The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

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The MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, is running a special exhibition, starting this weekend, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT’s charter. The “MIT 150” exhibit showcases a collection of stories and artifacts that represent the institute’s contributions to science, technology, business, education, and society—things like Marvin Minsky’s robot arm, Claude Shannon’s maze-solving machine, J.C.R. Licklider’s Internet-presaging paper, Norbert Wiener’s letter describing a meeting with Albert Einstein, and much more.

The exhibit’s objects and themes were crowdsourced from the MIT community and organized by Deborah Douglas, curator of science and technology at the museum. It’s all part of a 150-day-long campus-wide celebration of MIT’s distinguished history. (Some sticklers for detail point out that MIT didn’t actually open its doors to students until 1865, so we might have to do all this celebrating over again in 2015.)

Here are a few items and links that caught my eye as being particularly relevant to MIT’s entrepreneurial legacy:

—The first business plan for Digital Equipment Corporation, and other items from American Research and Development Corporation, the equity investment firm co-founded by former MIT president Karl Compton (which originally invested $70,000 in DEC in 1957).

—Artifacts commemorating the 25,000-plus active companies around the world founded by MIT alumni and faculty.

—Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child “XO” Laptop, from 2002.

—MIT’s first patent policy, from 1932.

—Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto (1985), in response to companies making proprietary software.

—Project Athena (1983-1991), a joint project by MIT, IBM, and DEC to integrate computers into the university curriculum. (OK, I’m sentimental about my first e-mail account.)

There is a celebration at the museum for the MIT community today from 3:00-5:00 pm, and a public program on January 14. The MIT 150 exhibition officially opens to the public tomorrow.

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With 2010 almost in the books—and a lot of people grounded by the Northeast blizzard—it seems like a good time to take a break and look back at some of Xconomy Boston’s top stories of the year.

These are not necessarily the ones that generated the most traffic (although in some cases they did). Instead, they are stories that best exemplify what we try to deliver to our readers day in and day out—the stories behind the companies, ideas, and people that are helping to create the future of innovation in our network of cities.

Our Boston editor’s picks span a wide range of subjects, from young startups (Baydin, Krush, Energesis) to established public companies (Genzyme, Vertex, Unica, Progress Software), from software and information technology to life sciences, biotech, and energy. They range from unique breaking news stories (Resveratrol) to in-depth features (TripAdvisor), Q&As (John Glaser, Arif Padaria), and commentary/analysis (entrepreneurial Walk of Fame).

Without further ado, here are our top 20 stories of 2010, sorted by sector:

Top 10 Tech Stories

Krush Founder Gina Ashe, Survivor of Horrific Car Crash, Has New Lease on Startup Life

Q&A on Startups and Investing Strategy with Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s “State Angel” Arif Padaria

Why Rich Levandov Invested Early in Zynga, and Why It Took Off—Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Consider

Twitter Plea Helps Baydin Get Seed Money from Angel Investor Dave McClure; Startup Moving to the Valley Next Month

Kendall Square Wants an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame—and So Should Every Innovation Hub

The Unica Story: Yuchun Lee’s Journey from MIT Blackjack Team to IBM Acquisition

Is Boston Becoming a Hub for Female Tech Entrepreneurs? Maybe, and Here’s Why

Tim Berners-Lee and Group of Boston Web Gurus Leading New MIT Class to Get Linked Data to Market

Reinventing Progress Software—Boston’s Next Billion-Dollar Company?

TripAdvisor: The Travel Company That’s Really All About Data

.

Top 10 Life Sciences Stories

Avila Therapeutics Pursuing Rival to Lung Cancer Drug in Dana-Farber Lawsuit

Energesis Pharmaceuticals, Co-Founded by Sirtris Vet, Seeks to Tap Power of “Good Fat” in Fighting Obesity and Diabetes

Genzyme Boss Henri Termeer Not Ready to Sell to Sanofi, Ride Into the Sunset, Sources Say

Former Sirtris Execs’ Nonprofit Starts Selling Resveratrol with Potential Anti-Aging Effects Online

John Glaser, Boston’s Top Hospital Geek, Talks About Obama’s Health IT Plan and Getting Booted from Catholic School

Vertex, Worth $7.5B, Eagerly Awaits Final Proof that Hepatitis C Drug Works

Cooking with the Genzyme Recipe: New Players Funding Rare Disease Drugs in Boston

The Genetics Institute Alumni: Where Are They Now?

