$7 USB Stick Aims To Bring Thousands of Poor People Online

dryriver sends this BBC report: "The USB flash drive is one of the most simple, everyday pieces of technology that many people take for granted. Now it's being eyed as a possible solution to bridging the digital divide, by two colourful entrepreneurs behind the start-up Keepod. Nissan Bahar and Franky Imbesi aim to combat the lack of access to computers by providing what amounts to an operating-system-on-a-stick. In six weeks, their idea managed to raise more than $40,000 (£23,750) on fundraising site Indiegogo, providing the cash to begin a campaign to offer low-cost computing to the two-thirds of the globe's population that currently has little or no access. The test bed for the project is the slums of Nairobi in Kenya. The typical income for the half a million people in the city's Mathare district is about $2 (£1.20) a day. Very few people here use a computer or have access to the net. But Mr Bahar and Mr Imbesi want to change that with their Keepod USB stick. It will allow old, discarded and potentially non-functional PCs to be revived, while allowing each user to have ownership of their own 'personal computer' experience — with their chosen desktop layout, programs and data — at a fraction of the cost of providing a unique laptop, tablet or other machine to each person.'"

Comments

How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help?

[Irate Engineer]

Can someone explain to me what dumping piles and piles of computers into Africa is going to accomplish?

In Africa I see waves of ethnic turmoil coupled with basic infrastructure problems, all played by the governments to keep a few powerful folks in power.

Are we trying to turn Africa into our next call center and need to get the kids up to speed with computers? I don't think that is going to happen until something resembling stability (i.e. taking care of food, clothing and shelter for entire years without fear of a machete attack) takes hold.

Re:How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help?

[frovingslosh]

Don't you understand? They got $40,000 on Indiegogo and all they had to do was give an African village 5 old worthless broken computers and a few flash drives. Clearly this is a life lesson for the starving Africans. If they would just take something that has already been done many times before and claim it was new, and send their old trash to someone else, the chumps on Indiegogo might give them $40,000 too. That's over 54 years worth of African wages. If the Africans are too focused on how to get food, somewhat clean water and staying alive to follow this example, then its not my problem. They should learn from this and, now that they have flash drives and those 5 crappy computers, go on Indiegogo and post some scam of their own.

Re:How is Burying Africa Under PCs Going to Help?

[pslytely psycho]

"That's because of the news cycle, or your news sources. "If it bleeds, it leads"."

Such a good point. I admit, this was my view of Africa before I met a couple of real Africans. One from Liberia, another from Somalia.
They both paint very different pictures of the Dark Continent.

Fungbey, my friend from Liberia, paints a modern picture, tarnished only by the civil war that ended in (I think) 2003. The country is nearly indistinguishable from any western country, but much poorer. Education is very valued and easy to obtain and for many emigrating to the west they're education is the only thing they bring with them. Yes, they have a lot more problems and poverty than most of the west, but it is nowhere near what you see on the news, which focuses on the problematic interior, where warlords are still the problem .

Kannah, my friend from Somalia, paints a picture of abject poverty, corruption, and pretty much everything you see bad about Africa.
You almost never see Fungbeys Africa in the news. Except for the civil war, Liberia is just too normal and boring to be interesting.

For the worst of Africa, yeah, no electricity, internet, food shortages, etc, the PC is a no starter. But a lot of Africans live in modern Africa. Ignored by the mainstream news until something bad happens.

  And I personally think Africa will become the next China, just as China replaced S. Korea, that replaced Japan and so on for cheap labor.
I see it as a good thing. This cycle has left all of those countries better off than before.

But I understand why so many have the same incorrect view of Africa that I did. No one reports on Africa's good points, or Europe's, or America's. All any of us hear are the bad parts of other cultures. You have to search for anything beyond sensationalism.

OS on a stick is not novel

[Artifex]

We have other OS distributions that that live just fine on SD cards or sticks, already. If you want to bring computing to slums as a useful resource, the big problems are probably really:

1) actual hardware, shared or not, to run whatever open source OS you pick;
2) electricity to run the hardware and shelter for the hardware;
3) people to train those who have never used computers before, may have other literacy issues besides, and quite possibly speak dialects you will have difficulty getting localization for; and
4) affordable/free network access if these people want to use the internet.

I'll bet these are not the only issues, but if you don't address these, I suspect your money and time will be mostly wasted.

pointless?

[bloodhawk]

Perhaps it is just me, but I fail to see any benefit to this whatsoever. seems completely pointless, everything from windows to many distros of linux already can run on a USB stick and a USB stick doesn't solve the problem of internet access, a computer or more importantly the food and water they lack. I guess at least it gives them something to sell at the markets for a couple of bucks to buy something useful.

Dead hard drive or EOL Windows

[tepples]

I could think of two ways this could "revive" a computer. First, a computer with a no-longer-updated version of Windows that is incapable of running Windows 8.1 may be capable of running Xubuntu or Lubuntu or Puppy. Second, a computer with a dead internal hard drive may be capable of running an operating system from USB storage. True, 24 MB per second (Hi-Speed USB effective data rate after various overheads) isn't very fast for sustained transfers compared to something more SATAnic, but flash still has the seek time advantage.

They only raised shit money

[aliquis]

Seriously.

LIVE USB stick.

What a great new idea!

Free OS! What a great new idea.

Promises of being able to use an old PC. What a great new idea!

Fact is running OS from USB stick is slow as fuck and if you already have a PC why not install it on the HDD in said PC? Now they said personal and fine. Are there a requirement for that? Maybe they could store their files on the USB stick instead? both is ok.

How do they get actual Internet connection?

What about electricity?

If they have limited electricity then something more modern would likely be better.

Also how do they take care of old electronic goods in Africa? Environmental safe recycling? ..