast mono display using available light.
Any other new ideas?
The most striking aspect of the laptop – about half the size and weight of a conventional model – is its external antennae, or ‘bunny-ears’. On a standard laptop, antennae are buried in the display screen to get them out of the way. On the XO, they stick out to increase range, and to enable the PC’s in-built ‘Mesh’ networking technology that lets XO users communicate with one another and share an internet connection across several hundred metres. Handily, the ‘ears’ also double as latches to keep the laptop closed and protect the USB ports from dust and dirt.
Will it work?
If OLPC is a success, the idea is that the children involved will be able to access an education beyond the classroom, which will help lift them and their countries out of poverty. But there are also implications for the PC business. Even though OLPC and Intel say they want to restrict cheap laptops to those who really need them, some industry analysts predict that a grey market in XOs will quickly spring up in the West. Moreover, it seems inevitable that the technology – and indeed actual components – will sooner or later be integrated into retail models aimed at Western markets. Already, Asus is planning a cheap-and-cheerful $200 laptop, called the Eee PC, which is likely to hit the market before the end of the year.