Prominent Flatley Family Launches Boston Nonprofit for Cystic Fibrosis Drug Research

Chairman Bill Young: Next Biogen Idec CEO May Be a Scientist

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Nicholas Negroponte walked into the Starbucks holding some sort of thin, tablet-like computer. I couldn’t tell what model, because it was zipped inside a carrying case—but I was hoping for a prototype of the XO 3, the next-generation tablet Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Foundation wants to create for children in the developing world for something like $75 per machine.

“That’s not an iPad?” I asked, hoping it was not.

“It is an iPad,” Negroponte replied, crushing my hopes for an exclusive early look at the envisioned device. “We’re fast, but not that fast.” We met last Friday at the Starbucks in the Galleria Mall, here in Cambridge, MA, not far from OLPC headquarters. It was kind of ironic how deftly Negroponte wielded the iPad, using it to look up information and send me pictures and PowerPoint slides as we spoke, and flipping it around occasionally to demonstrate similarities and differences between it and the planned XO 3. As I snapped off a few pictures, he joked that they would make a nice ad for Apple (except he hadn’t seen the quality of my pictures).

While the dimensions of the iPad and planned XO 3 are very similar, the differences between the machines—one for upscale consumers, the other for children in developing nations—are profound. But perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation was Negroponte’s assertion that OLPC might not have to build anything at all to get an XO 3-like tablet to market (more on all this later).

We were speaking as part of several interviews I have been doing with OLPC personnel and advisors to catch up on the group’s progress and ambitions. On Tuesday, I profiled the OLPC Association, the business side of the organization. This article, based primarily on my interview with Negroponte, looks at the OLPC Foundation. Negroponte is the founder of and top figure in the entire organization, but the foundation (which he chairs) is his chief focus. Its mission is really twofold: to bring laptops, starting with the current XO model, to children in new areas such as Gaza and Afghanistan, and to oversee development of the XO 3 tablet.

Both efforts, it turns out, are utilizing innovative new initiatives and ideas—with what might be called mixed success. Negroponte’s update included a sobering assessment of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and a report on OLPC’s Gaza plans that wasn’t unlike reports of Mideast peace talks: things are frustratingly slow to develop. There was better news on the XO 3 front: as I reported on Monday, semiconductor maker Marvell recently committed to a $5.6 million grant to fund the tablet’s development. Along the way, Negroponte had some observations about the evolution of computing I found fascinating—including his assertion that tablets were not creating the market for e-books, but that it was rather the other way around. And my overall impression was that while the days of ubiquitous praise and head-spinning press about the OLPC project are long past, the organization is actually settling into a pace and place where it could make by far its biggest impact in the next few years ahead.

Getting Laptops to Afghanistan and Gaza

We spoke first about efforts to expand OLPC’s reach. Most of the organization’s success so far has come in South America and Latin America (primarily Uruguay and Paraguay), and to a lesser degree parts of Africa. Negroponte now seems to be focusing mostly on the Middle East: Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq. And to do it, he’s had to come up with an entirely different model for getting laptops into the hands of kids, one based on humanitarian donations rather than convincing governments to purchase the machines.

The humanitarian donation idea, he says, is almost “totally new.” Outside of very few exceptions, the 1.5 million laptops distributed to date (plus another 500,000 on back order) have been funded by the governments of the countries for which they’re intended. But that won’t work in … Next Page »

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A French drugmaker’s bid to acquire one of New England’s biggest biotechs turned hostile this week. Read on for this, and some of the week’s less predictable deals news from the tech and life sciences sectors.

