OLPC-- cheap at twice the price
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The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project is going on sale: buy two, get one. But it's still a good deal.
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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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Dell SP2008WFP: 20-inch wide-screen LCD monitor with Webcam
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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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Former One Laptop Per Child CTO Mary Lou Jepsen has created a for-profit company, Pixel Qi, which will use OLPC inventions to build a $75 laptop.
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Nicholas Negroponte thinks everyone in the world should have a computer. His nonprofit OLPC wants to build and distribute the world's most-affordable laptop, priced at less than $100 and aimed at youngsters in the developing world.
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Why is the government paying for our consumer electronics? A contrary opinion on the voucher program for mandatory analog TV conversion. In Gadget Lab.
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Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: There&#39;s a new laptop available and itâs cheap, really cheap. Working with operating system vendor Linspire--helmed by former mp3.
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The BBC has demonstrated an open source video codec named Dirac which it claims offers twice the bit rate of MPEG-2. According to a story on The Register, the new codec was revealed at the LinuxWorld exhibition
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Blog: High def radio. Few are buying. But you can tell a lot from the price.
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The open-source computer is inexpensive and actually looks good.
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InfoWorld - The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project is asking software coders to develop free, open-source educational computer games for the XO laptop, continuing its push toward a&#160;September launch date.
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(InfoWorld) - Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract laptop PC manufacturer, already has confirmed orders for one million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, a company representative said Thursday. The OLPC project is aimed at ensuring children around the world don't miss out on learning how to use computers. The fear is that the high cost of computers is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how the software, Internet and communications benefits of computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, a conundrum commonly referred to as the digital divide. Quanta is manufacturing the OLPC laptop, andÂ mass productionÂ is the key to slashing its cost. Currently,Â the laptops cost around $130, but the goal is to whittle down the price to $100. The groups involved in the OLPC project, including the MIT Media Laboratory that launched the effort, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, and Linux software developer Red Hat, believe they can reach that goal once millions of the laptops are being produced annually, and had set a target to reach that price sometime in 2008. Quanta said it could ship between 5 million to 10 million units this year because seven nations have already signed up for the project. That may be enough to reduce the costs and meet the $100 goal sooner than expected. The governments that have committed to buy laptops for their schoolchildren include Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay. Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine. "OLPC is a nonprofit organization, but Quanta is a contract manufacturer, a for-profit business. We can't not charge a fee for making the laptops," the representative said. What the company is doing is helping find ways to cut costs as much as possible. The company became famous by slashing production costs to a bare minimum and figuring out ways to further reduce the cost of laptops themselves. Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard are just some of the companies that farm out notebook PC orders to Quanta, which manufactures the products at factories in Taiwan and China. The company is using its expertise to keep OLPC laptop production costs to a minimum. "This is our chairman's pet project, it's his life," said the president of Quanta, Michael Wang, at a company Lunar New Year celebration last week. People across much of East Asia celebrate the Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb. 18. The chairman of Quanta Computer is Barry Lam. Â
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Priced at $249.99, it can play MP3, WMA and WAV-encoded music files.
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A few months after it began hacking its Windows XP operating system to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO children's machine, Microsoft says it is actively field testing the software on the tiny laptops. Whether or not Windows is the best fit for the OLPC's core audience -- children in developing countries -- is debatable.
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New lineup of low-cost PCs includes with some multimedia capabilities.
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Cool but pricey Portable Media Center devices now available.