[tt] WP: On a Laptop Mission for Kids

[Premise Checker]

The only ones that will buy these in the developed world are those who 
just want to see for themselves what they are like, or else the 
charitable. I can buy a much better laptop for $300 at BestBuy.

On a Laptop Mission for Kids
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/17/AR2007111700180_pf.html

A Buy One, Give One Campaign Seeks to Send Tech Abroad

By Leslie Walker
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 18, 2007; F06

For two weeks this month, Americans are being invited to join a
global marathon -- the uphill effort to take 21st-century computing
to poor children around the world.

The invitation comes from One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit group
founded in 2005 by academics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Media Lab. The MIT gang is trying to jump-start
unexpectedly slow laptop computer sales abroad by appealing to
charitable impulses at home.

Through Nov. 26, it is offering to sell anyone in the United States
and Canada two of its bright green XO laptops for $399. While one
goes to the buyer , the other will go to a child in a developing
country.

"We want to broaden the scope of the program, to engage more people
and let them participate," said Walter Bender, the nonprofit's
president.

The unusual "Give 1. Get 1." marketing campaign (
http://www.xogiving.org) is a departure from the original
distribution plan promoted by the group's founder, new-media guru
Nicholas Negroponte. It called for no sales in the United States or
to the public, only to governments in large developing nations. The
sales force was mainly Negroponte, who spent the past several years
flying around the world to meet with heads of state and announcing
handshake commitments in Brazil, Thailand, Nigeria and other
countries.

For various reasons, those agreements yielded fewer laptop orders
than Negroponte wanted. Changes in political leadership were partly
to blame, he said, but the bigger factor turned out to be fierce
competition from the tech industry at home after Intel and
Microsoft joined the race, launching for-profit ventures to sell
computing technology to developing nations.

"So in August we came up with another strategy. We said instead of
going to big governments, let's go to the people," Negroponte said.
"The truth is I don't know whether this is going to generate
100,000 laptops or a million, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't
take a lot of snow to generate an avalanche."

Negroponte is hoping his campaign will allow laptops to reach
poorer, more remote nations because the subsidies no longer have to
come exclusively from the governments in target countries. Rwanda,
Haiti and Cambodia were among the first to sign up to receive Give
1, Get 1 computers.

Uruguay and Peru, meanwhile, were the first to place orders for the
XO laptops that went into mass production near Shanghai a few weeks
ago. Uruguay ordered 100,000 laptops and Peru ordered 250,000. The
machines cost $187 to make, but Negroponte is hoping the price will
drop closer to the original $100 target as production volume rises.

The lightweight machines have been winning positive reviews from
the media but a fair amount of ridicule from American tech titans,
including Intel Chairman Craig Barrett and Microsoft Chairman Bill
Gates. Barrett belittled the XO laptop as a "$100 gadget." Gates
ridiculed its hand-crank method of generating power, saying, "Geez,
get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and
you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to
type."

Negroponte counterattacked early this year, publicly accusing the
tech leaders of trying to undercut his program because it didn't
use Intel microprocessors or Microsoft's operating system. In July,
Barrett softened his stance and joined the board of One Laptop Per
Child. While the XO laptops originally only contained
microprocessors from AMD, Intel's chief rival, by next April some
of the XO machines will run on Intel chips.

"We are in the honeymoon phase with Intel," Negroponte said,
chuckling.

The XO's unusual design consumes little power, runs open-source
software and features a high-resolution screen readable in
sunlight. It also has a wireless system that lets XOs form a local
network to communicate with one another, even when no Internet
connection is available.

Whether it succeeds, One Laptop Per Child is likely to go down in
philanthropic history as a case study in the formidable challenges
facing anyone trying to use technology to help the developing
world.

Wayan Vota, a technology missionary who runs a Web site devoted to
news about the group, said it has "a great dream and amazing
technology but not much of an implementation plan." He worries that
the outcome could resemble an ill-fated tractor program in Africa
decades ago, which provided lots of tractors but little supporting
infrastructure.

"You can't just drop in technology and leave," Vota said. "And
every successful technology project in the developing world has
shown you have to start at the grass roots. You need buy-in from
end users and work up the change from the bottom. You get students
and parents and teachers to support it, so they influence the
education bureaucracy."

Bender disputed the notion that his group didn't do enough
spadework, saying MIT researchers have been doing fieldwork since
the 1960s. "We have been on the ground in virtually every corner of
the planet for 40-plus years working on this problem and getting
feedback." Bender said critics don't understand their vision for
how laptops will change children's lives by helping them "learn
about learning."

Negroponte agreed, saying that was a key difference between the MIT
project and rival commercial ventures: "One Laptop Per Child is an
education project. It is not a laptop project."

Negroponte and Bender believe that playing with their own laptops
will engage children's intellects, spark creativity and provide an
outlet for self-expression. Laptops, however, aren't teachers
anymore than a vaccine is a cure, Bender said, citing an analogy
between immunology and education popularized by Jonas Salk: "A
vaccine is an agency that allows your body to manufacture a cure.
And a laptop is not a cure, but an agency that allows teachers and
students to engage in learning to construct learning."

Still, the program ascribes great potential to the machines. Intel
and other rivals question whether that potential can be met without
costly companion services.

For its part, Intel is doing charity work and commercial
development in search of devices to create new markets for its
microprocessors. Because most children in developing nations have
little access to education, they are seen as a natural starting
point. Intel developed a rival laptop, the Classmate PC, that
leapfrogged the XO in sales earlier this year, with tens of
thousands of units shipped to foreign countries since production
started in March, even though they cost more than the XO.

"It's now in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Libya and Pakistan," said
Intel spokeswoman Agnes Kwan. "Most were purchased by governments."

By the end of the year, Intel will be running laptop pilot programs
in schools in 30 countries with an eye to figuring out what kind of
software services, Internet connectivity, local educational content
and technical support are needed.

"We don't believe in just providing hardware," Kwan said. "Our
experience is it needs to be end-to-end solution."

Intel launched a global education initiative a decade ago, and
early last year announced a "World Ahead" program that committed $1
billion over five years to bring technology to developing
countries. Intel also pledged to donate 100,000 computers to
classrooms in poor countries over five years.

Microsoft, also eager to tap new markets, announced this year it
would sell a stripped-down software package to emerging-country
governments for $3 a student as part of its "Unlimited Potential"
program to bring technology to the world's poor. Company executives
also have been touting a separate plan to make cellphones that hook
up to TVs and perform many laptop functions.

Yet another tack is coming from Stephen Dukker, founder of low-cost
computing pioneer eMachines, who has started a firm called
NComputing that aims to reduce computing costs through a new
machine that lets children share computing resources.

Vota says all of these approaches and more are needed: "If there
are a billion students in the world, there will be a billion
solutions. There is a full spectrum of educational environments
computing can be in, and they all have potential."

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