—Watertown, MA-based WiTricity forged an alliance with Troy, MI-based Delphi Automotive aimed at developing wireless charging stations for hybrid and electric vehicles. The companies did not reveal the financial terms of the deal, which marks the first automotive partnership for WiTricity, whose primary market is wireless charging of consumer electronics.

—Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX), the Cambridge, MA-based biotech, signed a drug development and commercialization agreement with the Japanese contract research organization CMIC. The deal, which includes a $4 million upfront payment to Dyax and potentially $102 million in development and sales milestone payments, focuses on commercializing Dyax’s DX-88 (ecallantide) in Japan.

—Transportation management software maker BirdDog Solutions of Andover, MA, raised $2.1 million in an equity-based financing round that could ultimately total $2.4 million, according to a regulatory filing.

—The Cambridge-based One Laptop per Child Foundation scored $5.6 million from Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell to fund development of a tablet computer, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told Bob. The tablet represents the third generation of OLPC’s XO laptop, and so will be called the XO 3.

—French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE:SNY) launched a hostile takeover bid for Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ) with a tender offer of $69 per share. The bid, worth $18.5 billion total, is priced the same as an earlier offer that was unanimously rejected by Genzyme’s board in August.

—The Echo Nest, a startup in Somerville, MA, that provides a music-data service for independent app developers, raised $7 million in a Series B funding round. New investor Matrix Partners led the deal, which included participation from return backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

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Walter Bender and the One Laptop per Child organization are back together again. The architect of the Sugar learning environment at the heart of every XO laptop, who had teamed with OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte to launch the project but split with the organization 30 months ago, saying it had lost its way as a disruptive power, is now once again an integral part of the effort. He and his Sugar Labs colleagues are teaming with OLPC personnel to deliver laptops and help create a software development ecosystem in South America and other parts of the developing world. It’s part of what seems to be a renewed push to advance the foundation’s goals of enhancing learning and to create an economic framework to help emerging nations help themselves.

This reunification was the most surprising and important thing I learned about last week when I visited OLPC board member and strategic advisor Chuck Kane in his office at MIT for an update on the organization. Bender joined us by telephone for much of the interview. The big catalyst of the reunification was Kane, who started working with OLPC three years ago. “One of the things I really wanted to do was get Walter back into the mix, because Walter was at the front end of this project,” says Kane. “When Walter left, we kept in close touch, and when it became clear that Sugar Labs would be a natural fit to our joint mission, we decided to work together again.” The renewed collaboration began about eight months ago. And, says Kane, “He’s really had an impact on our capabilities since coming back. Now it’s a joint effort again.”

“In some sense, it’s the same as it ever was,” adds Bender. After all, he notes, OLPC has never shipped a laptop that didn’t have his Sugar environment at its core—so at least on one level, “the Sugar Labs team has never stopped working with One Laptop Per Child.” Still, he acknowledges a vastly improved relationship with the organization—and says that’s because its interests seem once again more tightly aligned with his own. “What’s different,” he says, “is that there’s a much more concerted effort to get the message out that this is not just a laptop project, it’s a learning project.”

I get into more details of what brought Bender back below, and how that is going. But first, a general update from Kane about what the organization’s been doing since I last met with him and Negroponte early last year.

The short answer, says Kane: “a lot.” Indeed, at the time we last spoke, the OLPC organization was going through a round of layoffs and splitting into two main groups. That split has now been entirely achieved. The OLPC Foundation, led by Negroponte, is continuing to develop a next generation computer while also pursuing new opportunities to bring laptops to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gaza—parts of the world where, in Kane’s words, “our intention is to provide by way of some kind of donation computers to the children in those areas.” That work, he says, is proceeding apace—and we will have more from Negroponte in the next few days.

