olpc

Photos: Easy does it with Asustek's 'Eee PC'

Amid all the talk of One Laptop Per Child and whether its machines will turn commercial after being first offered to developing nations for use by schoolchildren, it looks like Asustek and Intel are going straight to the head of the class. They've just announced a new teeny, affordable PC that's stripped-down but still pretty versatile. We've got pictures for you! With a full-size grown-up's keyboard and price tag around $200, the machine just might cause a market disturbance. Click on the image for more.

OLPC vs. the world

Sunday night's 60 Minutes, usually a show at the tail end of the technology bell curve, weighed in on a surprisingly relevant topic--Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative. If you've been following the MIT professor's story, you'll know he set out several years ago to develop a cheap laptop for children in third-world countries, featuring a low-power AMD chip, flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive, and even built-in Wi-Fi and a Webcam.

Closer to $175 than the originally projected $100, the systems are being rolled out in small test markets. We actually … Read more

OLPC's Negroponte blasts Intel's low-cost PC initiative

Apparently, this world isn't big enough for two low-cost PC projects.

Nick Negroponte, founder and leader of the One Laptop Per Child project, told 60 Minutes Sunday night that he would have 3 million orders for the $100 laptop (at this point, really $175) if not for Intel's "shameless" business practices.

"Intel has hurt the mission enormously," Negroponte said. How? By apparently distributing marketing materials questioning the features of the One Laptop (it's really called the XO) and by giving away an Intel-designed laptop called the Classmate PC to poor nations around the … Read more

MIT, UCLA develop programming language for kids

Kids now have their own computer programming language, thanks to researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and at UCLA.

MIT on Tuesday introduced a programming language called Scratch, which is designed for kids age 8 and up to create interactive Web stories, games and animations that can be shared online. Kids have already used the language to write a story about a polar bear school and to create an outer-space attack game.

MIT compared the programming language, which lets kids snap together graphical blocks to build a Web site, to the simplicity of Lego "bricks." (… Read more

Keeping tabs on the $100-plus laptop

Thursday's briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child initiative seems to have meant different things to different folks.

The Associated Press led with the rising price of the laptop, designed for school-age tots in developing nations ("'$100 laptop' to cost $175"), while the Reuters news agency focused on the potential for use closer to home ("U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project"). And The Boston Globe, for which the just-across-the-Charles-River OLPC is in part a local business story, got caught up with the laptop's sense of fun, style and mission (&… Read more