OLPC Names New President and COO

The One Laptop Per Child Project has named CFO Charles Kane as its new president and COO, with founder Nicholas Negroponte remaining as chairman.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has announced that current CFO Charles Kane will be stepping into the roles of President and Chief Operating Officer of the organization as the non-profit looks to put recent snafus and key personnel losses behind then. OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte will stay on board as Chairman, and will focus on fundraising and promoting OLPC to world governments; Kane will assume responsibility for all OLPC operations, as well as negotiating agreements with third parties.

“From the moment I got involved with OLPC, I’ve been passionate about the mission and impressed by the team’s ability to break through numerous challenges to develop and deliver the XO laptop,” said Kane in a statement. “I greatly look forward to working with the team and our partners to helping make OLPC even more effective in achieving its objectives.”

Prior to joining the OLPC projhect, Kane headed up enterprise software company Corechange, and before that held executive management positions at Informix and Ardent Software, as well as financial management positions at Stratus Computer, Prime Computer, and Deloitte and Touche. More recently, Kane was the CFO of RSA Security, and interim CFO of Aspen Technology.

Negroponte let it be known last month that the organization was searching for someone to step into the OLPC top job. Kane’s appointment may resolve recent issues in the OLPC organization which have led to the loss of key personnel in the last few months, including the organization’s chief technology officer, director of security and architecture, and president of software and content Walter Bender.

Numerous industry reports have OLPC talking with Microsoft about offering a dual-boot version of the OLPC laptop that could run Windows XP as well as the OLPC’s custom Linux-based operating system and user interface, Sugar.