Oct 16 2007

From Dream to Vision to Reality: The OLPC Project

Posted by DummyGeekGurl as Hardware, Hardware and Gadget Features, Notebooks

You would know an Apple Fangurl when she you see a girl watching this video and she cringes, and covers her eyes (but with matching peek-a-boo fingers) every time she sees the iPhone being dropped to the carpet, kitchen floor, and even the pavement.

That aside, we now go on to the scheduled programming.

The buzz today on the tech “airwaves” is the OLPC project. The OLPC project has got to be the most ambitious humanitarian/tech effort on the planet in recent times. And yet, it’s really coming to fruition. The OLPC has come a long way: from the first concrete steps of laying down the design and vision at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland made in January 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, down to the t-minus for November 12, 2007, when the OLPC will be officially released to the world.

The mechanics of the OLPC is, if you want to participate, you will buy a laptop from the OLPC project, and it will then get sent to a child somewhere in the developing world, be it Cambodia, Africa, Brazil, Thailand, Uruguay… Wherever there is a needy child in destitute conditions.

The OLPC has gone beyond giving hope for needy children in aiding their education. The OLPC laptop has changed personal computing like never before, shaping even the innovations in mainstream consumer tech. A prime example of that is how it has sparked ASUS to develop its own version of the OLPC: the eeePC, which is aimed at first-time computer users.

It is amazing that one ~~small~~ ~~ambitious~~ humanitarian dream could change the landscape of personal computing altogether. There is hope for humanitarian tech, as evidenced by the Ubuntu Linux project by Canonical Ltd., and the OLPC project. How a company can build a business model and a full-blown business outfit from an altruistic dream is just admirable.

And I thought that tech was just for salivation.

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Tiny Laptops Part 2: Intel Classmate PC vs. OLPC XO-1 by Gadzooki
01|Dec|2007

[...] a salivation trip with a twist: materialism married with charitable intentions on a grand scale. I had talked about the launch of the OLPC before, and I wanted to inform you about other tiny laptops that made waves this season, thus this [...]

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