Former OLPC CTO aims to create $75 laptop
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A laptop under $100 could reach desks if a new venture formed by the former&#160;CTO of One Laptop Per Child, Mary Lou Jepsen, can deliver on its promises.A &quot;spin-out&quot; from OLPC, the company, Pixel Qi is looking to create a $75 laptop and trying to advance low-cost computers and power-efficient laptops, mobile phones, and other consumer electronics that are sunlight readable, Jepsen wrote on the company&#39;s Web site.Jepsen left OLPC two weeks ago to commercialize technologies she invented with OLPC, she said in an e-mail to the IDG News Service at the time. A patent lists Jepsen as one of the inventors of a display system optimized for low-power operation.&quot;Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO [laptop], while leveraging a larger market for new technologies,&quot; Jepsen wrote.There is a big commercial market for technology spawned by OLPC, Jepsen wrote. Prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of key technology advances, she wrote.The company will continue to work with OLPC by providing products at cost, and it will sell devices at a profit to commercial organizations.A similar promise to introduce a low-cost laptop came from OLPC, when it launched the $100 XO laptop in 2005. Since then, the effort has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs, which caused the laptop&#39;s estimated price to rise to $200. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.As CTO, Jepsen was responsible for hardware development for the rugged and power-saving XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its environmentally friendly design and innovative display, hardware and networking features.Her departure from OLPC spawned a debate, with critics charging that Jepsen was taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gains, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a sinking ship.Jepsen, who is attending the&#160;International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, was not available for comment.
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The $1.75 billion deal represents the latest upheaval in an industry in which personal computers and the components that go into them have largely become commodities, parked on desktops everywhere and available at Wal-Mart for under $300.-The Washington Post
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How much for a new laptop? That depends. You can pay $800 or so for a hefty "desktop replacement," or $1,500 for a light, sleek portable optimized for road warriors.
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InfoWorld - The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has raised the price of its XO laptop to $188, according to an Associated Press report.
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Blog: One Laptop per Child (OLPC) announces final beta version for its $100 XO laptop.
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Lenovo will pay $1.75 billion for IBM&#39;s PC business unit but will continue to use the IBM brand for five years. By Paul McDougall, and Darrell Dunn.
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(InfoWorld) - In an unexpected development, chip giant Intel has joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The nonprofit project aims to equip children in developing countries with specially designed low-cost notebooks powered by chips from Intel rivalÂ AMD. Previously, Intel's efforts in the education market appeared at odds with those of OLPC. While OLPC expects toÂ finally begin delayed volume shipments of its XO laptopÂ in September,Â priced at $175, Intel has been selling itsÂ Classmate PC laptopÂ in bulk since March. Classmate currently costs around $225, but Intel hopes to lower that price to $200 by year-end. Intel has been selling Classmate primarily in Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan, while OLPC has beta copies of its laptops in use by schoolchildren in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Thailand, and Uruguay. The governments of those seven nations have pledged to purchase the XO laptops in bulk when volume shipments begin. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, has previously said publicly that Intel's Classmate efforts have been adversely affecting his project, given the well-funded nature of the chip maker's initiative. Intel and OLPC had engaged in conversations on and off for a while but nailed down an agreement to work together in the last month, according to Will Swope, vice president and director of corporate affairs at Intel. "Our role here is one of how do we have the biggest impact on education and on children around the world?" he said. The chip maker has spent more than $1 billion in education initiatives since its founding and over the last five to six years has been investing annually around $100 million on such projects. "How could we make that more impactful and reach more children?" Swope asked. The answer, he said, was to join OLPC. "Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children,â Negroponte agreed in a statement. Under the agreement, Intel and OLPC will look into collaborating on both the technology and educational fronts. Intel will also join the OLPC board. In the short term, Intel will effectively be supporting two different laptop programs -- OLPC and Classmate -- which will sometimes overlap, while retaining some unique capabilities, according to Swope. It will be up to governments to decide which machine they want to buy for their schools. Over time, the two lines will become "more complementary" and Intel and OLPC will partner a lot more, he said. As yet, it's too early for Intel to provide specifics on that area of the relationship between the two organizations and product lines, Swope added. The agreement doesn't have anything to do with Intel making chips for the XO laptop, although should the contract to provide silicon for the device be up for grabs, Intel would naturally be interested, Swope said. AMD, an OLPC board member, is supplying its Geode processors for the machine. "We're definitely excited by this change of heart [by Intel] and welcome their contributions," said Rebecca Gonzales, director of marketing communications at AMD. "We're happy to have them as part of the group." AMD has long said that the technology divide that OLPC is trying to bridge with its XO laptop can't be achieved by a single entity, Gonzales added. AMD has worked closely with the other corporate members of OLPC, which include Brightstar, eBay, Google, News, Nortel Networks, Quanta Computer, and Red Hat. The vendor is looking forward to Intel joining the board and providing a fresh take on the project, Gonzales said. Intel isn't disclosing all the conditions of its membership in OLPC. Swope noted that a number of other IT vendors are lining up to join the project under the same terms as Intel, and OLPC doesn't want to disclose those specifics until those other companies have also become members. Intel also isn't revealing how much it's investing in OLPC and that figure may remain undisclosed, Swope said. OLPC has struggled to bring its ambitious project to fruition. Initially, the organization had hoped to begin selling its laptop at $100, but that's proved impossible given spiraling production costs. The laptop is being manufactured by Quanta with the Taiwanese vendor hoping to produce 1 million computers by year-end. Negroponte continues to vacillate on whether OLPC will also make the notebooks available outside of the developing world, for instance, to U.S. states.
