One Laptop Per Child Orders Surge As Negroponte Claims Momentum Growing

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation has just secured an order for 260,000 of the low cost machines from the government of Peru. Despite a lower than expected take up from foreign governments, Nicholas Negroponte claims that this latest success could mean the momentum will now build.

Negroponte is the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor who set up the foundation in 2005 to provide affordable laptops to schoolchildren around the world. In an interview on Friday, he revealed news of the Peru order, as well as saying that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim had purchased 50,000 of the machines for distribution in his country.
The not for profit organisation wants to eventually offer laptops for $100 or less, with the current price $188. The idea behind the whole project is to convince governments of developing countries to buy the machines, and distribute them to poor schoolchildren to enable them to have access to technology normally unavailable due to costs.

Just last week, the education minister of Nigeria, Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku claimed that the project was senseless until the basic facilities such as seats and uniforms were put in place.
There has also been intense competition to the idea of an affordable for all laptop from the commercial sector in the form of Microsoft and Intel.

Due to the lack of uptake of the original plan, OLPC introduced the Give One, Get One program, with participants buying two of the laptops for $400: one for themselves; and one for a child in the developing country.

According to The Boston Globe, Robert Fadel, the OLPC Foundation’s director of finance and operations, claims that since the Give One Get One program began on November 12th, the foundation has received about $2 million in orders every day. That equated to 190,000 laptops in total, with at least 95,000 of those going to kids in developing countries.

I hope the OLPC’s mission succeeds, as there’s no doubt it’s a great aim to enable children in less well off countries to be able to have access to this technology that we all take for granted.

Source: tech.blorge.com

Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child) Sued for Patent Infringement

Among its other problems - like failing to get orders from third-world governments, competing against Intel and Microsoft, and the seeing the price of its Holy Grail rise from $100 to $200 - One Laptop Per Child and its do-gooder-in-chief Nicholas Negroponte are now being sued for patent infringement in Nigeria on a Nigerian patent (RD8489) by a US-based Nigerian-owned outfit called Lagos Analysis Corporation.

Lagos claims the non-profit reversed engineered its Shift2 keyboard driver source codes.
Lagos says it developed advanced multi-lingual keyboard technology using four shift keys and characters which when pressed while typing normally produce language-critical accents, symbols and diacritical marks. The widgetry appears in Lagos' region-specific Konyin Multilingual Keyboards.

Lancor claims OLPC bought two of the keyboards and ripped the technology off even though the OLPC and the Konyin keyboards are different.

Lancor, which intends to file suit elsewhere, claims OLPC put the functionality in another key.
Last we heard OLTP hadn't seen the suit.

Nigeria initially agreed to buy a million XO laptops from OLPC but reneged on the deal in part because of the higher price and in part because - according to what its education minister Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku told the BBC the other day - "What is the sense of introducing One Laptop Per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in; when they don't have facilities."

So, failing Nigeria, the first 300,000 AMD-based XOs are in production and some of them are bound for Rwanda, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti and Mongolia. The rest are bound for upscale American homes under OLPC's $399 Give One, Get One scheme, which started November 12 and was only supposed to run for two weeks but has been extended to December 31.
Oh, yes, and Intel is giving 3,000 of its competing Classmates to Nigeria.

Source: wireless.sys-con.com