The other big block is the OLPC Association, which is what Kane is part of. It is basically the business end of the enterprise, working with customers—most of them so far in South America—that buy computers rather than acquiring them by way of donations. This is the side of OLPC that handles sales, manufacturing, the supply chain, and so forth. It has moved its headquarters from Cambridge, MA, to Miami, where Kane now keeps an apartment and where CEO and chairman Rodrigo Arboleda runs day-to-day operations, closer to OLPC’s biggest customers in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru. “Most of our rollouts have been in Latin America, Miami is the capital of Latin America, so it’s worked out very well,” says Kane. Indeed, he says, OLPC has now delivered 1.5 million of its XO laptops, and “we’ve got about a half million on backlog right now.”

Another change in this part of the organization is that, for the first time, OLPC has built in what Kane says is a “very small” profit margin to help the organization support itself in the face of waning corporate donations. Even with this extra margin, the XO is “still by far and away the least expensive computer” in the world, he says. But the price gap is narrowing between it and commercial netbooks and laptops. “Whereas our competition was very limited two years ago, our competition today is high level, from a number of computer manufacturers,” Kane says. What’s more, he says, “they are targeting the education market in a big way.”

Which in a way is where the reengagement with Bender and Sugar Labs comes in. One … Next Page »

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The One Laptop per Child Foundation and Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell have cemented a partnership announced last spring, with Marvell agreeing to provide OLPC with $5.6 million to fund development of its next generation tablet computer, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte tells me. Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011.

“Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”

The OLPC tablet, which Negroponte hinted at last November in an interview with my colleague Wade Roush and formally announced last December, is known as the XO 3 because it represents the third-generation of the XO laptop currently sold by OLPC (the foundation scrapped plans for its e-book-like XO 2 computer and is moving straight to the tablet). Marvell is a longtime corporate sponsor of the foundation, but with this grant has formally stepped up to take the lead on engineering development. “They’ve been sponsors all along,” Negroponte says. “But they were one of ten. Now they are the technology partner.” The deal, he says, means the tablet’s development is “fully funded.”

Negroponte also reiterated what he said back in May—that Marvell and OLPC will have something concrete to show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this January. He stopped short of promising a working prototype, however. And he emphasized another point he has also made previously—that whatever will be shown will not relate directly to the XO 3.

Instead, it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. That tablet would be made entirely out of plastic, so that it is bendable but unbreakable, and would have a dual-mode display that works indoors as well as in bright sunlight. The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.

“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.

Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.

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The Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation arguably launched an industry with its XO-1 Laptop, which first went into large-scale production in 2007. The worldwide buzz generated by the little green machine, which was intended mainly for classroom use in technologically underserved areas of the world, inspired computer makers to build an array of low-cost commercial netbooks. But since then, hardware makers have leapfrogged OLPC—with Apple’s iPad, in particular, fueling perceptions that the future of personal computing lies in tablet-style devices with multitouch screens.

This week, the organization unveiled its near-term plans for catching up with the tablet revolution—but it bears little resemblance to the snazzy, dual-screen device OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte first showed off in May 2008. Instead, the foundation is working with Santa Clara, CA-based Marvell Technology Group to develop a version of Marvell’s planned Moby tablet that will run OLPC’s Linux-based operating system and educational software.

Marvell announced the Moby as a “reference design” in March. Envisioned to cost $99 or less, the device will have Marvell’s own 1-Gigahertz Armada microprocessor inside, and will have a multitouch, high-definition LCD screen. At the website for the Moby initiative, Mobylize.org, the company pitches the device as a low-cost alternative to the iPad for students, who could use it for reading e-textbooks. (In a politically savvy pilot program, Marvell says it plans to donate one Moby tablet to every student in an at-risk public school in the District of Columbia.)

Judging from early mock-ups of the Moby—which will be available this fall, according to Marvell—the device will resemble a somewhat chunky iPad, right down to the single “home” button on the bezel. Marvell hasn’t announced the device’s full specs, but says the tablet will include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM, and GPS radios and will support “multiple software standards including full Adobe Flash, Android, Windows Mobile, and Ubuntu.” (Ubuntu is a variant of Linux.) Like the iPad, the Moby is expected to have a long battery life compared to a laptop, but unlike the iPad, it will have a built-in camera for photography and video conferencing. Marvell also says the device’s virtual keyboard will provide “touch feedback,” although it hasn’t specified how this will work.

