background preloader

Technology

Facebook Twitter

What's OLPC Biggest Mistake? Negroponte Says Sugar. I am always surprised by Nicholas Negroponte, he really keeps me on my toes with his pronouncements, and today is no exception.

What's OLPC Biggest Mistake? Negroponte Says Sugar

In an interview with Vivian Yeo, where he proudly trumpets his success in selling XO laptops, he also says that the Sugar Learning Platform was OLPC's biggest mistake. Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC Let's start off with the good news. Negroponte tells us that over 900,000 laptops are in the hands of children from 31 nationalities. He claims another 230,000 are being shipped, with a backlog of 600,000 XO's. For any normal four year old nonprofit that is supposed to be an education project, not a laptop project, that would be top-of-the-world crazy success numbers. But for Negroponte, this is failure. [T]he biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application "on a vanilla Linux laptop", said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte. As I've said before, I disagree with Negroponte. The "$100 laptop" term was the OLPC marketing failure. One Tablet per Child 

The philanthropic organization One Laptop per Child (OLPC) never quite managed to hit its price point for its “$100 laptop,” but now the organization is sketching a concept for a $75 tablet computer that it hopes will further decrease power consumption and pioneer the first flexible LCD display.

One Tablet per Child 

“A tablet is simpler than a laptop, so it’s easier to make a tablet cheaper,” says Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer. But beyond that basic advantage, he says, the key to achieving super-low cost while also innovating is by working to establish common designs that can be broadly adopted and customized by other companies. The project starts with processor technology from a commercial partner, Marvell, known for super-low power consumption–potentially as little as one watt, compared to the five watts consumed by OLPC’s flagship machine, the XO.

Marvell is already customizing tablet platforms for use in U.S. schools. Building on this, OLPC wants to add a new screen technology. One Laptop Per Child to Produce $100 Tablet. Remember that One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tablet concept we showed you back in December?

One Laptop Per Child to Produce $100 Tablet

Today the company has announced a partnership with silicon solutions maker Marvell that will make that concept a reality by 2011 — and for just $100 per device. The OLPC XO-3 tablet computers will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The hardware is being produced by Marvell using its Moby Platform, featuring a built-in camera for video conferencing, and support for 3D graphics and Flash.

Marvell co-founder Weili Dai also told The New York Times that the first version of the tablet would be equipped with Google's Android operating system. From the looks of it, the device will be ultra thin. Watch the video below for more information on the tablet. One Laptop Per Child, Reviewed by 12-Year-Old. [I recently got my hands on one of the One Laptop Per Child machines.

One Laptop Per Child, Reviewed by 12-Year-Old

I found the perfect person to review the machine. Today's guest blogger, SG, is twelve years old and is the child of a close friend. I lent the laptop to SG and asked SG to write a review, which appears here just as SG wrote it, without any editing. –Ed] [Update(June 2012): I can reveal now that SG is my daughter, Claire Felten.] I’ve spent all of my life around computers and laptops. Over the last few days, I spent a lot of time on this laptop. My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high. But, unfortunately, the internet is the only fast element of the computer.