One Laptop Per Child News on Sales Talk

Shop for XO Laptop Accessories - Online!

Posted on May 06, 2008 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Products

Are you an XO laptop user looking for great computer accessories? Like SD cards, keyboards, USB memory sticks, and even OLPC t-shirts to show your One Laptop Per Child pride? Then for your shopping enjoyment, may I introduce you to three XO Accessories stores:

Walter Bender's XO View

OLPC News XO Accessories Store: I've put together a list of Amazon.com goodies to supply you with a whole quiver of green gadgets to color compliment your computing theme. My favorite - a green gamer mouse to avoid the XO trackpad.
Auntie Mame's XOExplosion: The Mass XO User Group leader has add-ons and tweaks for the G1G1 owner to find more joy in the XO experience. My favorite - XO View, an exclusive XO camera viewfinder.
Brady Pierzchalski's I Love My XO: Offering six accessories separately or as a "travel pack" perfect for the XO on the go. My favorite - the signature USB flash drive.

Personally, I'm very happy to see an XO aftermarket spring up, both for the laptops themselves, and their accessories. Each of these sellers are supporting OLPC by increasing the usability and popularity of the XO, and in the case of these three accessory stores, donating a portion of their profits to support OLPC programs.

Actually, I think Auntie Mame says it's the best:

"By giving first-world users a venue for tweaking their XO's, we're increasing visibility. By giving developers a venue to market their developments, we're increasing the product's viability as an educational resource."

So do your best to support OLPC, and America itself - go shopping!

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A $75 Laptop from the Hardware Chick of Pixel Qi

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Sales Talk: Products

Mary Lou Jepsen's XO laptop

I love me some Mary Lou Jepsen. I feel she (almost) single-handedly made One Laptop Per Child's XO Laptop a reality. She has every right to brag to Groklaw that:

"When I started in January 2005, many people thought [OLPC] was a joke, including Craig Barrett and Bill Gates. I took it from that stage -- just an idea of a $100 laptop -- through invention, design and partnering and to delivery.

The laptop is in high volume mass production, it's the lowest cost laptop ever made, the lowest power laptop ever made, it's the greenest laptop ever made, it's the only sunlight-readable laptop on the market,"

And now its looking like she left OLPC just in time to start Pixel Qi, a company she founded to commercialize OLPC technology.

Cutting edge technology the self-described "hardware chick" is going to sell to rich notebook computer buyers to support better educations in poor countries:

"I've created a licensing structure where OLPC and the children of the world benefit through me licensing the technology. I happen to be the inventor as well, but I'm not getting access to the IP by virtue of being its inventor."

Now guess what her first goal is with all that clock-stopping hot technology at her fingertips? Nothing more that a visual revolution across all digital technology:

Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras.

Nokia, sign this woman up! I love me my N95, but I can't even imagine how cool it would be "Jepsenized"!

My only disappointment is that without her to Jepsenize One Laptop Per Child, I expect we'll have more Negropontisms - announcements of technology achievements proven to be fantasy.

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Real Geek Accessories: OLPC T-Shirts & XO Laptop Bags

Posted on November 23, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Countries: Austria, Use Cases: Business, Sales Talk: Products, Countries: USA

Official OLPC T-shirt, modeled

In the midst of your Black Friday shopping spree, don't go spending your entire Christmas budget buying XO laptops on eBay. Do hold back a buck or two for the other geek must-have this shopping season: OLPC T-shirts and laptop bags.

OLPC T-shirts

First up, Todd Kelsey put together a CafePress shop with OLPC logo t-shirts. While they're nice, they'll never make you look geek chic hot.

That can only be achieved if your attire is distinctively local like a Tuquito t-shirt that I've wanted for a few months now, or OLPC Austria's black is the new black XO logo understatement.

Down in South America, there is no understatement with OLPC Peru, they go all team red to liven things up. Sadly, Luis Ramirez is green with envy in Chile. No t-shirts for him when he's promoting OLPC to Secretaria Generals.

XO Laptop Bags

XO laptop bag in action

You need not have jealousy if you don't care for the t-shirts. You can always promote OLPC with your very own bright and colorful XO laptop bag from Ten Thousand Villages.

Better yet, with the whole Open Software theme of One Laptop Per Child, you might want to take matters into your own hands with a Hansel and Gretel adventure of building your own Open Source laptop bag.

If you don't see any swag or bag that catches your eye, don't fret. You can always help OLPC design up your very own Project Runway dreams

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A Missing OLPC Product: One Printer Per School

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Peripherals, Sales Talk: Products, Content: eBooks

OLPC XO: printed

As I was printing out Steve Cisler's excellent ebook reader, and there could even be a Library of Alexandria's worth of electronic content, but nothing beats the printed word. Especially when you want to spread your ideas, dreams, or just classroom writings with those in the offline world, like parents, teachers, community members or secondary school admissions counselors. As Steve says in his evaluation:

In order for teachers to take the information they find online or on the CD-ROMs I recommend extra resources for printing black and white documents, diagrams, and maps that can be taken to the coordinating centers by the CCTs or directly to the schools by teachers. There must be ways of delivering information even where no ICT exists.

And yet there isn't a printer in the OLPC product mix.

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One Commercial Opportunity Per Child

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Donors, Sales Talk: Products

OLPC XO Nasdaq Math?

What if you sat down with a marketing representative from Coca Cola or Adidas or any of the many multinational companies and offered them unprecedented exposure to children in the developing world? The next generation of consumers who are increasing their purchasing power and branded products consumption at exponential rates.

