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Negroponte Offers OLPC Technology For India's $35 Tablet
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned $35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology."
I guess it'll be the India's $200 tablet now.
It seems obvious how this might point the Indian project in the right direction, but will OLPC be able to learn anything form involvement in the ultracheap Indian effort?
Joint ventures FTW!
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
India is trolling - it can announce $35 tablets, even $0.00 tablets, but it sure as hell can't make any for that price. The components alone cost more than $35, and that's when China makes them with slaves paid less than India will pay.
Negroponte has been there, knows the truth, and knows that India is just there to swindle international news media to get attention for its own country. He's going to co-opt that attention for his own project. Good on him.
Does my bum look big in this?
I'm sure he means Intel hardware and MS software technologies.
OLPC did not sell out to Microsoft. OLPC's policy is simply like this: If an organization buys OLPC XO-1 & XO-1.5 machines, they are free to do with them what they want, even install Windows should they choose (unlike the iStuff Apple does not want you tinkering around with and have to be jailbroken in order to do more stuff). You buy it, you own it and are free to install whatever software you want on it (whether open or proprietary), unlike a lot of gadgets today which you only seem to license from their manufacturers due to their DMCA and DRM hooks.
Moreover, some governments requested that their machines run Windows, so how could Negroponte say no to that request from paying customers? (I don't think it ever happened though, haven't seen any XO-1s running WinXP in the wild. The XO-1.5s should be able to run Windows with their higher specs tho).
I asked, AFAIK, NO ONE at OLPC has been working on Windows stuff, it was all up to the MS folks to make Windows run on the OLPC XO machines. The only work done by OLPC folks did to support Windows was to make the BIOS more compatible. One of the engineers at OLPC said that the changes the MS folks wanted to the BIOS would even prevent booting to anything else than Windows, so what the OLPC dude did was actually fix the BIOS so that it *could be* dual booted to both Linux and Windows as opposed to the MS folks' original plans.
There's been a lot of hate thrown towards OLPC ever since the Windows thing, but really, everything they do is open source over there and nothing really came out of that Windows thing except negative public backlash.
Now about selling to small deployments and individuals, IMHO this is something they need to do to make the platform survive. The smallness of the size of the developer crew at OLPC is simply ridiculous. More geeks need to be able to get their hands on these wonderful machines to get a healthy software and application ecosystem going.
As for touchscreen, having monkeyed around with an XO-1 machine, I'd say it's a must-have when you twist the screen into tablet configuration. The gamepad buttons on it are simply not enough when you need to use the mouse.
http://www.object404.com
Oh, BTW, I've been using the OLPC XO-1 I have with me as a PDF reader. A touchscreen would be amazing for scrolling, panning and zooming. The mousepad and gamepad arrow keys are pretty stifling. The touchscreen would be so intuitive for kids, and best of all, will allow them to take notes in traditional fashion and enable them to sketch diagrams for their notes, something a keyboard and trackpad won't allow you to do.
As for OLPC tech, the Pixel Qi screen is a complete game-changer and something everyone else on the market doesn't have yet (can't wait for the Notion Ink Adam android tablet which will have it). It's simply amazing how you can switch between colored backlit LCD to black and white low-power sunlight readable mode which *extends* battery life. Moreover, even the backlit LCD mode is sunlight readable. If you take your device outside or put it under very bright lights, it will show up as black and white and is still readable as opposed to normal backlit LCD screens.
The wireless mesh networking technology used by OLPC is also something I want to see perfected across the computing world. The OLPC XO machines were built so that you can chain a bunch of them across a long distance to share and piggyback an internet connection that's available to only one machine, kinda like smart dust.
Another thing, I haven't tested it, but under ideal conditions (think line-of-sight straight highway with no obstructions), the XO machines are supposed to be able to communicate across 1 kilometer. I'd believe it though as the XO picks up a *LOT* of wifi signals that my phone can't see. Something like 30:10 ratio.
http://www.object404.com
The components may well cost 35$, but I'm sure they excluded the price of the PCB and the machine time for mounting the components onto the PCB, thats a big chunk of money right there. Then you've got the assembly, logistics and distribution costs so that even with cheap indian labour I'm sure you'ill be much closer to 70$ than 35$.
In sort its easy for the guys in the lab to look at the BOM and say 35$, but the reality is somewhat different.
