Yesterday we ran the first part of our interview with Steve Bratt, the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, which was unveiled on November 15 by Web inventor Tim-Berners-Lee. The foundation aims to empower people in developing regions to access “life-critical information” on the Web using mobile phones and other simplified interfaces.

Bratt, who leads the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation from offices in Boston, talked in the first half of the interview about the origins of the group, how its mission differs from that of its sister organization the World Wide Web Consortium, and the gaps in content, research, and technology it hopes to address.

In Part 2, below, Bratt details the foundation’s initial projects in Africa and South America, the role of voice technology in broadening Web access, and the foundation’s plans for growth.

Xconomy: What can you tell me about your initial projects?

Steve Bratt: There are two: the Web Alliance for Re-Greening Africa, and Empowering Youth in Inner Cities. Both are in partnership with other organizations. With the first one, the goal is to provide Web systems that will help capture local knowledge about how to plant in very harsh desert environments. There is a group, the Africa Re-Greening Initiative, that has been working for 20 years to take local innovations in how to plant and conveying them to others. This is a great example because it’s not a case of foreign aid coming in and saying, “Let’s build a dam and here’s some chemical fertilizer and some genetically engineered corn.” It’s about what is working for the 1 percent and how to convey that to the other 99 percent. I met this farmer in Burkina Faso, Yacouba Sawadogo, who figured a different geometry for making trenches to grow seeds and plants that turns out to be much more productive—what size hole to use, when to put manure in. He didn’t have any training, he just discovered it. It’s a perfect example. They’ve been busing farmers into to see him; he might see 10 a month. We want to create a digital bus to allow all of the farmers in that area to have the knowledge.

We’re working with VU University in the Netherlands, and we’re going to see if the Web can empower the conveyance of information, and how to use voice to enable the Web. VoiceXML has been heavily used commercially in the West—every call center uses it—but it hasn’t been used as much for development. There are no new standards needed. We just want to work with local developers and local farmers so they can develop something that meets farmers’ needs.

The Empowering Youth project is in concert with the Center for Digital Inclusion, a fantastic organization started by Rodrigo Baggio in Brazil. They started in the poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro and they have close to 800 community centers in inner cities training kids on computers. We’re going in to help them develop a curriculum to teach youth how to develop content and Web applications. Again, we’ll focus on mobile and voice, because those are the predominant technologies available to people, even in poor areas. Even in the Sahel in Africa, we were told that every family has access to a mobile phone and a radio. It’s the same in Brazil and Latin America. So that will be a pilot project in five cities—one in Brazil, one in Latin America, one in the Middle East, and probably one in a Western city. But this is an unfunded project at this point, so we’re looking for partners to help fund it.

X: Do you ever worry that the voice-accessible Web that you’re describing will be an extremely slow, impoverished version of the Web that we enjoy here in the United States? I mean, just to keep things manageable, you’d probably have to limit menu choices at each level of a voice interface to four or five. How do you translate a complex Website into something that can be consumed that way?

SB: We are so spoiled. We have our iPhones and our high-speed Internet. Well, if you’re making a decision about what movie to go to and it starts in five minutes, you need a pretty fast answer. But if you’re making a decision about which direction to walk in when …Next Page »

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Only 25 percent of adults around the world have access to a computer that they can use to reach the Web. But 75 percent have access to a mobile phone. So the simplest way to open up the wealth of information on the Web to more people would be to make it usable via voice connections—for instance, through some combination of speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies and voice-driven interfaces customized for each region.

Making that happen will be the first mission for the new World Wide Web Foundation, officially launched November 15 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and the director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Berners-Lee unveiled the foundation’s plans in a speech before the Internet Governance Forum, a non-governmental organization meeting this week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Watch the video.)

It was 20 years ago this year that Berners-Lee proposed the Web’s basic markup language (HTML), its data protocol (HTTP), and its system of document addresses (URLs). “The thing that made the Web work then and the most important thing about it today is its universality,” Berners-Lee said in his speech. “Two Webs doesn’t work. It has to be one Web for all sorts of information, no matter what hardware you have, no matter who you buy your computer from, and now more importantly, no matter what sort of device you have.”

