Laptops, Hardware, Education, Global: Professor Nicholas Negroponte, who chairs the non-profit One Laptop per Child project, took the opportunity of December’s ITU summit in Hong Kong to bring the telecoms community up to date with the latest progress in his dream.

Professor Negroponte was able to announce that the first US$100 computers have now rolled off their production line and between three and five million of these laptops will be distributed to children in six developing countries in 2007. He also spoke of his intentions to boost the number of laptops to as many as 150 million by 2008, with more countries allotted to receive them.

Despite the eye-catching headline “US$100 laptop” Professor Negroponte has always stressed that One Laptop per Child is an attempt to boost the educational resources of the developing markets, and not an attempt to sell hardware. Many companies, including Microsoft, had indeed pledged and demonstrated their support of the project but in the words of its chairman: “The moral purpose of the project is really to look at education as the tool for eliminating poverty or creating peace, and bringing opportunity to people in a different way. Whatever big problem you or your country has on its mind [will] be solved in part by education, in no part without education and in some cases just with education.”

One key principle for Nicholas Negroponte is for the children to use the computers to educate themselves: “Up until the age of six children teach themselves to walk and talk, but after that people assume that education means having a teacher.”

He certainly questioned the commercial strategy of certain laptop manufacturers: “We had to break a spell…The natural tendency for electronics is to go down in price, so what the manufacturer does is add features and options to stay even. But you get to the stage... that they are obese with all their software.”

The One Laptop per Child scheme has to introduce different priorities for its users: uses have to educational rather than enterprise-oriented, so that children can use the laptop to download and compose music, for example, and then to share content with their friends and fellow students.

To reduce both energy consumption and expenditure additional to the purchase price of the laptops, the hand-cranked hardware consumes under 2W of electricity to function, while full connectivity is anticipated to run at US$30 annually. Professor Negroponte’s retort to his critics reads: “Many people said this was all icing and no cake, but there is the cake going down the assembly line.”

more info: www.laptop.org