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"World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only
BobB writes to tell us that what one company is calling the "world's cheapest laptop" is now available at the price of $130. Unfortunately if you want to buy one you will also need to convince 99 of your closest friends to go in on an order with you since you cannot buy in less than units of 100. We have covered several "cheap laptops" in the past and many have turned out to be fraudulent, so especially with a large up-front cost, buyer beware. "The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software."
Even closer in spirit, I think, would be www.eswarm.com. I've met one of the founders, and they've been in development for a long time, it seems. From what I understand, the whole point of e-swarming is to post something you'd like a discount on (like these cheap laptops, or even regular consumer items--blenders, ipods, car insurance, etc--and see if you can find the requisite number of people to affect a bulk buy discount.
When I first met the guy, and heard his idea, I thought it a brilliant use of the internet, and I'm surprised it hasn't caught on before.