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Microsoft engineer shows off a new "MinWin" kernel that takes up a fraction of the space of the traditional OS.
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The vaunted "$100 laptop" that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept.
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The creator of OpenLaszlo plans to create a line of collaboration applications.
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In which our correspondent endures great travail in search of a sub-$300 laptop. In Gear Factor.
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Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a $75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.Jepsen&#39;s departure as CTO prompted critics to accuse her of taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gain, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a listing ship. OLPC has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs over years, with the laptop&#39;s estimated price rising from $100 to $188. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors like Intel that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.Jepsen denied the allegations, saying her departure was put in place early last year and that she continues to work with OLPC on developing technologies for future XO laptops while selling it for a profit to commercial organizations.Technologies she invented at OLPC include the display system optimized for low-power operation, which has been implemented in the XO laptop.Retaining the OLPC spirit, Jepsen said Pixel Qi is developing inexpensive products like a power-efficient display that can be used in developing countries. She chatted with the IDG News Service about the new company, the $75 laptop, and her days at OLPC.IDGNS: How is Pixel Qi progressing?Jepsen: Things are going great. Pixel Qi is now a month old. I&#39;ve done a lot of startups before, but [Pixel Qi] is a very unusual startup. It&#39;s got products to ship already, so that&#39;s unusual. It&#39;s getting a lot of attention, which surprises me, but it is good that people are interested.IDGNS: Are you working on the $75 laptop right now?Jepsen: The $75 laptop -- maybe people are interested in it because it&#39;s a catch phrase -- but mostly it&#39;s about designing things for the billions of people who are joining the information age right now. That&#39;s what Pixel Qi strongly believes in.Right now I&#39;m starting this company ... to get a lot of the technologies in [OLPC&#39;s XO] laptop into other laptops and cell phones as a first priority. Then working with OLPC to focus on driving that next-generation laptop. But we just started shipping this generation [of XO laptops], we owe it to ourselves to see how the children use them ... and before we start in earnest the design and development cycle to have the feedback from children in different countries.I&#39;m focused on getting the screens and power management into other people&#39;s small laptops and cell phones right now. I think the [$75 laptop] will happen pretty soon, but again, I&#39;m not really focused on the $75 laptop right now, while the innovations that I&#39;m working on can go into that.That mimics what we did at OLPC. We thought a lot about [designing the XO laptop] before executing on it. It&#39;s a lot easier to redesign on paper. [We are] taking this time and really talking to a lot of who&#39;s who in technology about what [the $75 laptop] should be. But it&#39;s certainly possible to go lower price -- if you look, there are $10 CPUs around.IDGNS: There is a perception that you left OLPC to privatize the technology and make money out of it.Jepsen: I arranged it with Nicholas [Negroponte]. My departure has been well planned and organized with OLPC. It was in place since spring of 2007, and I was committed to delivering the XO into high-volume mass production. But as somebody who ... invents, develops, and gets hardware into mass production, there wasn&#39;t much more for me to do at OLPC after ... that.On some level, I was responsible for making a laptop ... and, I realized ... I should keep doing this. So I got access to the ... intellectual property and patents. Not because I was the inventor, and not even because the inventor has the really good chance of improving the price and performance of her invention, but because OLPC is the beneficiary as the licensee.I&#39;m still in spirit with OLPC, but now I&#39;m with Pixel Qi, and I am not working on just children, but adults and trying to get the cost down. That doesn&#39;t mean just Dell on a diet if you will, but [a laptop] that people are proud to own and proud to use at low cost and designed for different environments. The mass market -- there&#39;s literally billions of people who want to join this information age, and they need products too. They need interesting products, not stripped-down stuff. The XO is probably the first in that line.IDGNS: A $75 computer seems optimistic considering OLPC&#39;s inability to produce a $100 laptop. Can you walk us through the changes needed in component prices and system design to reach that target?Jepsen: I don&#39;t think it&#39;s that hard, frankly. If you look at the cost of flash and DRAM, they go down 50 percent year over year. You look at screens, they go down 30 percent every year. If you look at the cost of CPUs -- well, some of them stay expensive -- there are several companies working on the $10 CPU right now.There are pretty low-cost [parts], but using low power, guess what ... you don&#39;t use the same amount of ... processing power. Your battery is really inexpensive if you don&#39;t use a lot of power because it won&#39;t need as many cells, for example. I think it&#39;s very straightforward.There&#39;s ways to hit ...