The One Laptop Per Child project has had a long, noble, bumpy road. The dream of getting computers into every small 3rd world hand hasn't arrived yet, but now there's a new plan: toss 'em out of helicopters.
Now that e-book readers no longer suck as much as they once did, all sorts of people are prophesying the death of the physical book. Nicholas Negroponte told the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe, CA, that paper books were already dead, and people just don't realize it. "It's happening. It not happening in 10 years.…
Talking at the University of Pennsylvania yesterday, One Laptop per Child's founder Nicholas Negroponte said that Steve Jobs helped in the development of the OLPC computer. Wait. What?
It has always been an unspoken fear—or assumption, even—that the dual-touchscreen followup to the original OLPC, the XO-2, would never come to pass. But we let the dream live! Until today: the XO-2 is officially scrapped.
Today, Ars Technica picked up a blip from Nicholas Negroponte, who informed readers of his intention to cut half the staff and reduce pay of the rest, and emphasizing the shift to hardware.
China's HiVision has debuted a Linux-based laptop that makes the OLPC seem ridiculously expensive. For $98, you get a MIPS-based processor, 1GB flash storage, 3 USB ports, Ethernet, an SDHC card reader, WiFi, audio in and out, voice-chat and Firefox browser support on a Linux user interface. No word who this is…
When I met with Nicholas Negroponte not long ago, he laughed at the coverage he'd received through the past few years, including our own portrayal of Intel chairman Craig Barrett and him as Beavis and Butthead. Far more hurtful have been the admonitions of his own former staffers who feel he has mismanaged the OLPC…
In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen traveled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a "working" $100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection…
From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his $100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world's supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately…
This is the first footage of the same XO OLPC doing a dual-boot of Sugar Linux and Windows XP—something skeptics have said wasn't going to happen. Soon, XOs will ship with both Sugar and XP for Boot Camp-style dual-booting options. They will never come with only XP, though the team is working on adding more of the…
OLPC has agreed to supply 65 thousand XO computers to the state of Caldas, Colombia, providing an injection of technology to a rural area of the country. The first 15,000 will be distributed throughout the most remote areas of the state by the end of 2008, while the remaining 50,000 will be offered in the capital,…
The founder and chairman of OLPC has admitted that only using open-source software has not been good for the project. Just a day after the resignation of group president Walter Bender, Nicholas Negroponte admitted that the choice of the Sugar operating system has hit the XO laptop project in two places: usability; and…
Reports of OLPC's Negroponte looking for a replacement to fill his CEO role were a bit unfounded, as the man himself just claimed that the organization HAS no CEO, and that whatever the replacement does, it won't be what Negroponte is doing. Negroponte says:
The One Laptop Per Child project, initially famed for its lofty goals, became known for becoming one of the more impressive shitshows in tech, in part thanks to founder Nick Negroponte's own foibles. So it's probably not a bad thing for the org—as much credit as he deserves for starting it—that he's stepping off to…
The OLPC is all set to launch an American branch, called OLPC America, which aims to help kids from low-income families in the US. The new arm of OLPC has already acquired a director and chairman, and their head office is likely to be situated in Washington D.C.
If you were wondering why you've been asked to help pick up the tab with the OLPC project, its founder offers a lesson in international business: