Taiwan's Quanta, the biggest manufacturer of notebooks in the world, has signed on to the $100 laptop project.
The OLPC organisation, which hopes to bring a $100 laptop championed by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte, has selected Quanta to serve as its original design manufacturer, or ODM. ODMs typically manufacture products, but also participate substantially in the final design.
Although not many US consumers know the name, many own Quanta's
products. The company produces systems for HP, Dell and others. It is
engaged in a long-running rivalry with Compal, also based out of Taiwan.
The signing of Quanta isn't an entire surprise. Earlier this year,
MIT and the company signed a five-year, $20m (£11.3m) research pact.
Still, lining up one of the world's major contract manufacturers
further demonstrates the feasibility of the project, according to
backers.
"Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for
education in the developing world has just gone away," Negroponte said
in a statement.
Quanta will try to bring out a product in the fourth quarter. The
machines will run Linux and require little energy (turning a hand crank
will be enough to power them). Connecting to the Internet will be
possible through mesh networking.
For an in-depth look at the $100 laptop project click here
The first 5 million to 15 million units will get shipped to China, Brazil, India, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand.
Other participants in the project include AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corp., Nortel and Red Hat.
While many have saluted the goal, others have expressed scepticism. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has said that the idea won't travel far. Consumers in emerging markets want full-fledged computers, he asserted.
History has also shown that bringing PCs to the poor is extremely difficult. Attempts to bring low-cost PCs to Brazil have failed several times. The Simputer, a cheap computer designed in India, fell flat, and AMD has not sold many of its cheap Internet devices for the emerging world, according to sources.
Partly because of this, some entrepreneurs, such as India's Rajesh Jain, and some of India's leading academics have decided to tackle the problem by deploying thin clients. Other companies are promoting full-fledged, full-price computers that can be shared by communities. To save energy, thin clients and PCs can run on car batteries or solar panels.
Talkback
Mesh networking may bring about a renaissance of Usenet.
With the disappearance of AOL from Usenet the signal to noise ratio has improved by several orders of magnitude. I think one can say now that the 'September that never ended' is finally over. That is a boon to everyone, but in particular to the developing nations and regions with intermittent connectivity.
Over the decades a lot of ideas about improving Usenet have come forth. Between now and Q4 2006 there may some time to implement them. The peer to peer nature of Usenet is ideally suited for mesh networking and areas with intermittent connectivity. There was a succesful project to use a bus with Wi-Fi and UUCP (or something simliar) to provide connectivity. NNTP or its successor would fit right into such an environment.