Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 14, 2008 – 2:58 pm
Zee M Kane, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
At the World of Health IT Conference in Copenhagen, founder Nicholas Negroponte announced the launch of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation in Europe.
From November 17th the OLPC will be selling their laptops online via Amazon across 27 European countries, including Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.
The laptops will be sold under the Give One, Get One scheme which has been running in the US for some time already. Buyers purchase one for themselves and the second laptop is donated to a child in a developing country.
The Give One, Get One programme was first run in the US in December 2007, selling approximately 190,000 machines. The organisation however has recieved many complaints from buyers who never actually recieved their product, and this is what has lead to the partnership with Amazon. Additionally, the organisation has faced competition via Intel and their Classmate PC which has seen considerable uptake, particularly across South America.
The XO laptop is expected to price at approximately £268 (313 euros).
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Written on November 4, 2008 – 4:57 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You might not realize it when you’re playing around with a fancy Macbook, but the laptop has been around for forty years now. It all started with the Dynabook, a conceptual system proposed by Xerox PARC in 1968. Credits for this innovation that inspired computer makers to work on laptops and tablet pc’s go to researcher Alan Kay.
Like every tech inventor, he isn’t satisfied with the recent developments. Kay doesn’t like the fact that small mobile devices are capable of the same things as laptops.
When Kay designed the prototypes of the Dynabook, he aimed for children. Of course, adults could have their way with the small computers, but the main focus was on developing educational applications for kids. So I guess it’s not a coincidence that Kay currently works for the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC).
To honor Kay’s achievements, Mountain View’s Computer History Museum on Wednesday will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the legendary Dynabook.
Here’s a video of Alan Kay’s recent Ted Talk.
[Hat tip: Bright]
Written on September 6, 2008 – 2:01 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
THe OLPC laptop, developed for people from third-world countries, isn’t very popular in the blogosphere. Despite it’s noble goal, bloggers hate the facts that the development goes so slow and that its price is still higher than $100. Apart from some funny news - people paying €500 for a graffiti version -, there’s hardly any positive news surrounding the green laptop.
Well, there is now. Paris-based video service Dailymotion has decided to take on another problem of the OLPC. The $100 laptop is unfortunately not compatible with the Adobe Flash player that Dailymotion and other video sharing sites rely on. So the enormous video site has decided to start a project which will make a large amount of videos accessible for people browsing on the OLPC computer.
The project consists of a special group where users can upload videos that are in fact compatible with the toylike-looking laptop. These videos are encoded in free standards, provided by the Xiph.Org Foundation: Ogg (container), Vorbis (audio) and Theora (compression).
Although Flash-compatibility would be the ultimate solution - like they say on ReadWriteWeb: “that’s just how it goes” - I like the fact Dailymotion is actually doing something to turn the OLPC laptop in a success. Because a project with such an ambitious and world-improving goal can use some respect. So that, in a while, (flash-based) videos of people kicking around with the laptop (believe it or not, there’s actually a man who did such a pathetic thing) will become absolutely intolerable and unheard of.
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