The basic tenet behind the Web Foundation is that the Web can empower people around the world to help themselves, if only barriers of language, literacy, location, and income can be overcome. The foundation’s first efforts in this direction will include support for an emerging discipline it’s calling “Web science,” as well as collaborations with VU University in Amsterdam and the Center for Digital Inclusion in Brazil focusing on the deployment of Web-based mobile communications technologies among farmers in Africa and schoolchildren in South and Central America and elsewhere.

A non-profit founded in 2008 and operating largely under the radar until now, the Web Foundation is subsisting for the time being on a five-year, $5 million seed grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The organization (which is not using the acronym WWWF, perhaps to avoid confusion with the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wrestling Federation) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. But its CEO, Steve Bratt—formerly the CEO of the W3C—is working from a newly opened office in Boston’s downtown financial district.

Bratt met with Xconomy on Monday morning for his first detailed Q&A session about the creation of the Foundation, the philosophy of its early projects, and his and Berners-Lee’s ambitious plans for making the Web more accessible. Part 1 of our interview appears here; we’ll publish Part 2 on Wednesday.

Xconomy: What’s the mission of the World Wide Web Foundation, and how is it different from the mission of the World Wide Web Consortium?

Steve Bratt: Our overarching theme is empowering people through the Web—giving people the power through the Web to accomplish their own goals. It’s about helping people, not just having cool technologies. You never hear Tim Berners-Lee give a talk without …Next Page »

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The world of traditional mobile games can be tough for small studios and publishers to navigate. Having to work around all the different wireless carriers, handsets, and operating systems can severely limit the distribution of their games. Which is why the iPhone and other app stores attract so many developers. Now, Seattle-based RealNetworks is trying to make the process of mobile game publishing faster, cheaper, and more efficient on a much broader range of mobile devices—all while advancing its own business in the sector.

RealGames, the gaming division of RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), is announcing today a new mobile publishing program, called Federation of Studios, that lets game developers quickly and cheaply port their games across 1,700 mobile handsets, 130 carriers, and eight different operating systems (J2ME, BREW, iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, Nintendo DSi, and Flash) worldwide. Real is offering game studios a development platform—plus distribution, marketing, and customer service, with no upfront cost—in exchange for a split of the game revenues. The first studio partner Real has announced is New York-based Sonic Boom, maker of games like Puzzlings and Kill All Bugs for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

“We’ll give you the emerging technology to develop in, we will train you in it, support you in the development process, and once the game is finished, we’ll take it and run it through the handset creation process,” says Charles Harper, general manager of business development for RealGames. “The ideal partner is someone currently creating great, innovative, and compelling content without a direct route to get onto traditional mobile.”

The technology originates from Real’s 2005 acquisition of Mr. Goodliving, a mobile game studio in Helsinki, Finland. It makes the process of developing, porting, and testing mobile games for different platforms and handsets more efficient, by automatically adjusting for technical issues like the screen size and user input scheme. Real says it will also handle the localization of mobile games for other countries, as it has expertise in 10 languages (primarily European).

RealGames employs roughly 400 people, and is known for developing and publishing games in-house (including popular games for the iPhone, Facebook, and personal computers). This is Real’s first dedicated program for working with outside game developers. The program is non-exclusive, so developers can use Real to reach a broader range of handsets and carriers while still submitting an iPhone version, say, on their own.

But, as Harper puts it, the iPhone has 30 to 40 million users, while the size of the overall mobile market is something like 2 billion people. “If you look at iTunes now, there are amazing games that are not making it onto mobile, [except for] a limited number of handsets,” he says. “We’re trying to kick the doors open and throw it out to everybody.”

Today’s news fits into RealNetworks’ broader strategy of investing in mobile as an increasing focus of its business. “We are obviously trying to expand into marketplaces as best we can,” says Harper, a two-time Real employee who has also worked at Seattle-area gaming firms WildTangent and Screenlife. “Mobile is an extremely fast-growing area for us. Because we have this unique technology, this is the best methodology we can bring in to publish out to carriers. It is the next big step for our mobile strategy.”