[the $75] envelope if you look at the mechanicals and the keyboards and everything else you need on the motherboard. I think we know how to ... integrate the components and work with manufacturers and producers to get there very quickly to lowering the price and increasing the performance. But then again, you have to redefine performance for a cow herder and pick your country.IDGNS: All of that still calls for performance. Is there going to be some kind of trade-off in capabilities relative to a mainstream notebook?Jepsen: There&#39;s two ways to be fast, one is the standard, more blah way, where you just heap on the megahertz and megahertz and then heap on the code. Vista&#39;s footprint is 12GB as opposed to our OS at OLPC, it&#39;s 0.1GB, it&#39;s 120 times smaller. You could do big code and big iron or skinny down the code and make do with a 500 megahertz processor ... that was a state-of-the-art laptop in 2000. All of the software has gotten bloated, and do you really need a little paper clip guy or doggy telling you what to do?The XO is ... an outdoor usable laptop. You can drop it, you can spill on it and the batteries last a long time. And it&#39;s green. Those are performance metrics that really matter. Making your batteries last a week is also a performance criteria. Intel has said for a number of years that it&#39;s not about&#160;one more megahertz anymore, it&#39;s about lowering the power consumption.IDGNS: Are inexpensive laptops a new category? IDC says notebook computers like Eee PC -- they don&#39;t take those laptops when they measure market share or measure unit shipments. They&#39;re calling the category &quot;notebook gadgets.&quot; How do you feel about that?Jepsen: It&#39;s funny. I don&#39;t feel much about the word. I just talked at a gadget conference, &quot;Greener Gadgets,&quot; but ... [Intel&#39;s] Craig Barrett, when he was trying to be derogatory toward the laptop project, called it a gadget. I think that we think of gadgets as things that don&#39;t really work for long, have a short life, and are transient, not real machines. The XO lasts two-and-a-half times longer than a standard laptop. That&#39;s not a gadget-like property of it. What is a gadget? Is it a learning machine or is your laptop a gadget or cell phone a gadget?IDGNS: Did Intel undermine the OLPC project with their Classmate PC?Jepsen: It&#39;s such a long story with them, especially for me because I used to work [at Intel]. It&#39;s hard for me to summarize. Certainly, there are so many individuals at that company on the technical side when we finally got working together, it was great. We were really pursuing an -- I think it&#39;s been announced -- Intel chip in the XO, that was something we were working well together on with their technical team. I think the difficulty was from the sales and marketing side as I understand it, and I really wasn&#39;t involved in that in OLPC. I would only hear from the ministers in the countries I would visit and from Nicholas and so forth. I wasn&#39;t that involved in it towards the end.IDGNS: Is there a release date for the $75 laptop?Jepsen: It&#39;s not that hard. It will take about two years. Realistically, it does need that time because what you have to do first is make the components and then you put them together. At OLPC, it took&#160;three years because we had to start with the disbelief, but now people believe. Now cut that down to about two years, it&#39;s about reasonable. It&#39;s 2010 we&#39;re looking at.
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InfoWorld - Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a $75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.
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The co-designer of the original OLPC now has plans for its chief competitor, including integrating low-cost cameras and top-notch displays. Her goal is for the Pixel Qi to be as technologically and aesthetically compelling as an iPod Touch.
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Pixel Qi is looking to create a $75 laptop and trying to advance low-cost computers and power-efficient laptops, mobile phones and other consumer electronics that are sunlight readable.
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Science & environment: The Asus laptop is a return to the idea of the closed box and an attempt to get the next billion users, writes Jack Schofield.
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It's first entrant looks less like the Origami UMPC's pushed by Microsoft, and more like the OLPC XO laptop, however.