Tag archive: Nicholas Negroponte

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) famously aimed to create the $100 laptop and make it available to schoolchildren throughout the world. It never reached that cost target – the actual figure is close to double that – but it’s made a big impact, and now it hopes to make and even bigger one. Speaking at the TED 2009 conference, founder Nicholas Negroponte announced that the company would open source its hardware design and… Read More

The much-touted One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has announced it is laying off half its staff and reducing salaries for its remaining employees, blaming the global economic downturn for the restructuring. At the same time, the program is vowing to do more with less, including spinning off the development of the Linux-based Sugar operating system to the OLPC community and working to deploy a $0 laptop for the worlds least developed… Read More

The One Laptop Per Child project as re-launched its Give One Get One program, making it possible for individual customers in developed nations to donate an OLPC XO laptop to a child in a developing region—or donate a notebook and set their hands on one of the OLPC XO laptops for themselves. Although the program was embraced last year by donors willing to support the project to get computers to children in developing nations, the… Read More

Microsoft Corporation and the non-profit One Laptop Per Child project has announced an agreement that will put Windows XP on the OLPC XO laptop—albeit with a higher price tag attached. OLPC XO's will still be available with the organization's Linux-based operating system and education-centric Sugar interface, but versions will also be available with XP, which should make the notebooks easier to sell to governments and… Read More

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… Read More

The OLPC project's director of security architecture Ivan Krstić has resigned from the non-profit organization, characterizing OLPC's recent restructuring as “drastic” and a radical shift from the organization's original goals. Krstić revealed on a Web site entry he resigned the post three weeks ago. “Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite… Read More

The One Laptop Per Child project got its start in academia, with the MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte floating the idea of developing $100 laptop computers to be deployed in school systems throughout the developing world to ensure entire generations of humanity don't get left out of the digital revolution. Although the OLPC project is shipping computers and in many ways could be considered a success, the project has faced… Read More

When it was launched a few years ago at MIT, the One Laptop Per Child project came under some criticism from domestic groups who argued it was disingenuous for the project to focus on the needs of educational systems in developing nations when there were plenty of needful, under-served children and students right in the OLPC organization's backyard in the United States. Now, in an interview, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte says the… Read More

Who would have guessed it: Non-profit companies and for-profit companies don’t get along too well when they’re both peddling the same product. It shouldn’t come as any huge surprise then, that Intel has recently cut off its involvement in the One Laptop Per Child program, which it only been participating in since July. One Laptop Per Child is the non-profit program behind the XO Laptop, a low-cost device designed to be… Read More

When Nicholas Negroponte originally set out to build a laptop from the ground up and as cheaply as possible, that decision included omitting commercial software like Windows in favor of Linux. Two years later, the One Laptop Per Child program has moved the XO Laptop from dream to reality – and now Microsoft wants in. Microsoft officially announced on Wednesday that it was internally developing a version of Windows XP that will… Read More

Sometimes even the best intentions can't avoid patent troubles: Nigerian-owned Lagos Analysis Corporation (a.k.a. LANCOR) has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the One Laptop Per Child project and its head Nicholas Negroponte over the multilingual keyboard design used in the low-cost OLPC XO notebook intended to benefit educational systems in developing nations. The suit accuses the OLPC project of willfully infringing on… Read More

When the One Laptop Per Child organization began mass production of its OLPC XO notebook computer, it also launched a “Give One, Get One” program which enabled commercial sales of the notebook intended to enable education in developing nations. Folks in developed economies would be able to get their hands on the OLPC XO for $399…and, in doing so, would fund another OLPC XO laptop to be given to a child in a developing… Read More

The so-called $100 laptop, developed by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a great idea that’s been dogged by problems along the way. As it’s developed, it was apparent the cost would be higher than believed, it’s suffered competition, and for a long time it was a product without a buyer. At least the last factor has started to change. According to a BBC report, Uruguay has placed an order for 100,000 of the machines, which it will distribute to… Read More

Although the One Laptop Per Child program has always been targeted at children in third-world countries, it would be fair to say that it has attracted a fair amount of country from curious geeks in developed countries as well. Those in the United States and Canada will finally get a shot to buy their own OLPC XO-1s on November 12 when the program opens sales of its hardware to the public. The catch: they’ll need to buy a package of… Read More

If you're an umbrella user, you've probably been hit with this dilemma: sure, it's sunny outside now, but will it still be sunny ten hours from now when you're standing at a bus stop, trying to get home from work? If you take the umbrella and it turns into a 90°F sunny day, you look like a fool. If you leave the umbrella at it turns into a rain-drenched 65°F day, you look like a very damp fool. Now Ambient… Read More