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.

One Laptop Per Child project, popularly known as OLPC delivered more than 1m XO-1 laptops to the children of developing nations. This project was started with a vision to help the poor young ones. The main aim of the OLPC is to ensure that no child is deprived of quality education just because he cannot afford it.

OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte, who is the founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab. Unfortunately it has been through lots of setbacks in past recent years. In 2007 OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen refused to start a new company called Pixel Qi to support development of XO ideas separately. Later on Walter Bender, the software boss also resigned and recently the OLPC had shed off half of its staff and the remaining 32 members have agreed to a huge pay cut. Perhaps even more threateningly, many commercially made netbooks are now approaching and eclipsing the OLPC’s low cost. Whilst commercial netbooks, such as the Asus Eee PC 701 8G, were already almost as expensive as the OLPC XO laptop, recent developments have netbooks approaching the £100 mark; which is obviously a major threat to the OLPC’s viability

The amazing thing is that despite all this the OLPC stands tall and confident with regards to its vision and operations. Nicholas Negroponte doesn’t sound downhearted. He says, “OLPC should have trimmed sooner. We have since grown stronger. Almost all the cutbacks were in engineering staff related to the in-house support of Sugar, which is far better done in the community. In fact, paying people to do it from within created a degree of control that was unsuitable for real open-source development. There are 600,000 laptops in the field, 250,000 in transit and another 380,000 about to be made, so the total adds up to about 1.2m. Thirty-one countries in 19 languages are the exact statistics. It’s less than I anticipated, but still gratifying.”

Tags for this article: laptop, netbooks, sales

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is actively getting involved in donating laptops to children in developing countries every day, but this project is not exempted from the economic crisis. Indeed, the worldwide recession has affected OLPC too and forced the OLPC founder to restructure and streamline its process. Recently OLPC has cut off 32 employees from its staff as a part of its streamlining process and the rest of the officials are bearing with salary cuts.

OLPC is focusing on the development of a $100 XO laptop for children in developing countries. But now the commercial vendors too have introduced their portable computing machines at a nearly equally competitive price. For prices as low as £160, the Asus Eee PC 701 4G was already nipping at the XO laptop’s heels, but with a new wave of netbooks approaching the $100 range, things look much more difficult for OLPC. This naturally makes OLPC face tough economic times, especially at this time of recession. However, the OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte says, “OLPC will be dedicated to bringing the cost of the laptop down to Zero for the Least Developed Countries — the $0 Laptop.” This is a very bold goal set by the OLPC team.

The last year was full of struggles for OLPC. OLPC’s top three executives resigned as they felt that the OLPC is getting more interested in laptop distribution instead of economic development. Still, Negroponte believes that the OLPC has ability to keep donating laptops in the developing nations. He says, “The future brings with it some uncertainty, some difficulty, but also the excitement that comes with the rededication to a cause, and a new path that will allow us to realize the moral purpose of OLPC.”

The One Laptop Per Child organisation, popularly known as OLPC, is vigorously concentrating on promoting the campaign of donating free laptops to the children of poor and developing nations. The project has brought the all time favourite John Lennon of the Beatles band back from the graveyard. The OLPC organisation is making use of John’s image in a video advertisement. Using the digital imaging tools, John’s picture has been perfectly transformed in a way that it looks that the John himself is standing out there on the screen and telling all his fans how important it is to donate a laptop to the poor children.

In the advert, John’s image clearly speaks that “Imagine every child, no matter where in the world they were, could access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want. I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way.” If you recall, Apple computers used John’s image way back in the day in the so-called “Think different” advertising campaign, although the company has not used his image at all recently for promoting its Apple MacBook. Call it creepy or clever; this advert intends to incite John’s fans to participate in the OLPC and visualize the development and growth that every child can bring after getting a laptop in his/her hands.

John was murdered outside his apartment building in New York 28 years ago but still the superstar lives in the mind and soul of his fans. John’s widow, Yoko Ono has also given her approval for this commercial.

