One Laptop per Child is one amazing project

By: Ray Pellecchia

File Under: Miscellaneous

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The directors and other leaders from One Laptop per Child (OLPC) were here this morning to ring the Opening Bell, and talking with them even briefly just knocked me out. Great cause, the right people and wow technology. I just wanted to share a little of this with you now, and I hope to write more about it in the future.

OLPC is a non-profit organization building inexpensive, richly functional laptop computers and getting them into the hands of children in developing countries as a means of helping these children "learn to learn." Here is yesterday's New York Times article about the project's upcoming program allowing you to "Give 1 Get 1" -- buy a laptop to donate and get one for yourself for a total of $399. Here is a link to its concise and useful Web site.

"A computer uniquely fosters learning learning by allowing children to "think about thinking" in ways that are otherwise impossible. Using the XO as both their window on the world, as well as highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential," says the group's mission statement, in part.

The group walked in with half a dozen of the laptops, set them on a table, and immediately the machines linked to each other via a mesh network, and were ready to be used to chat with another with a single click of an icon. CTO Mary Lou Jepsen gave me a brief demo:

-- Screen can be adjusted to be readable in sunlight, i.e., where much of the developing world lives
-- Multiple languages, and the keyboard can be changed to different characters with the swap of an overlay.
-- New meaning to the word networked -- if one person in a village has access to the 'Net, everyone in the village with a machine also gets it.
-- Waterproof keyboard
-- Lowest power consumption of any laptop
-- Machine can be dropped from a height of 5 feet and not break.
-- Built-in camera, which Mary Lou used to shoot the bell ringing from the trading floor
-- High-resolution screen can be rotated in any direction on its sturdy hinge, and flipped over to use the machine tablet style.
-- You can use your finger or a stylus on the built-in mouse pad.
-- They cook the machines in a 150-degree-Fahrenheit "oven room" to test for desert durability, and then they "add water" to test for rain-forest use.
-- Weighs 3 pounds
-- Fast, easy programming, video, art and sharing capabilities
-- Built in oscilloscope, to let kids "see" their own voices and the sounds around them.

I'm certain I'm omitting many of the most important things about the laptop, but I wasn't planning to take notes, and the conversations were regrettably brief. I think you get the gist. I know that John Thain, an MIT electrical engineer by training, also was amazed by the technology and very impressed with the group's progress and cause.

I should disclose that the group's board includes technologists and other leaders from some of our listed companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Red Hat, News Corporation and Nortel Networks. None of them, or anyone else, urged me to write this post.

I should also disclose that in the rotating photos at the top of this post, the one with John Thain getting a tour of the laptop from OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte also features your humble blogger at far right, turned profile, requiring a wider-lens shot to fit in my immodest schnozz, and breaking the PR person's old cardinal rule of staying the heck out of the photo.

Reading the Times piece gives you a sense of One Laptop per Child's incredible accomplishments to date, but more important, the enormity of its task ahead. If I've done anything with this post, I hope I've interested some of you in taking a look at this organization and its work. I think you'll be as moved and excited as I am at the possibility of helping this small group make a huge difference in the world.

Tags: One Laptop per Child, Nicholas Negroponte, Advanced Micro Devices, Red Hat, News Corporation, Nortel Networks