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Burlington, MA-based Vela Systems, which develops software for construction firms, has completed a $10.5 million equity funding, according to an amended SEC filing made today. The investors were not disclosed. In July 2007, Vela raised $6 million, which is included in the $10.5 million total. The company provides software to allow construction companies to access, modify, and manage paperwork using mobile devices. Vela was spun out of mobile software research and development from the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. [A previous version of this story mistakenly implied that Vela had raised $10.5 million in new funding. We regret the error---Eds.]

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When I first wrote about Black Duck Software about five years ago (pre-Xconomy), the company was pitching its open-source code tracking system as a protective measure. Many software companies wanted to incorporate open-source code into their products—why reinvent an e-commerce module for taking credit card numbers, for instance, if there’s already a perfectly good open-source one?—but they were scared of exposing themselves to the licensing and copyright hassles that sometimes came along with using open source.

Black Duck tried to put companies at ease by developing a system that let software engineers compare their works-in-progress to a large database of open-source programs. If a match was found, that could be a sign that the developers would have to comply with the specific license governing the reused code—or it could mean that complying wasn’t worth the hassle, and that it would be easier to develop the component from scratch.

These days, things are a bit different. Companies can’t afford not to use open-source components in new business or consumer applications, given that it’s so much more economical than starting over. So now it’s more a question of figuring out which components are best—and then making sure they’re safely reusable. As a result, Waltham, MA-based Black Duck has had to recast and expand its business.

A few weeks ago, shortly after the company announced the closing of a $9.5 million Series D venture round, I spoke with Black Duck’s new CEO, Tim Yeaton, who says the company’s new identity is about “driving the acceleration of software development in general by enabling companies to fully exploit the economics and the capabilities of open source.” That means not just ensuring licensing compliance, but actually helping developers find components that could speed up their projects—something that’s easier to do when you own a database of more than 200,000 open-source software projects totaling tens of billions of lines of code.

The first time I spoke with Yeaton, back in November 2007, he was still chief marketing officer at EqualLogic, the Nashua, NH, network storage device maker that had just been purchased by Dell for a stunning $1.4 billion in cash. I don’t know whether Black Duck’s board was hoping for a similarly spectacular exit when they named Yeaton CEO back on February 10—but he does have a bullish outlook on the future of open source components in software development.

“The open, collaborative model and the things it’s created have fundamentally and irreversibly changed how software gets built,” says Yeaton. “Individual developers have already figured this out—they are far more productive when there are technologies out there that they can use and not reinvent the wheel. The opportunity for Black Duck is that when you are a company trying to take advantage of the wealth of open source and intermix it with your internally developed code, that introduces a lot of complexity that most companies haven’t found a way to manage.”

Black Duck’s core product, Code Center, is all about managing that complexity. Introduced in January 2008, the software includes a catalog of open source code pre-approved for reuse, along with search tools for finding just the right bit of code for the problem at hand. Code Center can also …Next Page »

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Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies announced today it has signed a strategic partnership and technology development deal with In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community. Financial terms were not disclosed. Elemental makes video processing software that takes advantage of existing graphics chips.

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Companies headquartered at the Cambridge Innovation Center, a rental office facility where scores of Boston-area entrepreneurs have gotten their ideas off the ground, played host to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick this afternoon. Patrick and other officials—including Massachusetts Life Sciences Center president Susan Windham-Bannister and Greg Bialicki, Patrick’s choice to replace outgoing Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Daniel O’Connell—spent about 20 minutes in a closed roundtable discussion with company leaders at 1:00 p.m., then circulated among the small (some of them really small) companies contributing to the startup brew at the CIC building, a Kendall Square landmark at One Broadway.

Patrick met executives from seven companies in the center, some of them so new or small that they don’t even have websites:

Conduit Labs—a venture-funded startup creating social online games; last profiled by Xconomy here

InVivo Therapeutics—a medical-device startup testing scaffolding materials for stem-cell-based repair of spinal cord injuries

Madera Energy—a one-man firm developing a biomass power plant in western Massachusetts. (Madera principal Matt Wolfe occupies one of the tiny, single-person offices that the CIC calls “Unos.”)