Lets just hope this laptop only has support for yesteryear's encryption such as ROT-13 lest the Indian government causes a fuss about not being able to spy on OLPC user's traffic and outlaws its like they did with satellite phones.
"I like the proposal [of] giving away the back-up strategy if XP is rejected,"
.. a way to position this around MSFT willing to possiblt give MORE if they research on stuff that is mutually interesting'
.. It turns out that one of the site's authors works on an Intel project that is competing with the OLPC. Oops"
`We should see how we can "target" the funds for the specific research
`I think we should name our new open source license and romance its creation. "Education Open Source" or something like that'
`Remember that a key part of our strategy is to create a situatuion where even if Nick rejects us for philosophical reasons there is a long and visable history of our attempts to work with them and then we have to ask to get a license for the "open source hardware" and we will make our own offering on the commercial side' Craig Mundie Oct 2005 link
"The OLPC News website in the past months has build up a reputation for sharply criticizing the $100 laptop
Why Microsoft Must Control One Laptop Per Child
Does India have any tech manufacturing base? No troll - sincere question.
I know they've got keen engineering students who want that base to develop so they can work in it, but I can't think of any factories. Everything's in China, isn't it? In which case this is a pipe-dream promotion by the prof. It'll get friendly words from various Goverment officials trying to sound like they want to do things for education and manufacturing, but it won't get funding like the Space program does. (Space programs are relatively easy to fund -- national vanity projects aren't judged by meeting commodity pricing.)
Which leaves the remaining indian tech I can think of, which tend to be licensed military contracts that suffer bad cost-overruns and delays. The Tata's isn't a good example because its only innovation is stripped-out performance and safety requirements. It's a fine and useful thing, but it's not an example of technical industry any more than the Trabant was. You can apply the same principle of Vicious Compromise to digital school tablet, but that won't deliver something cheaper than its Chinese parts.
The XO was never about "shipping products people could afford and wanted to buy". It was about giving children in developing nations an open platform on which to learn computing, and have access to digitized knowledge resources. Not everyone is out to make a profit, some people just want to do good things.
If no one has your back, time to move your back.
I'm not sure what relevance this has to Apple whatsoever. Apple never suggested they were making a budget tablet nor competing on price (there are already higher specified, lower priced machines out there). The company's model has always been to charge a higher price to reflect the aspirational aspect of their projects. They've been undercut with vastly cheaper and more powerful desktops for years but it hasn't affected their price point in that market, so if you imagine they will drop the price of iOS products to try and compete with a cheap tablet I think you are sorely mistaken.
I wonder - will it run Flash?
This statement from him is just a last ditch effort to recapture the media's attention after India's announcement challenged his position in two ways:
By "offering the OLPCs technology to India", Negroponte is trying to both create the impression that India did not went out on their own because the OLPC's technology was not adequate for it's stated aims and to set up the groundwork to later claim some of the success from India's project by stating that it succeeded thanks to the help from the OLPC project.
The OLPC is pretty much dead and has been dead ever since they sold out to Intel. What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru (source).
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlights and lost focus on what the OLPC was meant to achieve: the OLPC project became the means by which Negroponte got his moments in the spotlight, not the other way around.
Negroponte essentially sold the project out to the large corporate interests whom the XO-1 threathened as a disruptive technology. While the true soul of what the OLPC project was meant to do slumbered on for a bit in the form of netbooks and it will take something like India's project to bring it back to life.
I mean really, sure the kids will learn about all this fancy electrical engineering and maybe one day they will figure out how to provide clean drinking water, build good hospitals and all that, but what's really important is shoving these kids into cubicals in Mumbai so they can code spambots. When are people going to learn that idealism is great but what really matters is greed and making money NOW. Not to mention, what kids really want is games: can you play Grand Theft Auto on one of these cheap laptops? That's what the kids want.
Sure, of course, now that india has proved who ever is in charge of the OLPC project was in it just to make a buck himself, and that now they proved him wrong with his designs, he hopes to at least get them to look over some of the materials they still might need and make money by them using his stuff....right, of course, he is thinking of the endless millions of kids needing one of these over there, and is just a too excited for his own good....I think this is just your perfect example how the big wheel keeps turning to help the richer get richer and the poor get poorer (if that is even a word...)...