One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as the OLPC project, is gaining success day by day at a very fast pace. Aimed at stimulating the growth and development of children in developing nations, the project has put a smile on 600,000 children so far and still continues to make more and more children happy everyday.

According to the OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte, 600,000 children in developing nations are using the OLPC’s ultra-cheap XO Laptop as of now. He also clarifies that this figure does not include the number of promised laptops, rather it shows the total laptops that have actually been delivered into the hands of children and are being used by them at schools and homes. The laptops donated under the OLPC project consist of small Asus Eee PC sized laptops running on Sugar OS (a Linux based operating system). These laptops come equipped with all the necessary applications, including a word processor, games, music maker and much more, to help children learn and comprehensively develop their computing skills.

So far the shipment of XO laptops has been made in 31 countries including Peru, Rwanda, and Cambodia and according to Negroponte Palestine will be the next nation to receive the shipment. He also said that by mid 2009 every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop.

Tags for this article: laptop, children

So far the One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project has been popular in developing nations and a few days back it spread its wings to the developed nations (especially USA) as well via Amazon.com. At Amazon citizens of developed nations were offered the OLPC XO laptop, but for the price of two, so that one can be donated to a child in developing region. The good news is that now the OLPC will be coming to the UK also this December.

According to a listing on Amazon.co.uk, UK citizens will be offered XO laptops via the same scheme. This service will be launched on the 16th of December this year, but consumers can pre-order their laptops. The laptops will cost £275. While this is more than, say, the Acer Aspire One, the purchaser is actually paying for two laptops, one of which is sent to a child in a developing nation. Apart from this they will also have to pay a sum of £50 towards packaging and postage. However this charge is set up by OLPC and not by Amazon.

The OLPC XO laptop offers a variety of applications and a good hardware configuration. The one that will be available on Amazon.co.uk will have 1GB NAND flash storage and 256MB DDR RAM. It will be running on the Linux based Sugar operating system only. Neither the Microsoft version nor the dual boot one will be available as those models are meant for the developing countries only.

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.

One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as OLPC has achieved great success in developing countries. To further promote this project the world pioneer in e-commerce, Amazon has announced that it will be selling the OLPC’s XO laptops through Amazon.com.

These laptops will be sold in the same way the G1G1 program was carried out. The buyers have to pay for two laptops out of which one will be shipped to the buyer itself and the other one will be donated to a child in developing country. Jim Gettys, vice president, software engineering, OLPC announced that only Linux based XO laptops will be sold through Amazon.com in US as of now.

However, the OLPC is finding out the possibility of extending this service to other countries too. The Linux based XO laptops that are approved for online selling has got an impressive configuration. All the units are powered by Linux Sugar operating system which offers all the necessary applications and a bunch of exciting games to enable the children get hold of the technology in a playful manner.

The hardware too is sufficient enough to handle all the tasks without any glitch. The XO laptops feature a 1GB of flash memory, 256MB of RAM and 7.5 inches of bright LCD. These laptops are optimized to support wireless networking too.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is really becoming a hot favourite in developing countries. Although the XO laptops are minimally powered, they are a perfect tool for making kids computer literate at a minimal cost. The goal of the programme is astoundingly to develop laptops that are even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC 701 4G. The only issue that the OLPC programme has faced is that the laptops used in this project are running on Linux based Sugar Operating System instead of Windows. While in some countries Sugar is considered as a great operating system, others argue that as the global workspace is dominated by the Windows based systems, the students should practice on the same platform; otherwise they will turn into computer literates but still incompetent in the Windows environment.

Thus the OLPC has decided to introduce new XO laptops running Windows XP Pro. As of now, Peru will be the first country to experience these newbies. In addition to this, a dual boot edition is also expected in future. To find out which OS the kids prefer, they were given both the laptops to work and play. The results were amazing. The kids find it easier to work on windows based XO machines but they still want to stick to the Sugar OS because of the array of pre-installed learning games that come with it. Obviously, both the operating systems offer excellent opportunities to learn and enjoy.