[tt] NYT: Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free

[Premise Checker]

Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/worldbusiness/24laptop.html

By STEVE LOHR

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the
developing worlds children, has considerable momentum. Years of work
by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost
machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early
reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next
month.

Orders, however, are slow. I have to some degree underestimated the
difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a
check written, said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit
project. And yes, it has been a disappointment.

But Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media
Laboratory, views the problem as a temporary one in the long-term
pursuit of using technology as a new channel of learning and
self-expression for children worldwide.

And he is reaching out to the public to try to give the laptop
campaign a boost. The marketing program, to be announced today, is
called Give 1 Get 1, in which Americans and Canadians can buy two
laptops for $399.

One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation,
and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The
donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The
program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to
Nov. 26.

Just what Americans will do with the slender green-and-white laptops
is uncertain. Some people may donate them to local schools or youth
organizations, said Walter Bender, president of the laptop project,
while others will keep them for their own family or their own use.

The machines have high-resolution screens, cameras and peer-to-peer
technology so the laptops can communicate wirelessly with one
another. The machine runs on free, open source software. Everything
in the machine is open to the hacker, so people can poke at it,
change it and make it their own, said Mr. Bender, a computer
researcher. Part of what were doing here is broadening the community
of users, broadening the base of ideas and contributions, and that
will be tremendously valuable.

The machine, called the XO Laptop, was not engineered with affluent
children in mind. It was intended to be inexpensive, with costs
eventually approaching $100 a machine, and sturdy enough to
withstand harsh conditions in rural villages. It is also extremely
energy efficient, with power consumption that is 10 percent or less
of a conventional laptop computer.

Staff members of the laptop project were concerned that American
children might try the pared-down machines and find them lacking
compared to their Apple, Hewlett-Packard or Dell laptops. Then, in
this era of immediate global communications, they might post their
criticisms on Web sites and blogs read around the world, damaging
the reputation of the XO Laptop, the project staff worried.

So the laptop project sponsored focus-group research with American
children, ages 7 to 11, at the end of August. The results were
reassuringly positive. The focus-group subjects liked the fact that
the machine was intended specifically for children, and appreciated
features like the machine-to-machine wireless communication.
Completely beastly was the verdict of one boy. Another
environmentally conscious youngster noted that the laptop prevents
global warming.

Still, the Give 1 Get 1 initiative is mainly about the giving. The
real reason is to get this thing started, Mr. Negroponte said.

He said that if, for example, donations reached $40 million, that
would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the
developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000
machines to 20 countries to try out and get started.

It could trigger a lot of things, Mr. Negroponte said.

Late last year, Mr. Negroponte said he had hoped for orders for
three million laptops, but those pledges have fallen short. Orders
of a million each from populous Nigeria and Brazil did not
materialize.

Still, the project has had successes. Peru, for example, will buy
and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year many of
them allocated for remote rural areas. Mexico and Uruguay, Mr.
Negroponte noted, have made firm commitments. In a sponsorship
program, the government of Italy has agreed to purchase 50,000
laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.

Each country will have different ideas about how to use the
machines. Alan Kay, a computer researcher and adviser to the laptop
project, said he expects one popular use will be to load textbooks
at 25 cents or so each on the laptops, which has a high-resolution
screen for easy reading.

Its probably going to be mundane in the early stages, said Mr. Kay,
who heads a nonprofit education group, whose learning software will
be on the XO Laptop. Im an optimist that this will eventually work
out, Mr. Kay said.