With OLPC’s software on board, the Moby tablet should be able to support all the same educational activities the XO-1 does, including the wireless mesh networking that is a key element of the foundation’s “constructionist” philosophy for computer-mediated learning. Because it won’t have a physical keyboard or many of the other moving parts that go into a laptop, the device may even be more … Next Page »

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It seems only fitting that the creators of one of the most popular children’s toys in history would want to honor the creator of the most successful children’s computer in history.

Today the Denmark-based Lego Group, of plastic brick fame, announced that it has awarded its $100,000 Lego Prize to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

The company said that the prize, which it created in 1985, was being awarded to Negroponte “for his passionate vision of one laptop per child and his ability to make his vision come alive.” Nearly 2 million XO Laptops built by the foundation have been distributed to children in 40 countries.

“In the Lego Group, we see children as our role models,” Lego owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen said in a statement. “Children look at the world with open eyes, unconstrained by the past and willing to ask why? and what if? By connecting them and enabling them to learn and develop, OLPC creates totally new possibilities and a hope for a much brighter future for the world.”

Reached by Xconomy in Copenhagen, where he will receive the prize at today’s Lego Idea Conference, Negroponte said the most important meaning of the prize was that “Both OLPC and Lego stand for learning by playing.”

Negroponte’s association with the Lego Group is a longstanding one: the company was one of the earliest sponsors of the Media Lab, where researchers’ offices are perennially littered with Lego bricks. “We are celebrating our 26th year of collaboration with Lego,” Negroponte says, so visiting Copenghagen to pick up the award “may be more like [being with] family.”

I asked Negroponte how the prize helps to validate OLPC’s mission of supplying low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. “There is not much left to validate any more,” he replied, via e-mail. “The only open question is how to pay for OLPC. The full cost of acquisition and ownership is $1 per week per child.”

Negroponte said he doesn’t have any plans so far for using the prize money. The last person to receive the Lego Prize was New Hampshire-based inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, in 2008.

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Every so often, we like to check in with Walter Bender, the former president of software and content for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation. He’s always busy with something interesting—and lately, it’s been Sugar, the classroom-oriented software environment that he and a team of software engineers originally developed for the OLPC’s $200 XO Laptop. Bender left the OLPC Foundation in 2008 to start Sugar Labs, a Brookline, MA-based non-profit organization that continues to make improvements to Sugar.

The most recent, which Bender told us about back in February, is Sugar on a Stick, a version of Sugar that fits on a USB key. Insert Sugar on a Stick into the USB slot of your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, and you can start up the computer in Sugar instead of the native operating system. The implications are exciting: for the first time, any classroom or consumer with a computer can try all of the educational software built into Sugar without having to obtain an XO.

Last week, Sugar Labs announced the debut of Blueberry, the second major release of Sugar on a Stick. I caught up with Bender just after he’d returned from the Netbook World Summit in Paris, where he says many netbook manufacturers expressed interest in putting Sugar on their devices. I asked him, among other things, for his views on the future of the netbook category, where Sugar fits in, and how Blueberry changes the picture.

I was particularly intrigued by two points Bender made. First, he says Blueberry includes a vastly improved e-book reader that makes any computer running Sugar into “a pretty darn good e-book reader” (his words), with built-in access to the hundreds of thousands of free books available from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, as well as cool tools for shared book annotation. The implications for schools are obvious.

Second, Bender hinted that the next release of Sugar on a Stick after Blueberry, code named “Cloudberry,” will take Sugar in some very interesting new directions, bringing capabilities like cloud-based storage to Sugar users. That ought to make it easier for teachers and students to share documents and applications, for one thing. Click through to the end of the interview for the details.

Here’s the full record of our talk.

Xconomy: You just got back from Paris. What were you up to there?

