Former OLPC C.T.O. Aims to Create $75 Laptop
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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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The so-called "$100 laptop" has moved one step closer to reality, with 2,500 units set to ship later this month to eight developing nations. If the small test proves successful, mass production of the units would begin.
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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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A low-cost laptop, designed for children in developing countries, will go on sale in North America.
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MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte's much-touted $100 laptop is now officially on sale via the One Laptop per Child Foundation's Web site, with production cost now totaling $200. The organization previously said the laptop would cost $176 in April and raised that estimate to $188 last month.
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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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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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A nonprofit group that designs low-cost  computers for poor children may start selling $350 laptops on  the commercial market by Christmas, an executive said on  Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel Corp. wants to see its low-cost Classmate PC help transform they way students in developing countries are educated. And the company is not alone. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project also hopes its low-cost XO laptop can close the "digital divide" that exists between the developed world and emerging markets. Much has been made of these two efforts, which are often painted as rivals by the media and observers. Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel's sales and marketing group, recently spoke with IDG News Service about the Classmate PC and the challenges Intel hopes to address with the device. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview. IDG News Service: Is there room for both the Classmate PC and OLPC as efforts to close the digital divide in emerging markets? Sean Maloney: I've spent a good deal of my life traveling around emerging markets and the first thing I want to say is that it's a truly humongous problem. It's an enormous, enormous problem you're talking about. No one company is going to solve this, whether it's us or the OLPC guys, or Asustek, or HP. And no one single approach is going to tackle the issue either. It's very diverse what people want. Even if you pick one country, say India, you're not going to get the state governments having the same opinions on how this should be handled. It's a perfect problem that a Taiwanese economy of scale could tackle. What Taiwan has always done in the past -- with stunning success -- is drive down costs for standardization and mass manufacturing. IDGNS: And standardization helps keep costs low... Maloney: Yeah, if they're standardized it makes field repair easier and logistics easier and distribution chains easier and all that stuff. It's not just about the device. It's also about the education software that goes on it, the role of the teacher in the class, and then someone has to maintain the thing locally. Many of these countries actually want to assemble it and someone has to do the integration, and all of that. It's a broader issue than just the device, regardless of whether it's an Asustek device, or a Classmate PC, or an OLPC. IDGNS: Apart from education, will these low-cost computers help to increase PC penetration in developing countries? Maloney: To be determined. I've spent a lot of time in the last year in emerging markets and the striking thing is how many mid-range and high-end notebooks are being sold. If you go to Egypt or Turkey or Ukraine or Poland or Czech Republic or Brazil or Argentina, you're seeing shopping malls everywhere converting over to selling notebooks. You could see it in China a year ago, where you go into shopping malls that used to sell desktops and now they're full of notebooks. You see the same thing all across India. It is amazing how many mainstream, made in Taiwan or made in China, notebooks are sold in emerging markets. People have the same aspirations and brand aspirations. You can't patronize people and say we get the big one with the 14-inch color screen and you get the little one, that's not going to work. My view is that these things, like Classmate PC, are much better targeted at kids, with a much smaller screen, smaller keyboard. IDGNS: Is the aim to give the students in developing countries basic PC skills, or is computer access the key to something larger? Maloney: It's about the Web more than anything. I have young kids and it's almost obscene: my kids have access to it and there are 2 billion kids that don't. The disadvantage for someone who doesn't have access to the Web is overwhelming. Â
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With its lowest-priced home PC to date, company shows desire to move beyond pricier game machines.
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New company in New York will emboss gadgets with custom artwork, and they're going to give away the business plan. Photos: Laser-etched laptops
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In an unexpected development, chip giant Intel Corp. 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&#39;s rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has announced a two-week sale from November 12 to November 26, with the objective of catalyzing greater support from philanthropists and generous consumers, as well as emerging nations whose citizens could stand to benefit.
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By Peter Svensson  It seems like a great idea: making a computer that's somewhere between the size of a cell phone and a laptop, for people to carry around and surf the Web.
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If you donated an XO laptop to the OLPC with the expectations of getting one back for yourself, you've probably been on hold for several months amid shipping snafus.
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The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow this week, with Chief Technology Officer Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC.Jepsen, who joined OLPC as its first employee in 2005 after Nicholas Negroponte started the effort, will pursue an opportunity to chase after &quot;her next miracle in display technology,&quot; OLPC said in an e-mail sent on Sunday.Jepsen was responsible for hardware and display development for the rugged and power-saving&#160;XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its innovative hardware features and environmentally friendly design.Her last day with the organization is Dec. 31, though she will continue consulting with OLPC, according to the e-mail. Dec. 31 is also the end of OLPC&#39;s Give One Get One program, in which two XO laptops can be purchased for about $400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.Satisfied that XO laptops were shipping in volume, Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.&quot;I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit,&quot; Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.&quot;I believe that the work I led in the design of the XO laptop is just the first step in changing computing,&quot; she wrote.Powered by solar power, foot pedal or pull-string, the laptop doesn&#39;t rely on an electrical outlet to run, making it useful for situations where power is unreliable or unavailable. The laptop&#39;s specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, compared to 40 watts on commercial laptops depending on usage.The laptop&#39;s battery lasts up to 21 hours because of custom-designed, efficient power-saving features implemented at the hardware and software level. Batteries in commercial laptops may explode at high temperatures, while XO&#39;s batteries can run and recharge in temperatures around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said in earlier interview.OLPC is also designing a cow-powered generator that works by hooking cattle up to a system of belts and pulleys.For connectivity, the laptop has mesh-networking features for Internet access.
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As&#160;One Laptop Per Child prepares to ship its highly anticipated XO laptops in two weeks, it is developing a &quot;supercharger,&quot; a mass battery recharger that will draw power from cows and yo-yos to help the laptops run longer.The supercharger is a box that will charge 15 batteries at a time, said Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer for OLPC.The supercharger complements other environmentally friendly battery charging technologies being used or under development for the XO laptop, Jepsen said. Users can hook up handcranks, cows, yo-yos, foot pedals and solar panels to the box to recharge batteries.Last week OLPC said it was designing a cow-powered generator through a dynamo with a system of belts and pulleys using cattle to generate power.A typical charge cycle for a laptop battery should be about three hours, Jepsen said. Groups of children will be able to share batteries.Currently in design, the supercharger will be ready for manufacturing next year, Jepsen said.A laptop&#39;s mileage depends on its usage, so OLPC designed an environmentally friendly laptop that could work with a rugged, low-power battery, Jepsen said. The laptop&#39;s specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, Jepsen said. It lasts five years and works in environments up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said.The XO batteries do not work on normal laptops, which can sap up to 40 watts of power depending on usage, Jepsen said.The XO is also the first laptop that uses only alternative energy, Jepsen said. Low-cost solar panels are great as a power option where there is plenty of sunlight, Jepsen said. Energy is especially scare in developing nations, so the laptop will hopefully pass on energy preservation lessons, which could help preserve battery life in the XO, Jepsen said.The laptop goes into manufacturing this week after three years of design experimentation and attempts to reduce manufacturing cost. It will first be offered in two weeks to consumers in the Give 1 Get 1 program, in which two laptops can be purchased for about US$400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.&quot;We&#39;re exhausted, but exhilarated,&quot; Jepsen said.REFERENCES:OLPC experiments with cow-powered laptops ... seriously, Oct. 24, 2007