Do you think they would salivate at the opportunity to shape buying habits of tomorrow's affluents? That's the question Nat Torkington posed on O'Riley Radar with this conclusion:

We should see some things:
Companies sponsoring curriculum materials. ("Jenda has five delicious smoky Marlboro cigarettes ...")
Companies building applications such as casual games for the OLPC platform (e.g., by taking the OLPC programming tutorial at OSCON)
Companies stepping up to fund the distribution of these machines to kids, as a way of raising brand awareness.
But I haven't seen these things.

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Does Toshiba's Portégé R500 Display XO Dual Mode Screens?

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Production, Sales Talk: Products, Hardware: Screen

Do you remember Mary Lou Jepsen's OLPC product roadmap, where she hinted at XO technologies spreading out into commercial laptops in 2008? Well it looks like Toshiba might be a little ahead of One Laptop Per Child in commercializing the innovative dual mode screen if you read the Portégé R500 press release:

The Portégé R500 Series is the world’s first notebook computer to incorporate a widescreen 12.1-inch indoor/outdoor transreflective LED backlit display. This unique innovation is ideal for usage in virtually any type of lighting condition, including direct sunlight. Indoors, the LED backlit display produces an image, rich in color saturation and superb quality. Outdoors, the transreflective screen uses natural sunlight to bring the display’s colors and images to life.

Doesn't that 1,280 x 800 WXGA display sound suspiciously like the Jepsen-design screen that Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) has an exclusive manufacturing licensee to produce?

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Adult OLPC OS: Red Hat Global Desktop or Ubuntu Mobile?

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Intel, Software: Operating System, Sales Talk: Products

Thinking about One Laptop Per Child commercial sales, specifically who would buy a "$100 laptop" when the XO retail price is more like $325 and the Sugar UI is designed for children, I wonder what adult operating system OLPC might bundle with the XO.

First, there is Red Hat's Global Desktop:

The software borrows from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, with about 95 per cent of the code overlapping. The OLPC uses an adapted version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux. The Global Desktop won't share the OLPC's 'Sugar' user interface, but will come bundled with applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice.

With that code overlap, Global Desktop seems to be the natural choice for a commercial "$100 laptop" - it would take the least work to modify it for Christmas XO sales.

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One OLPC XO Technology Per Military Warfighter

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC-enabled military?!

Thinking about the multitude of OLPC technologies that could be commercialized for profit, I read the following Request for Proposal that World War E found with great interest:

develop intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that exploit movement to establish and manage mesh networks in urban settings. The goal is to create small, inexpensive, smart robotic radio relay nodes that dismounted warfighters drop as they deploy in urban settings. The nodes then self-configure and form a mesh network – a temporary infrastructure that establishes communications over the region. As the situation changes, the nodes will adapt the network, such as self-healing if nodes are destroyed by the enemy (DARPA 2007, 3-4).

Yes, you read that right, "warfighters" is a nice euphemism for military soldiers and DARPA is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US military's research arm, and the RFP sounds perfect for the FCC approved OLPC mesh networking.

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OLPC Product Roadmap to Financial Independence

Posted on July 12, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: Business, Hardware: Peripherals, Sales Talk: Price, Sales Talk: Products, Hardware: Screen

Looking at the One Laptop Per Child product roadmap slide that Digitimes captured at Mary Lou Jepsen's keynote presentation at the International Display Manufacturing Conference (IDMC) on July 4th, I was struck by a vision on independence. Just look at the slide - do you see the same vision that I do? A vision of OLPC financial independence!

Do you see what I see? Do you see the One Laptop Per Child Foundation shifting the $30 Billion dollar cost burden from participating countries, all of them financially challenged beyond the capacity to buy one computer per child? Do you see all those commercial products?

We can always start with a commercial version of the OLPC itself, as many of us already have, in our dreams. An XO stepped up to adult computing needs, but sill not the bloatware of a Wintel set-up, priced per the slide at $1,000, but built using the XO cost methods. Right there, OLPC could rack up per-computer profits to buy a whole country's worth of Children's Machines.

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OLPC Products: XO, Server, Charger, Antenna, & Repeater

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Peripherals, Hardware: Power Supply, Hardware: Production, Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: School Servers, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC multi-battery "gang charger"

In this weekend's , OLPC VP Walter Bender casually drops an OLPC product lineup bombshell:

We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; (4) an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.

While we are all intimately familiar with the OLPC XO, what are the other four "products" that Water speaks of? The last time we checked, school servers were still very much an idea or barely Beta, and now they're going to be production ready?

The multi-battery charger, or "gang charger" is even more mysterious. There is a basic Wiki entry, and now a photograph, but not much else.

Walter tells us about the active antenna for the first time in the very same update:

Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have out first working "active antenna" prototypes. Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput. They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.

Luckily, thanks to Aaron Kaplan, we now know more about the solar mesh repeaters, but that was only last week.

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One Cheap Solar 802.11s Mesh Repeater Per Child

Posted on June 10, 2007 by Guest Writer in Internet: Access, Hardware: Power Supply, Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

Mesh network testing

I am Aaron Kaplan and I was recently visiting the MIT, home of One Laptop Per Child. I think I have to tell my fellow OLPC News people about the wonderful new solar goodies that are being designed and tested there.

Since I myself come from a background of building and designing free community wireless mesh networks, I was naturally very interested in OLPC's mesh solution. So I was lucky to get a preview of what surprises OLPC might come up with soon.

With my background, one question I had was - "how does OLPC test their 802.11s mesh implementation"? Well, when entering the office, I was quite surprised to see XOs hanging from the ceiling everywhere :) As I discussed with Michail Bletsas, having a moving mesh will actually be something else. But this test setup can already give you a good impression of a school class.

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One Laptop Per Child News

Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.