One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project is now focusing on expansion of its domain. This non profit organisation has recently decided to keep away from the small scale deployment of XO laptops and has started to focus on large scale deployments of the devices. This strategy is adopted to combat the recession. The OLPC will now break its operations on regional basis and start giving the laptops.

This change is also initiated by a loss in interest in Give 1 Get 1 program, which was the major source of funding for OLPC. The G1G1 program was a big hit in its initial and subsequent stages but last year the program’s sales dropped tremendously. According to OLPC founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte, “This year G1G1 was less than 10 percent of the previous year. Not good; perhaps in keeping with the economic times.” Of course, sales of netbooks, like the Samsung NC10, are actually soaring during the same tough economic times; so maybe there is something else amiss with the OLPC XO laptop. Apart from this another program called ‘Change the World’ was also discontinued by OLPC. This program was aimed at small deployments of XO laptops with a hope that it will bolster the program’s success in future. Unfortunately this didn’t happened and thus the OLPC now targets large deployment of XO. OLPC will now put special emphasis on Sub-Sahara, Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Front Door Software is offering its laptop security product, called Retriever, free to all the non-profit charitable organisations for the remainder of this year. The company has assisted many charitable organisations in the past as well, by protecting their mobile computing machines from theft and data loss. Some of those charitable institutions were Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, MADD, Visiting Nurse Service Inc. and The Children’s Network to name a few. Nowadays the laptop theft has become a huge problem. In fact, the 300 percent increase in laptop theft is an alarming figure. The data retrieved from the stolen laptops generally unveils sensitive information such as personal data, customer’s database, bank transactions etc.

Therefore preventing laptop theft is a major concern nowadays. The Retriever is a high-end security product by the Front Door Software which offers complete security for the laptops. It basically prevents the stored information from being accessed, and also traces stolen laptops so they can be recovered. This is far more than standard security software like Symantec Norton 360 offers. Moreover, the success rate of this software is very high and it is protecting the laptops of a large number of users in 26 countries.

According to Carrie Hafeman, CEO of Front Door Software Corp, “Front Door Software is thrilled to be able to help charities protect their laptops and their customer information. I am worried that charitable contributions may be lower than what they were last year because of today’s economy, and that laptop thefts increase at an alarming rate. The last thing charities need is to replace stolen or lost laptops. We are happy to donate our product to help any of those organizations that call us.”

Tags for this article: mobile, laptop, security

The much awaited $100 laptops will start selling in Europe on 17th November. These laptops will be sold on Amazon’s outlets online by the organization called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) as a part of their give one get one scheme which has already made its debut in the US where it saw a sales of 190,000 machines.

According to this scheme, every time a person buys a laptop, one machine will be donated to a deserving child in a developing nation. The green and white XO laptops will be sold in at least 27 European nations according to a speech delivered in the World of Health IT Conference, Copenhagen by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC.

The XO laptop will be priced at $268 for retail customers will also be available in Russia, Switzerland and Turkey, which is around the same price, or actually a little more, than the Dell Latitude D610. However, the success of this XO scheme was hampered by OLPC’s inability to deliver machines which were ordered on time. This is one of the reasons why an agreement was signed in September 2008 with Amazon.

The idea started with OLPC’s ambition of manufacturing powerful laptops costing less than $100 for school children. When the machine finally made an entry, it was priced at $188 and saw a sale of 600,000 units.

Though there was a lot of interest shown by nations all over the world, the XO was not sold in the numbers as expected by OLPC. 65,000 units have been ordered for recently by Columbia’s Caldas region.

With competition heating up from the Classmate laptop from Intel, we will have to wait and see the impact of this on sale of XO in Europe.

With its mission to spread knowledge among the children of developing nations, the XO has now announced to launch its BOGOF program in Europe. The give one get one (GIGI) is a unique plan that offers you the opportunity to buy a set of bright green laptops: one for yourself and one for a school going child in a developing country.

Developed by OLPC (One Laptop per Child), the scheme is made available through the Amazon.com on its site at amazon.com/xo. Although the offer initiated as a temporary one in the States, it is expected to extend with an overwhelming response. As per the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, sales of $2 million per day inspired them to spread out its scope.

The scheme is quite praiseworthy but the present credit crunch situation might affect its success in the country. People might not prefer to invest in a 433 MHz machine that has certain limitations such as only one SD storage card and a RAM of just 256MB, but these are still comparable to bare-bones subnotebooks, like the Sony Vaio PCG-C1MHP. Moreover, the XO’s social cause and children-centred features are likely to make it a hit among many parents in the Christmas season. These durable computers, based on Linux can actually make a great gift for your child while assisting a noble cause of spreading knowledge.

Nonetheless, if the project is successful, it might encourage other organisations to come-up with such ideas that make this world a better place to live in.