…bring technology to rural villages in emerging nations. Geekcorps partners with Via.
In the West African nation of Mali, a former local Geekcorps intern named Moussa Kita has formed his own IT firm, called Zirsun. Kita has only around four employees.
"But in Mali that's a midsize business, and they are working on projects across West Africa," Vota says. "We try to import as little as possible."
He said, she said
Negroponte, for his part, says the jobs that local PC manufacturing can provide are somewhat illusory, particularly if the cost of hardware goes up.
"Every country I visit, bar none, even the small ones, asks if they can build the XO in their country. My reply is in two parts. One, yes, if you will accept the price going up. Two, if you understand that this is really assembly and that assembly jobs are both few and not great jobs," he wrote. "The only justification to build the XO in each country is national pride — which is certainly important. Otherwise, local manufacturing does not affect economics as all the parts are [imported] anyway."
Negroponte added that the two groups are in some ways targeting two separate demographic groups. The chipmakers are mostly reaching out to the so-called next billion users, or the villages and urban centres that are poor but have experienced some of the benefits of economic growth in places such as China and India.
"We really want to bring the XO laptop to the poorest and most remote kids, for whom school is often a tree and whose teachers may not even show up," he wrote. "It is about learning. It is a long-term investment in young children who will not be in the job market for five to 10 years at least. Teaching six-year-olds Excel is criminal."
Intel's Davies and Via's Brown, though, stated that any cost benefits under the OLPC vision, in the end, won't be large at all. The OLPC laptop is made out of the same components as a PC, and will rely on the same sort of back-end servers and wireless antennas. Davies, in fact, doubted that the OLPC will hit its goal of $150.
"We know what LCD monitors cost," Davies said.
Local PC manufacturing is also growing alongside national and regional initiatives to increase PC ownership. Sri Lanka, for instance, has relaxed value-added taxes and duties to make it cheaper to import computers, while some banks in Turkey are offering zero-interest loans for PC purchases, noted Davies. In Brazil, Banco Santander Central Hispano, a large local bank, is offering zero-interest loans to students for PCs if they open accounts, Davies said.
"It's actually a cheaper way to acquire a customer," he said.
And learning business applications isn't generally viewed as bad among educators in emerging markets, said Davies. Often, it's what they want to teach kids.
Talkback
I'm sure that even though Intel has Ultra Low Voltage x86 chips, that the Classmate simply does not compare with the OLPC in terms of power usage.
I'm just guessing here, but probably that the Classmate consumes 10 times more power. For what? Well just to run an unoptimized Windows XP OS you need lots of wasted cycles, because it is the world champion in bloat-ware.
It's just a law of nature, that making hardware to support Windows XP costs at least twice as much and consumes 10 times as much energy as a hardware optimized for consumer-electronics like Linux OS, with a new concept of cheap screens, and advanced way of saving energy on the x86 processor and a co-processor running the Wi-Fi always-on Mesh independantly from the main CPU.
Nearly a year ago, when Intel launched their Classmate then called Eduwise at WCIT, I interviewed some representatives: http://wcitvideo.com/?p=15 and I asked them why they wouldn't rather do a solution using their Intel Xscale processor, and why they wouldn't spend their billions of R&D on bloat-free Linux OS and applications suitable for saving a lot of CPU cycles, managing RAM more effectively and thus saving a lot of energy. The response I got is that Windows XP is the worlds most popular OS, thus there are already a whole infrastructure one can have working natively on a Windows XP platform.
I think the point is that Intel doesn't want cheap computers, doesn't want people to start being aware of consuming less CPU cycles, Intel loves bloat-ware because that sells more expensive more power hungry processors that people don't need, Intel loves Microsoft because their partnership creates a computer industry that keeps the average price of computers high every year (just look at the hardware requirements required to run Windows Vista!!), meaning huge profits on both sides. Intel probably realises that the OLPC can change the industry, cause when most normal people realize that they do not need to buy the latest most expensive, most power consuming fastest processors, then people will suddently realise they can have even better, more stable and less power hungry solutions for half the cost of a normal computer, this will mean less profit margins for CPU manufacturers. Intel is simply trying to delay this from happening instead of accepting to participate in revolutionnizing the computer industry for the cheaper, simpler and much lower power usage.
My blog: http://charbax.com
When SCO made outrageous statements in 2003, I knew that it did not have any factual reason to do it, so it should be something else. Now we know that SCO wanted to straighten out its financials by being purchased by IBM. Then Microsoft saw a chance to delay progress of GNU/Linux by keeping SCO alive, and allow time for the release of Windows Vista. SCO is going to take some beating today in court. But it was a good thing for the entire open-source community, because now GNU/Linux has projected a strong image and a few GNU/Linux distributions have acquired a larger user share.
But Intel did not learn the lesson. By promoting an expensive, badly engineered competition with the OLPC, Intel is giving notoriety to Negroponte's team, so my feeling is that the Classmate is a loss leader that backfired. Its battery charge lasts up to 4 hours, while the OLPC's lasts 4 to 8 hours, depending on usage. The Classmate is not even good as a loss leader.