BigShinyThing : emergent culture

The Decade of Exploitunity

We’ve reported on the $100 laptop. We’ve flagged up Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: two innovations poised to set fire to the demographic tinder that’s the youth population of the Developing World. We see truly disruptive times ahead.

The $100 laptop (or its yet-to-be-developed relatives and descendants) will network millions of eager young people. Services like the Turk will give them the opportunity and motivation to take on work that’s too tricky for the best Artificial Intelligences the West can conjour, but too brain-numbingly repetitive and low-paid for most Westerners to bother with. That’s a whole lot of motivation, both supply-side and for the creation of demand. And that means business.

In fact, the one thing missing from the OLPC v1.0 seems to be a workable way to actually get micropayments safely in the hands of those for whom such income could be as life-changing as the educational opportunities which are the prime motivation for the project. If the initial rollout is at all successful, we expect free-enterprise, above-ground or not, to rapidly fill that gap.

The potential is enormous. Exploitation or opportunity? The stakes and possible rewards are too high – and the price of failure too terrible – for us to judge too early. Call it exploitunity, and hope it works out. Watch this space.

$100 Laptop: Update

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.

$100 Laptop: Co-creation for Kids?

An interesting snippet from the if:book blog:

[…] the word processing software being bundled into the [One Laptop Per Child Initiative’s] 100-dollar laptops will all be wiki-based, putting the focus on student collaboration over mesh networks. This may not sound like such a big deal, but just take a moment to ponder the implications of having all class writing assignments being carried out [on] wikis. The different sorts of skills and attitudes that collaborating on everything might nurture. There a million things that could go wrong with the […] project, but you can’t accuse its developers of lacking bold ideas about education.

Now there’s a thing. Its been a long time (anyone remember Smalltalk?) since we’ve really heard of any educational technology taking such a radical leap of faith. Whether the benefits of participatory co-creation outweigh its downsides is up for question on many levels. But it’s nice to see some educationalists embracing rather than censoring the tools of the zeitgeist. As we say here at BST, it’s all good.

The $100 laptop

This story actually broke last year but it’s too important to miss. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab has spun out a non-profit association called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) to design, manufacture and distribute laptops that will be provided to governments at cost and issued to children by schools on the basis of one per child. The machines will be hardy, use open source Linux-based software and so energy-efficient that hand cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation. They will fold up into eBook mode for reading only. Mesh networking will give many machines internet access from one connection.

According to MIT, at least 50% of a modern laptop’s purchase price is taken up by the cost of sales, marketing, distribution and profit. OLPC has none of these costs. The machine will not be available in shops, although in order to discourage a grey market they will authorise production of a commercial version, where a share of profits will be dedicated to further lowering the cost of the OLPC machine. Distribution in most cases will instead piggyback on existing textbook channels.

The remaining 50% of the cost of a laptop can be divided into roughly two equal parts: the display and everything else. The display is the real technical challenge in terms of keeping costs down. The Media Lab at MIT has therefore developed short term ways to bring the cost of the display to close to $30 per machine. Longer term solutions may be innovations like E Ink (which MIT invented) that could eventually be as cheap as 10 cents per square inch for a full colour, sunlight-readable screen with better than textbook resolution in print mode. As for the ‘everything else’ (the processor, memory and power management): modern laptops use about 75% of their own processing capacity to support hefty software applications and the operating system itself. Hence the adoption of the 'skinny’ (and free) Linux operating system.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, has now officially introduced the $100 laptop in The Economist saying:

Will the $100 laptop happen? Yes. When? Late 2006. Where? Certainly in Brazil, Thailand and Egypt to begin with; we hope in China too. But the 'market’ is global, more than 1 billion schoolchildren worldwide, for whom one laptop per child is the goal.