If students from india could figure out how to make a 35$ tablet , you know these guys could too, quite easily, they had the contacts right off the bat to save money where as these students do not even have contacts, they are just using ingenuity, so they come up with it and show the world that this is possible and that these companies are still just as greedy as they have ever been, I think india's government should just can OLPC and just straight off the shelf make the tablets available to all stores over there with a price cap or sell it themselves online...
2001:
``A group of Indian scientists and engineers has developed a handheld computer to help the poor and illiterate join the information age.''
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1442000.stm
2010:
``Both licensees may seem to have stopped actively marketing their Simputer devices''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simputer
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This fantasy device sounds great - if you were talking about a $200 tablet, and it was running Android on ARM it would perhaps be possible, if you're talking about a cheap tablet used for education, it's foolhardy to try to stuff it full of the latest tech, try to make it run Windows too (intel only, expensive), and then hope it would somehow hit a price point of $35, or even $100.
planned obsolescence is the full answer
Please take a look at those: http://bethstepsup.blogspot.com/ http://planet.laptop.org/
Since when are touchscreens "the latest tech?" Touchscreens have been around since the 70's. My personal first touchscreen gadget was from the early 90's. Everybody and their kid has had a touchscreen DS for ten years.
Keyboards are well established, but are fidgety to manufacture and have lots of moving pieces. A touchscreen, in theory at least, should be cheaper to make. It makes sense.
The ______ Agenda
Looking at some of the responses to my criticism of OLPC some of you people are wearing blinkers and have short memories.
Still, it's fucking funny seeing a bunch of tolerance on their own terms jerks get bent out of shape.
What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru
So you mean that they should have pushed it into places which couldn't afford it, nor the infrastructure to support it, and refused it to the places that wanted it? Sending laptops to a tiny village in Somalia with no internet connection would be a waste of time. Selling cheap computers to what you call "mid-level" countries like those in South America could do some good.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, he's not offering them his help because he wants the attention, he's offering them help because he actually wants them to succeed? As the head of a non-profit organisation with a mission to promote cheap computers for education, is that so implausible? And despite the various issues OLPC has run into, it's probably got more experience than anyone else for this kind of project (Intel's classmate is technologically similar, but I think OLPC is much more interested in how they are used and supported).
For my final point, I'd like to borrow from family guy: "Oh yeah, I bet you've got a much better --low cost educational laptop--. Stupid dog."
What India needs is one laptop and a projector per teacher/class and decent content developed centrally and a decent broadband infrastructure India has developed very good content for higher engineering education check http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/ or http://www.youtube.com/iit and is planning a three tier structure to distribute the same to all engineering colleges. The $35 is the last link in this distribution chain for this content Unfortunately similar content is not developed for primary education(still 40% of Indian population is illiterate) and the primary education delivery is very poor in spite of governament pouring lots(relatively) of money in to it. The whole education field is tightly controlled by government. The relatively rich (top 5% of people mostly in cities) manage to get some reasonable education for their children by sending their children to private "english medium" schools and to tuition and coaching classes for upto precollege(first 12 years of education) and by paying donation and very high fees for admission in "private"engineering colleges. Even in these the quality of teaching and infrastructure is poor compared to abysmal standard in government run primary schools(not english medium) Good and cost effective ICT can change the scene very fast some other points why the $35 access device may not be important are - 3G is being rolled out in India by this year end - this gives broadband access on mobile - most engineering students can afford a $100(approx Rs 5000) mobile phone with 3G capabality and the excellent content is already there for downloading
What the world needs is a "free" tablet. Now that would be a kicker.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
OLPC was a great idea run aground by greed, stupidity and a little help from Micro$oft. Your average person can't be helped, he's too daft. GNU/Linux can be downloaded for free right now and is way better than anything else out there.
Steve Jobs == Steve Ballmer. Neither of them care the least bit about the well being of anybody else besides themselves.
And yeah, there will never be a well designed $35 tablet.
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlight...
No, he was like that in his Media Lab days, before OLPC.
That's the big problem with OLPC - it's more about Negroponte schmoozing with heads of state, and less about shipping product.
Another CEO with the same ego problem is Shai Agassi, of Better Place, the people with the electric car battery changing system. He's full of grand schemes, but what he actually has delivered, after raising substantial capital, is one charging station in Tokyo for a fleet of taxis.