Design That Matters—a non-profit organization building prototype infant incubators made from easily replaced car parts and similar products for poor communities in developing countries

Tap N Tap—a software firm developing interfaces for wall-mounted home displays that coordinate family schedules, shopping lists, heating and air conditioning, and the like

ThingMagic—an MIT spinoff focused on RFID readers and associated software for tracking real-world objects; last profiled here

Vitality—a small company creating gadgets and software to improve medication compliance, including pill-bottle caps that blink or beep to tell patients when to take their next dose

It was an interactive visit for the governor: At Conduit Labs, he sat down to try out the company’s flagship online game, Loudcrowd, and he helped Design That Matters CEO Timothy Prestero disassemble and reassemble a wheeled incubator and isolation unit for premature infants. Patrick had plenty of questions, often asking how soon each company would be bringing new products to market.

CIC president Tim Rowe acted as Patrick’s guide, and took the opportunity to point out the center’s role in providing an all-services-included environment for local technology startups with 25 or fewer employees. Out of the $7 billion invested in New England technology companies by venture firms in 2007 and 2008, Rowe asserted, companies located in the CIC soaked up some $360 million, or more than 5 percent.

In remarks to a gathering of reporters after the tour, Patrick said he thinks companies at the CIC are doing great work, and that the state should do more to create room for startups to grow. “I want to do everything we can to support that kind of imagination and creativity,” he said.

But asked what the state could do to help startups, Patrick wasn’t terribly specific. “I think mostly encourage them, to tell you the truth. I think they’re doing a lot of what they need to do all on their own.”

And there’s an element of exhortation to this encouragement. Patrick asked several of the companies he visited, including ThingMagic and Vitality, where they manufactured their hardware or devices, and got predictable answers like “Taiwan” or “southern China” (although one entrepreneur made the mistake of saying “Connecticut”). That prompted the governor to urge the entrepreneurs to look for manufacturing facilities closer to home.

“I’ve been teasing some of the entrepreneurs I’ve met about where the manufacturing happens after the concepts are developed,” Patrick told reporters later. “One thing we’re certainly doing better and better is developing that manufacturing capacity across the Commonwealth and encouraging companies that get to that point to mass produce here in Massachusetts.”

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San Diego-based Ardea Biosciences announced today it has entered into a securities purchase agreement with institutional investors to raise about $30.6 million from the private placement of newly issued shares of its common stock. Ardea (NASDAQ: RDEA) is focused on the discovery and development of small-molecule drugs to treat HIV, gout, cancer, and inflammatory diseases.

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Seattle-based Movaya and PressOK Entertainment announced today they are joining forces to develop mobile games. Financial terms and impact of the deal were not disclosed. PressOK was formed by the merger of mobile-gaming companies Reaxion and Mobliss in September. Reaxion’s development teams are in Russia and Belarus, while Movaya’s team is in China.

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Redmond, WA-based Microvision, a mobile imaging and display company, announced it has been awarded a $750,000 contract to begin developing a high-definition, see-through eyewear display. The name of the customer was not disclosed. The wearable display is designed to be full-color and transparent to the surroundings.

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Architect Bob Noble was the CEO of San Diego’s Tucker Sadler firm when Kyocera America asked if he would consider designing a “solar carport” for its San Diego headquarters, using photovoltaic solar panels made by Kyocera.

The request might have been a non-starter at any other venerable, 50-year-old firm. Solar carports, after all, have been done before. And Tucker Sadler is known for its work on major projects, such as the recent expansion of the San Diego Convention Center, the Christina Gateway master plan in Wilmington, DE, and the storefront, entry, and interiors for Barneys New York in New York City.

But Noble has long been a passionate advocate for sustainable design. When I first met him 15 years ago, he was the founding CEO of Gridcore International, a venture making fiberboard-like structural panels from shredded U.S. currency and recycled cardboard. So he jumped at Kyocera’s proposal.

“For me it was an exciting opportunity,” Noble says, rattling off his experience and credentials faster than I could write. I looked at him, exasperated, and he said, “Let’s just say I’m an eco-preneur.”

