BigShinyThing

But — in a nice twist of sustainable capitalism — customers will have to buy two laptops at once, with the second going to the developing world. A philanthropic organisation would be formed to organise the orders and delivery of the laptops. “It’s much more difficult to do this than making the laptop,” say the organisers of the project. The aim is to connect the buyer of the laptop with the child in the developing world who receives the machine. “They will get the e-mail address of the kid in the developing world that they have, in effect, sponsored.”
Five million of the laptops will be delivered to developing nations this summer, in what the BBC is describing as “one of the most ambitious educational exercises ever undertaken.” Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer (now there’s a new and highly useful job!) for the One Laptop Per Child project, said they were working with eBay to sell the machine. Maybe they should be talking to Amazon as well …

Although the eventual aim is to sell each laptop for $100, the current cost per unit is around $150. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand have already signed up to buy units. The machine is officially called the XO and has software which is specifically designed for education. The OLPC project is working with Google (who else?) who will act as “the glue to bind all these kids together”. Google will also help the children publish their work on the internet so that the world can observe the “fruits of their labour”, said Mr Bletsas.

Each laptop has built-in wireless networking and video conferencing so that groups of children can work together both physically and virtually. Bletsas says:

I’d like to make sure that kids all around the world start to communicate. It will be a very interesting experiment to see what will happen when we deploy a million laptops in Brazil and a million laptops in Namibia.

An Apple phone? Whatever. We think that the XO is truly visionary tech.

Source: BBC news.