Walter Bender: I was giving the keynote at the Netbook World Summit. This is the second year they’ve had it in Paris, hosted by Mandriva [maker of a popular version of Linux]. It was a small group of about 200 people, but the right people. A lot of people were there from the various manufacturers, talking about different approaches to netbook software. There was somebody from Google talking about Chrome OS, and somebody from Samsung. I also gave the keynote last year, and I talked then about the difference between computer culture and phone culture, and about how computer culture was going to give the netbook guys an edge. What happened was, I was 100 percent wrong, because Apple and Google wrested the phone away from the wireless operators and the netbook industry just started emulating the status quo. Netbooks today all look the same, and all do the same thing, and the innovation is really happening on smartphones.

So I challenged the netbook community to wrestle back their innovative lead, and to frame it in terms of what you can do with a netbook that you can’t do with a phone. At some level, they are all just computers. But a netbook has a bigger screen, it has a keyboard, and there is a certain level of expression and creativity that those affordances give you that you are going to be hard pressed to do on a phone. A lot of people shoot video on a phone, but not many edit video on a phone. On phones, a lot of people type text messages, but … Next Page »

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[Updated 11/2/09 with additional details about 3rd-generation laptop design, see page 2] After the October 24 announcement that the Internet Archive is about to make 1.6 million e-books available free to children with XO Laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, we decided it was time to catch up with OLPC’s founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte. The organization has been through drastic changes of late, including a round of layoffs early this year necessitated by disappointing holiday 2008 sales and the pullout of major sponsors, and the subsequent spinoff of its sales and education-software efforts. But last time we talked with Negroponte, back in January, he had ambitious plans for rebooting the One Laptop effort, with an emphasis on getting the computers into new markets.

We wondered how the organization was progressing toward some of the goals Negroponte had laid out in the January interview. Last week, he took time on a recent plane trip to respond to a set of written questions. We’ve reproduced them below, with a few explanatory comments appended.

Of perhaps greatest interest, Negroponte told us the organization has scrapped plans unveiled in May 2008 for an e-book-like second-generation XO laptop, instead focusing on an upgraded version of the current XO and designs for a “3.0″ version of the device that will be “more like a sheet of paper.” And whereas the XO was once described as the “hundred-dollar laptop,” Negroponte said experience has indicated that the total cost of ownership for the device, including Internet connectivity, is closer to $1 per week per child. This amount is “high” but “not outrageous,” in Negroponte’s view; he says discussion in most countries where OLPC is operating has shifted away from whether the machines aid education efforts and toward how to pay for them.

Xconomy: What do you see as the main significance in the Internet Archive making e-books available for the XO Laptop?

Nicholas Negroponte: A further example of why olpc (lowercase) is not just education as we knew it and how learning opportunity can reach the most isolated places in the world.

[Editor's comment: As Negroponte explains below, the organization is actually two separate bodies now---the One Laptop Per Child Association, which builds the XO Laptop, and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, whose mission is to stimulate grassroots technology and education efforts in developing countries. Both groups are undergoing a rebranding of sorts, switching from OLPC to the lowercase "olpc."]

X: You had set as a goal back in January one million digital books. Looks like you overshot. Do you have a new goal? Five million?

NN: No. The next few million do not matter. It is like laptops. There are over a million in the hands of kids in 19 languages and 31 countries. The next million are … Next Page »

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[Updated 10/24/09 5:30 p.m. with additional interview material] All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.

Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “We’ve been working for the last year, since Nicholas invited us, to show that we can do this,” Kahle said. “We took all of the one million, six hundred thousand books and reformatted them to work with the OLPC laptop.”

The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.

The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”

Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.

The announcement came as part of a Boston Book Festival panel session on electronic books, entitled “The Future of Reading: Books Without Pages?” The session, held at the Boston Public Library, was part of a day-long celebration of books and reading funded by Boston’s State Street Bank and organized by Deborah Porter, a freelance book reviewer who is Negroponte’s significant other, according to the Boston Globe.