The result proved to be something of a revelation for Noble, who saw that parking lots represented an enormous opportunity for developing solar structures.

“Parking lots are big, hot, urban heat islands,” Noble says, working himself into another rapid-fire fusillade. “They’re bad for landscaping, bad for water drainage. They are the wasteland that you have to go through to get to a building.”

Instead, Noble argues that parking lots should be the giant canvas for integrating renewable energy technology with architecture and sustainable building design. He argues they are far better suited for solar arrays than the rooftops of commercial buildings, which are dominated by housings for mechanical equipment and worries about waterproof membranes. As a recently recruited San Diego Xconomist, Noble also will be making such argument on our forum.

Solar arrays like the “solar grove” that Noble created for Kyocera parking lot and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., generate …Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based Novell said today that Mono 2.0, an updated version of the company’s open-source platform for building and running applications based on the Microsoft .NET framework, is now available to developers. Using the new version of Mono, companies can make .NET applications run on Linux, Solaris, Unix, and even Macintosh operating systems as well as Windows. Mono 2.0 allows programmers to “write their applications once and run them on any OS platform, dramatically increasing portability and expanding their market reach,” said Miguel de Icaza, originator of the Mono project and vice president of Development Platforms at Novell, in the company’s announcement.

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Microsoft officially opened its Vancouver, BC-area development center today. The company announced the center, which is located in Richmond, BC, in July of last year. It is expected to add about 300 jobs to the region. Software developers there will work on products that include Windows, Windows Mobile, Office, and Xbox 360.

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Diagnostics-For-All, a non-profit venture aiming to provide low-cost diagnostic tools to global health workers, won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last night.

It’s been a week of business plan and entrepreneurship prizes, as we have chronicled in a series of articles. But the 19-year-old 100K competition is the granddaddy of them all. Organizers say the event has spurred the creation of more than 85 companies with a combined market capitalization of $10 billion-plus—and it has trained hundreds of other would-be entrepreneurs. All teams have to include at least one MIT member.

This year, the competition took on a new form, splitting into seven industry tracks: astro/aerospace, biotech, development, energy, mobile, products and services, and Web 2.0/IT. Last night the seven track winners (see list below), each of which took home at least 10K for winning its sector, vied for the grand prize.

Diagnostics-For-All, built around patent-pending technology developed in the lab of Harvard professor (and Xconomist) George Whitesides—himself a highly successful serial entrepreneur—is out to create a “new generation of diagnostic devices microfabricated and patterned in paper,” according to a press release. The technology is meant to enable tools for diagnosing ailments including liver, kidney, and metabolic diseases that are easy to use, cheap, portable, and disposable—and therefore well suited for use in the developing world. Judges picking the venture as the competition’s best included Desh Deshpande, co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, and Bob Metcalfe of Polaris Venture partners.

Another winner last night was Covalent Solar, which had already won the energy track of the competition. Based on its live elevator pitch, the team took home the $10,000 prize for audience favorite—as measured by cell phone voting.

Here’s our list of track winners and their prizes:

Mobile — Ubitrack ($35,000)

Energy — Covalent Solar ($20,000)

Astro/Aero — InAct Labs ($10,000)

Biotech — Diagnostics-for-All ($10,000)

Development — ClickDiagnostics ($20,000)

Web 2.0/IT — CyberAnalytix ($10,000)

Products and Services — MyFaktory ($10,000)

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Waltham, MA-based Black Duck Software, whose products help companies manage big software projects that incorporate open-source code and other third-party software, said today that it has acquired Santa Monica, CA-based Koders, proprietor of the Web’s leading open-source code search engine.

Black Duck paddled up to software developers in 2004 with the promise of helping them vet all of the snippets of open-source code that were, even then, finding their way into major software products. While much of this code is free, the problem is that it’s still subject to various, often conflicting licenses, exposing companies to potential litigation when they try to sell or redistribute programs that use it. BlackDuck’s “protexIP” system scans software for third-party components and highlights potential license conflicts and legal issues.

