| Several years ago Nicholas Negroponte began telling us of his quest help address the lack of good education in developing nations. The key to realizing his vision was a $100 laptop that could be sold in large quantities and handed out like text books in these areas. For much of the tech community, all we heard was “$100 laptop!” If building an innovative platform to foster learning in millions of children who have never been exposed to much technology wasn’t challenging enough, making that platform durable, reliable, and inexpensive should be impossible. Over the past two years, One Laptop per Child began shipping the fruit of this labor, the XO-1 laptop, and forever changed the landscape of mobile computing by ushering in the netbook revolution, though arguably not exactly what everyone had in mind. Are netbooks to be OLPC’s legacy or just the beginning of a true technological revolution in developing nations? |
