Peru Orders 260,000 XO Laptops

Wade Roush 12/3/07

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation—bedeviled by recent criticism from the Wall Street Journal over a dearth of solid orders for its XO Laptop, and defended by Bob in our pages recently—received a request last week for 260,000 laptops from the government of Peru, the Boston Globe reported on Saturday. OLPC founder and MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte told the Globe’s Hiawatha Bray that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has purchased another 50,000 machines for distribution in Mexico. Moreover, consumers have ordered 190,000 laptops since November 12 through the foundation’s “Give One, Get One” program; half of those machines will go to children in developing nations.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.