In the years since the company introduced protexIP, software development has become an even more synthetic, cut-and-paste process; most big programs these days are assembled from existing modules rather than written from scratch. In response, Black Duck came up with a new product, Code Center, that helps companies manage and track their growing jumble of code modules (whether open source or not) all the way through the development, review, and approval process.

Black Duck CEO Doug Levin says that left only one hole in the company’s offerings: a way for developers to identify appropriate code modules to put into their products in the first place. Hence the Koders acquisition. Koders.com is one of the most popular code search engines; it’s a place where a developer who wants to incorporate a shopping-cart function into his e-commerce software, for example, can type in “shopping cart” and get back hundreds of snippets of code culled from public software repositories that may answer the need.

“The first rule of being an engineer is don’t reinvent the wheel,” says Levin. “We’ve heard from our customers that they would desire a Black Duck solution for identifying components they can apply to their code from outside…. Over a period of time we saw the synergies between Koders and Black Duck, and we just decided we should acquire [the service] rather than rebuilding it ourselves.”

With the inclusion of search functionality from Koders, Black Duck Code Center users will be able to save significant amounts of time on software development projects, says Darren Rush, Koders’ CEO. “Say you’re mid-stream down the development process and you run into a roadblock of some sort. You may want to identify a snippet of code that integrates some low-level function into your application and save yourself an hour. By re-using code you can leverage developer time on the scale of man-days or even man-weeks.”

In one sense, Black Duck’s products add an additional layer of bureaucracy to software development projects, making them a bit slower than it might be if developers were free to slam together code from any source they pleased. But code reviews are a permanent fact of life inside the commercial software world, since no company is going to let code out the door that exposes them to copyright suits or other legal risks. The other upside of vetting code so thoroughly is that once companies know it’s safe to use, they can use it over and over. “There are a lot of companies out there that don’t use open source at all because they don’t know how to control it,” says Peter Vescuso, Black Duck’s senior vice president of marketing. “This opens the door to a lot of companies to be able to manage it properly.”

Black Duck isn’t revealing the exact terms of the Koders acquisition. But Levin says Koders’ three employees, including Rush, will be retained on a consulting basis, and will continue to work from their current location in Santa Monica.

“They happen to like the Southern California vibe, and we happen to like the Northeastern vibe,” says Levin. The Koders.com search site will remain free and open to all developers, he says.

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VMware (NYSE:VMW), the virtualization subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC
(NYSE:EMC), announced today that it would invest $100 million in India by 2010 to expand its existing research and development presence in that country. The investment will include building a new, 82,000-square-foot development center in Bangalore and doubling its local engineering organization to more than 1,000 workers.

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If only laptops could run on qi—the spiritual energy that, in traditional Chinese philosophy, pervades all things.

Well, if anyone has come close to making that happen, it’s Mary Lou Jepsen, founding chief technology officer at the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC). At the foundation, Jepsen did what computer-industry executives said couldn’t be done: design a powerful laptop for children in the developing world that worked on less battery power, and for less money, than anything the major PC manufacturers could create. Last November, the foundation’s neon-green, rabbit-eared XO laptop went into mass production in China. And on New Year’s Day, Jepsen’s long-planned departure from OLPC became official.

But she hasn’t gone far: the next gig for Jepsen, former CTO of Intel’s display division, is Pixel Qi, a Hull, MA-based startup she has created to design and build components for low-cost information devices that could be sold to consumers right here in the United States, as well as to people in the developing world. Jepsen believes that features she pioneered for the XO—such as the integration of the LCD screen and motherboard, allowing the CPU to shut itself down and save energy when little is happening onscreen—would benefit users everywhere, not just in environments where cost is critical or electricity is scarce.

Jepsen says she’s raising financing for the venture now, and that the first products based on the XO’s “holistic” design philosophy could hit stores as early as the end of this year. We caught up with her on last Friday, when she’d just returned from a whirlwind series of meetings with manufacturers at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. She commented on the prospects for a sub-$100 laptop in the near future, as well as the renewed acrimony between her two former employers—OLPC and Intel—over the giant chipmaker’s own attempt to market a low-cost laptop, the Classmate.