Excellent. His brother, John Negroponte, implemented a similar exchange via Honduras (into Nicaragua) in the early 1980's: ORPI (One Rifle Per Iranian) for TDPDS (Ten Dollars Per Dead Sandinista).
The OLPC is pretty much dead and has been dead ever since they sold out to Intel. What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru.
There has to more to it than that.
The kid with an XO laptop is almost certain to be Hispanic-American and Roman Catholic.
60,000 to Brazil. But over 500,000 to Peru. 100,00 units - of 1.5 million - went to Rwanda. But Rwanda is the only significant - confirmed - deployment of the XO outside the Western Hemisphere. OLPC: Deployment of XO laptops
The OLPC was originally presented to the Education Minister as a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it, bundle of hardware, open source software and a Constructivist philosophy of education straight out of the Western media lab.
When your product doesn't sell worth shit outside of Latin America, than any claims of universality are officially bogus. Until proven otherwise.
What the Indian government needs to do is come up with a linux distro that will run on old discarded hardware and contain educational applications. A lot of the costs involved in building a new computer platform are redundant when there are already a bajillion old discarded PCs that one can buy for around $35. One thing Indians and most developing nations are good at is fixing up junk and making it useful. A government supplied distro that comes with educational videos, sounds and images, a local copy of wikipedia, and a simple platform that the masses can use for writing applications such as a grain price monitor, and a usable UI written in hindi (and later on in regional languages) can go a long way in achieving their aims.
The government already owns BSNL which has a huge cellphone network throughout the country, and they can start a low-speed internet plan (available only to those with a ration card). They can collaborate with someone in China (say huawei) to manufacture PCI cards and USB dongles that can use the GSM network for data.
The problem is not hardware as much as it is software and content. If you were to subsidize and hand a netbook to every child and poor person in the world today, you couldn't expect them to use it for educational or professional benefits. They'll just log on to facebook and watch Justin Bieber videos. Just recently we heard a story about how computer use does not correlate with higher grades in developed nations. What makes people think it would be any different for a developing country?
As a middle class schoolkid in India, I would've been delighted if there was something else apart from just black and white books that I could learn from. Instead of just reading about concepts, it would've been cool if I had access to simple videos of what an atom probably looks like and speeches delivered by mahatma gandhi. Or a simple geometry application in which you can draw circles and triangles to learn about them without wasting paper.
What India can do is get together a big enough team of developers, schoolteachers and social workers to write applications and compile content for this $35 computer, integrate it into an OS distribution that will run on any x86 processor above the 486 and is portable to other platforms, and then get NGOs to install this on old machines and deliver them to the poor. When they run out of old machines to use, then, maybe they can come up with a cheap x86 or ARM based laptop that has a cheap screen, a keyboard and a pointing device and can run this OS.
My point is that there are greater educational returns for the government of India in spending money in compiling a good software distribution and getting the masses involved early instead of starting another Simputer project that leads to nothing.
To those who do not believe a computer can be made for $35, I'd point to the cheap-ass Nokia 1000 series phones that are the mainstay of the cellphone revolution. These devices can still run simple applications such as games and e-wallets, etc., play MP3s, and some can even read flash memory cards. If one could just write some applications for them and increase the screen size, bingo.
Looks like our friend wants to de-rail the $35 computing device effort by luring them using his 'cheap' platform ;). All these 'cheap' computer makers like Negroponte will be the biggest losers if someone really makes a $35 computer. Stay away from Negroponte.
Now that India is getting on the techy-bandwagon, they'll probably start off-shoring THEIR tech support to America. Hope THEY have better luck understanding US than WE have understanding THEM!
I think that being able to type quickly and accurately on an actual keyboard (and 10 key) is a marketable skill that would be lost if the focus went to tablets.
ppl, who have enough patience, here is a link to a video hosted by a News TV channel "http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=157534". As a part of their gadget program, they reviewed the tablet and interviewed Kapil Sibal, state minister for Human Resource Department which initiated this project. It runs android and the screen is "resistive". it has 2 gig of memory. The minister has plans to mass produce and try to get down price down to $10. right now, the plan is to produce one million of these and distribute them to students in institutes of "higher education". This will definitely help in bridging the gap of "knowledge access" between students in rural areas and cities.