OLPC and the Archive have been working together for a year to get the books ready for display on the XO Laptop’s screen, which was designed to be visible in full sunlight and to use less energy than existing commercial LCD screens. The books are being converted into the open EPUB format, which will be cleanly readable on an XO after a coming update to the devices’ operating environment.

“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen ,but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that … Next Page »

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If you’re interested in creating technologies for developing countries, or involved with a Web-based software startup in the Northwest, you definitely want to know Will Poole. OK, that covers a lot of people, but it’s not an overstatement.

Poole is one of the most prominent ex-Microsofties to leave the company in the past year. Until last September, he was vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (one of the better division names, in my opinion), and was in charge of providing software to markets in less-developed nations around the world. Before that, he was responsible for the Windows desktop operating system, so he knows a few things about shipping large-scale products. He first came to Microsoft in 1996 through its acquisition of eShop, a company he co-founded in 1991. Some of his post-Microsoft insights can be found on his “creative capitalism” website here.

I recently spoke with Poole to find out what he’s up to. I got the sense that his new role as a dedicated social technologist and investor is yielding a slew of projects we’re going to be hearing about soon. He also had some provocative thoughts on the challenges faced by organizations like the One Laptop Per Child Foundation—and anyone selling technology globally.

“Most people advised me to take a whole year off, but that’s not in my nature,” Poole says. “My overall goal is to contribute to the formation and growth of companies that can, by virtue of their successful and [large] scale operation, deliver good financial results to investors and shareholders, and also deliver on social and economic development.” That could mean improving education, nurturing an ecosystem of collaborative software developers, solving problems of how technology can assist healthcare, and so forth.

It sounds like he’s in a better place to do that now. “The thing I’m enjoying now is operating across a broader range of organizations that have a greater range of ways of doing things,” says Poole. “Microsoft does [software as a service] that goes out over global distribution channels. That’s only part of the story. What I get to do now is work more closely with nonprofits, thought leaders in academia,” and other groups, he says.

His most public new role is as co-chairman of Redwood City, CA-based NComputing, which provides personal-computing technologies to schools and businesses in developing markets. “I saw they had a disruptive technology,” Poole says. “It delivered a computing experience at a dramatically lower cost—at initial purchase and in ongoing management and energy consumption. It really changed the game.”

Poole says NComputing is having a “profound effect on markets that were previously unable to use computer infrastructure because of cost.” His role is to help the company build its business from a strategic perspective, using his knowledge and contacts from around the world. “The exciting thing about NComputing is they’re already at scale,” he says. “It’s cheaper to fill up a school [with these PCs] than any other choice out there.” Poole says NComputing has about 150 employees in 14 countries, and they’re currently selling into 90 countries.

The most important lesson from his time at Microsoft and NComputing? … Next Page »

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The damage to Bay State technology employment rolls was far greater in January than in any month since the downturn began. By Xconomy’s count, New England tech firms laid off at least 5,675 workers as 2009 began, compared to 2,028 layoffs in November and 1,428 in December, the two worst months prior to January.

Massive job cuts at two firms at the foundations of the local technology economy were the prime contributors to January’s grim statistics. Hopkinton, MA-based EMC announced January 7 that it would lay off 2,400 workers, and Bose in Framingham, MA, said it would let 1,000 workers go on January 20.

But other major area employers weren’t far behind: Brooks Automation in Chelmsford, MA, announced 550 layoffs on January 26; Sepracor, the Marlborough, MA-based maker of Lunesta sleeping pills, announced it would eliminate 530 jobs on January 29; and Teradyne in North Reading, MA, closed out the month on January 30 by announcing it would cut its workforce by 532 positions. (Not all of these reported cuts will affect Massachusetts employees—in most cases, companies don’t break down their reduction-in-force announcements by region.)

The cuts at local firms were merely a reflection of the national trend, of course. In 2008, technology companies laid off nearly 187,000 people altogether, according to a count last week by Chicago-based employment agency Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. While the company hasn’t finished compiling January figures, it said “technology firms appear to be continuing their job-cutting spree in 2009,” with giants like Sprint/Nextel, Microsoft, Motorola, IBM, Intel, and AMD leading the way.

