Tag archive: Nigeria

The Internet is a wonderful thing, but not all of our ancient human brains are equipped to handle it. In Naperville, Illinois, a 48-year-old man just discovered that his online girlfriend of 2.5 years isn't real, reports the Chicago Sun Times. Worse, he's wired her more than $200,000 throughout the relationship. That's right. Pent up for love and obviously ignorant about the dangers of the Internet, the poor man wired tens of… Read More

Just a couple of weeks ago, a new cable brought East Africa online. Now, problems with an undersea cable have caused communications disruption in several West African countries – specifically Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. The damage is to the SAT-3 cable which runs from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa, the BBC reports, and in Nigeria it’s taken out around 70% of the bandwidth, forcing companies to use… 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

The Information Commissioner has taken the British government to task over breaching its own data protection laws. According to a report, the UKVisas site, which is run jointly by the Foreign Office and the Home Office, but which was outsourced to an Indian company, VFS, didn’t make data from visa applicants secure.   A Channel 4 News report in May forced the parties to admit the breach, which affected some 50,000 visa applicants to… Read More

Intel and Microsoft have inked a deal to supply Libya's education ministry withh 150,000 of Intel's Classmate PC laptop computers. The systems are designed for educational use in developing markets and compete with the One Laptop Per Child project; like the OLPC XO's final pricetag, the Classmate PC costs about $200 to build. According to Reuters, the deal was announced in the Libyan press in August, but Intel and… Read More

You know those annoying Nigerian scam e-mails we’ve all had? Or perhaps the eBay scams where you’re paid by check from somewhere, only to discover too late that the check is a fake. Well, payback has happened.   A series of co-ordinated raids in the US, Canada, Britain and Nigeria last week led to a number of arrests, following a long sting operation. In the UK alone, over $17 million in checks were seized, while worldwide… Read More

A new annual report from the Economist Intelligence Unit aims to rank how nations' “e-readiness,” that is, how prepared they are to take advantage of the opportunities represented by the Internet and digital technology. This year, the report has changed its methodology to factor in not only the basic availability of Internet technologies, but how easy and affordable it is for citizens to get online. The result? Although… Read More

Taiwan's Quanta Computer says it has confirmed orders for one million notebook computers for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and may be able to ship between five and ten million OLPC systems this year as new nations sign up for the project. In addition to confirmed countries Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, and Thailand, Rwanda and Uruguay have recently announced their participation in the project. The OLPC initiative is… Read More

The One Laptop Per Child Project might have just seen its first XO units come off the assembly line for developers and testing in developing nations, but the project's backers are already floating new plans to offer the inexpensive machines for sale to the general public—so long as consumer also buy one for use in the developing world. The OLPC effort is currently planning to deliver up to 5 million of the inexpensive laptop… Read More

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort has reached a major milestone: Shanghai's Quanta Computer has pushed the first 1,000 XO laptop computers off its assembly line to begin environmental testing and software refinement. The idea behind the One Laptop Per Child initiative is to improve the educations of children around the world—and especially in developing nations—by putting low-cost, energy-efficient, open-source,… Read More

MIT's One Laptop Per Child portable Linux-based system aimed at the developing world will be apparently be named the Children's Machine 1, or CM1. The OLPC project has also confirmed to DesktopLinux.com that 500 unit will enter field tests in September 2006, with full production scheduled to begin in November. The systems will be manufactured by Chinese computer maker Quanta; the four countries leading interest in the CM1… Read More

MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) got a boost at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting, which showed rainbow-colored working prototypes of the $100 laptops. Aimed at children in development markets, the laptops are designed to bring basic computing and communications capabilities to classrooms in areas where infrastructure to support information technology may be minimal to non-existent. Although concept mockups of the OLPC systems… Read More

Awhile back, rumors floated about of Google Wi-Fi forming and providing free Wi-Fi to all. Eventually the rumors dissipated and we went back to loving our search engine giant just the same as always.But it looks like the Wi-Fi rumors are proving to be true somewhat. The US won't be getting free internet anytime soon though, as Google has chosen Nigeria to receive the first batch of free wirelessinternet. Perhaps this goes hand-in-hand with… Read More

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has inked a deal with Taiwan's Quanta to manufacture the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) $100 laptop designed by the MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte. Quanta is the world's largest laptop manufacturer, manufacturing systems for HP, Apple, Dell, Gateway, Sony, IBM, Sharp, Fujistu, and other major makers. Quanta will have manufactured nearly one-third of the laptop and notebook… Read More

Mature markets in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific will add 150 million new PCs to the world market by 2010. More significant growth will come from emerging markets, for which Forrester forecasts that 566 million new PCs will be in use by 2010, up from 75 million in 2003, a 31% CAGR. Competition for market share will pit industry leaders like Dell and HP against local emerging market manufacturers and fundamentally change the rules of the… Read More