Slashdot Mirror
Low-Cost Simputer Fails to Win Indians' Interest
prostoalex writes "The Associated Press looks at the Indian low-cost Simputer project and registers it as a failure. Picopeta sold 2,000 units over the past year, while Encore Software sold 2,000 Simputers. Only 10% of the devices were bought for rural areas, which the device was originally designed for. The reason? The companies need to sell quite a few simplistic monochrome devices to allow for the low price tag of $200. Meanwhile, anyone can buy a powerful device with a color screen for $199 from a major vendor."
You're probably referring to the Liberator, a single-shot .45 pistol, that the US manuafactured during WWII. Supposedly they cost less than $5 to make and were designed to be dropped behind Axis lines to allow resistance members to kill an enemy soldier and take his weapon. Today they are extremely rare and are worth up to a $1000.
Just because it is a mud hut does not mean they don't have electricity.
I have done allot of traveling to 3rd world countries and been to too many villages to count. But the one thing that always surprised me was the number of TV's. This is true for South America as well as African countries. Usually they were small black and white TV sets. But they were on every night.
Maybe not every hut had one but the families were always willing to share. They set them up on small tables out side and then everyone would gather around to watch.
The top 4 thing to watch are:
Soccer
Baseball
their version of the soap opera
American TV
People in those small villages are also very friendly.
The liberator pistols (and probably the Vietnam era Deer Guns too) have been melted down as scrap. The Deer Gun had to be reloaded by poking out the spent shell casing with a stick and then reloading by hand with one round of .45ACP. The Vietnam version, called the Deer Gun required its user to unscrew the barrel to reload its single shot of 9x19mm parabellum.
More info can be found right here.
They appear sell it only to verticals, such as the army:
l e_id=2701&cat_id=908
http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/article.jsp?artic
Supposedly they cost less than $5 to make
They'd better have cost a whole lot less than that! In 1942, the British could build a 30 round Sten gun for $7, which was reloadable with captured German bullets.
the simputer seemed to be the only option for a (low priced) PDA with linux and a USB host port.. I bet there's a lot of early adopters in the 'first world' that are willing to buy the first batch in order to archieve the volume they want..
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
If Wikipedia is to be trusted, it's $2.10/unit.
MIT's Multimedia lab led by Negroponte is working on a $100 laptop project for poor people that seems to have a fair amount of financial backing. More here
Help fight continental drift.
I'm really not surprised this wasn't a success. A lot of companies blindly go after "emerging markets" without really understanding them. In particular, price isn't as big of a deal as some people think it is. For example, people vastly underestimate the buying power of people in India. Even if everyone was able to afford a computer, what would they do with them? They have no training, no experience, and no support infrastructure.
Interestingly enough, there are some business models that work well. Take the "village PC" model. One person in the village buys a computer (possibly with village assets), supports it, rents out time on it, etc. Everyone in the village, regardless of their technical expertise, benefits from the technology. This model has also worked well for mobile phones.
Last quarter, there were two good talks on technology for emerging and "invisible" markets here at the University of Washington. The first is a talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) entitled The Case for Technology for Developing Regions. An abstract, video, and MP3 of the talk are available from that site. The other talk was given by John Sherry of Intel's People and Practices Research Group. PowerPoint slides, an abstract, a suggested reading list, a discussion wiki, and more can be found here. I highly encourage you to check these talks out.