XO To Roll Out This Month!

News of one of my favorite Web 2.0 programs, One Laptop Per Child, and its upcoming roll-out of 2500 computers for some of the world's poorest kids. The press release announced that the project is about to distribute the first installment of the neat little PC's to eight nations this month. This installment is an "experimental" model for the mass production of the little "Green and White Machines" set for July of this year.

The $150 laptops are a technological triumph that we reported on January 15^th. The cool laptops have a hand crank that will allow their little users to charge the batteries, with a keyboard that switches between languages and a digital video camera. The computers will have wireless connectivity and a Linux open-source operating system tailored to remote regions. The project managers say that the price of the laptop should fall to about $100 next year as mass production drives the costs down. The organization hopes to reach 150 million children by the year 2010.

The crank system allows the kids to power the little engineering marvels at a ratio of 10 to one, in that 1 minute of cranking provides 10 minutes of electricity. The laptop only requires 2 watts of power to do essentially what your desktop does with 40 watts.

Educators in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand, Ethiopia and the West Bankwill receive the first machines before the wider rollout to Indonesia and other countries.

The program has come under some criticism because of the relative cost to the poor nations receiving the computers. The financial burden seems to be the greatest concern, as detractors of the program line up to point out how the money could be better spent.

Some are concerned that people who make $1 a day will be tempted to sell the machines on the black market for up to $300, and there are a host of other possibilities and drawbacks to interjecting technology into such hard markets. Some systems are not conducive of the kind of creativity that children might exhibit with the machines, as education systems in these areas are often more prone to rote memorization and strict discipline.

My personal take on the program is that it certainly beats the crap out of anything other Internet technologies are coming up with to connect kids to the outside world. I think that the targeting of special areas that are better suited is a good idea, rather than some random scheme for distributing the XO. I expect the program creators are attuned to many of these issues and do not intend to cast their pearls in to the blind deep.

As for the cost, that seems rather simple to me. We can all just fork over $50 bucks or so and have immediate blog constituents if nothing else. Let's see, 50 million bloggers at $50 bucks a piece, heck that is $2.5 billion right there! I am in if you are for the cost of one x-box game, some cheap tennis shoes, 3 CD's, dinner at Outback or something else we can do without for a week. A good idea for detractors of cool programs might be to provide answers rather than advice. Let's get Bill Gates to donate matching funds! Now we are up to $5 billion! Think - just think of a child who has never even communicated with the outside world and who has never seen anything beyond the horrible specter of poverty and hopelessness.