(By Info-Tech Analyst Vince Londini– Printed with permission from Processor magazine, www.processor.com)
It’s cute. It’s green. It was delivered to my house just after Christmas. It’s the child-friendly XO laptop—the fruits of a project to provide third-world children with their own personal computers at a cost of $100 each. It remains yet to be seen if this little edu-tech marvel will achieve the lofty goals set for it, but it has shaken up the status quo.
In January 2005, Nicholas Negroponte declared his goal. The One Laptop Per Child Project, or OLPC, promised to provide a notebook PC for children for a mere $100 apiece.
His plan relied on the economies of scale that would arise from selling large quantities of this inexpensive educational tool to the governments of developing nations. While volume would help drive the price down, the real savings were to be found in open-source software, inexpensive chipsets, and, courtesy of the clever former-CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, an inexpensive, power-efficient LCD.