Xconomy: You’re starting Pixel Qi to pursue a new mobile-device design philosophy that you pioneered with the XO laptop. Can you talk about that for a minute?

Mary Lou Jepsen: I’m just back from CES, and I found it bewildering. Ninety-nine percent of the products are unnecessary. The iPhone and the iPod have redefined the high end of the consumer market, but nobody is doing that in the mass market.

If you look holistically at a device, whether it’s a cell phone, a laptop, or what have you, you can make products that are just as exciting [as the iPhone] in their own way—things that aren’t just for air-conditioned offices but that work indoors or outdoors, on or off the grid. But they have to be things that people are proud to own and proud to use. I think we accomplished that with the XO.

X: How will your designs be different?

MLJ: In order to work with economies of scale, we need to design a family of basic components that can be used by a variety of groups—not just children but adults, not just people in poor countries but people in rich countries. Everybody wants their batteries to last longer. Everybody wants to be able to use their cell phone or laptop or Blackberry outside in the sunlight and still be able to see the screen. It’s basic stuff.

Everybody thinks power is about the CPU, but the most expensive and power-hungry component in a laptop isn’t a CPU, it’s …Next Page »

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Apparently, the global village ain’t big enough for both Intel and Nicholas Negroponte.

The giant chipmaker said Thursday it had pulled out of Negroponte’s Cambridge-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), which is building a sub-$200 laptop for use by children in developing countries. Intel, with its $300-ish Classmate notebook computer, has its eye on the same market, and Intel gave up its board seat at the One Laptop Foundation because Negroponte had asked it to drop the Classmate, a request the company decided it could not accommodate, according to Intel representatives widely quoted by the Associated Press and other news organizations.

This afternoon the One Laptop foundation fired back, publishing a statement harshly criticizing Intel for failing to deliver on promises it made when it joined the One Laptop effort last summer. (Intel’s addition to the board was presented at the time as a sign of reconciliation between Intel chairman Craig Barrett and Negroponte, who had clashed over the importance of the laptop project in a well-publicized 60 Minutes broadcast). “Since joining the OLPC Board of Directors in July, Intel has violated its written agreement with OLPC on numerous occasions,” said the statement, posted on the organization’s wiki by Walter Bender, the foundation’s president for software and content. “Intel continued to disparage the XO laptop in nations that had already decided to partner with OLPC (Uruguay and Peru), with countries that were in the midst of choosing a laptop solution (Brazil and Nigeria), and other countries contemplating a laptop program (Mongolia).”

The statement also said that Intel had failed to contribute to hardware or software engineering efforts around the XO laptop (as OLPC’s laptop is known). Intel “failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts—even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software,” the organization said. “The best Intel could offer in regards to an ‘Intel inside’ XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power—exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision.”

The foundation had planned to debut a version of the XO laptop containing an Intel microprocessor at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, according to Information Week. But in the official hardware specifications for the XO laptop, the microprocessor at the core of the machine is a 433-Megahertz Geode LX-700 from Intel competitor AMD.

Even the two organizations’ final split was marked by acrimony. “It is clear that Intel’s heart has never been in working collaboratively as a part of OLPC,” Bender’s statement said. “This is well illustrated by the way in which our separation was announced singlehandedly by Intel; Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Actions do speak louder than words in this case. As we said in the past, we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market.”

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Would-be entrepreneurs interested in creating new technologies and businesses for the developing world got a piece of good news today: International investment group Legatum is donating $50 million to MIT to establish a new center to support just that sort of entrepreneurship.

The new Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship will provide fellowships for graduate students, drawn from across MIT’s five schools, who are interested in grassroots approaches to technological and economic development in emerging nations. The center will also host a variety of competitions, seminars, workshops, and debates.

The new center’s executive director, Iqbal Quadir, says the organization will concentrate on “bottom-up technology-based entrepreneurial development.” Bottom-up is the way all entrepreneurial development really works, says Quadir, who founded Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest cellular operator. “Unfortunately, for whatever the reason, the policy world had done it the other way and economic development hadn’t really happened.” The new center was born because “we just want to bring some balance to that, and at the same time allow MIT students to create real businesses around the world,” Quadir says.

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