We’ve been tallying up the local job losses on our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker, which we’ll continue to update as the layoff reports come in. Here’s what the January figures looked like, in the end:

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For those inspired by Nicholas Negroponte’s vision of bringing affordable computing to every child on the planet, it was a sad day early this month when the One Laptop Per Child Foundation he founded announced it was laying off half its staff and undertaking a significant reorganization.

Negroponte himself isn’t crying, though—he is working on plans for the future: OLPC 2.0, you might call it. Only a bullet-point sketch was presented on the OLPC blog, but Negroponte and OLPC President Charles “Chuck” Kane met with me last week in Harvard Square to explain more. We covered how the layoffs came about, particularly the failure of the Give One, Get One (G1G1) program and where that leaves the organization financially. And they shared plans to spin out operations in Latin America, where OLPC has been most successful, while beefing up efforts in Africa and the Middle East—as well as their thoughts on the next generation of XO laptops, including the foundation’s technical goals and commercial competition from netbooks.

While Negroponte and Kane painted an optimistic picture, pointing to the fact that the one millionth OLPC laptop will be deployed in the field in February, I found them candid about the hard lessons learned and challenges the organization faces. As Negroponte told me, his passion for the project and its importance is as strong as ever, but the foundation is at a turning point in its evolution and must focus better on where it can make big differences. “That’s the thing to keep in mind, and to make sure we don’t just perpetuate ourselves for perpetuation’s sake if some aspects of OLPC have run their course—and to recognize that and not try to be an incrementalist.”

The most vivid example of this philosophy, to me, was Negroponte’s comparison of the XO and netbooks. XOs cost about $225 apiece. Netbooks, which are produced by companies like Acer and Lenovo, among others, run about $300 to $450 but offer more memory and graphics power and larger screens. So, one could ask, won’t the normal, cost-curve-squashing evolution of computers obviate what OLPC is trying to do, and more efficiently than a non-profit? Negroponte replies that OLPC is not trying to compete with commercial computer makers but instead asking, “What are the things the normal commercial market won’t be pushing?”

In the case of netbooks, he says, “You could arguably say we really created the netbook market. But if you look at the netbooks, they really copied the easy part. They didn’t copy low power, they didn’t copy mesh networks, they didn’t copy sunlight-readable displays. All three things are absent from every single netbook.”

To understand the points Negroponte ticked off, recall that XO laptops operate on very low power, which can be generated by pulling on a cord that plugs into the computer—a valuable feature in places where people pay by the minute for electricity, or electricity is unreliable. “You’ve got to be in the two-watt regime in order for it to be something you can power by hand,” Negroponte says. Netbooks, by contrast, require more like 20 watts, he says.

OLPC laptops are also able to link together into wireless mesh networks that can easily pass data between computers, and include displays that can be read in glaring sunlight—again, features incredibly useful in developing nations and things Negroponte says the commercial market really isn’t focused on.

But we’re getting slightly ahead of the story. Before diving into the technology or future plans for OLPC, we started with what went wrong.

Give None, Get None

The G1G1 effort was crafted to spur consumers in developed nations to buy XO laptops for schoolchildren in emerging nations. Consumers could buy one, which would be sent to a school of OLPC’s choosing, and then get another laptop to keep or send wherever they wanted. In the 2007 holiday season, Negroponte told me, the program … Next Page »

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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, the great dream of MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte to bring low-cost, educational computing to children in the world’s developing nations and beyond, announced today a major layoff and refocusing of its mission.

Only 32 staff will remain, about half the current number, according to Negroponte’s post on the OLPC blog. The OLPC founder also laid out a series of new technology initiatives that include development of a second generation of computers, a “no-cost connectivity program,” “a million digital books,” and turning over development of OLPC’s original Suger Operating System to the open source community. “Separately,” Negroponte wrote, “OLPC will be dedicated to bringing the cost of the laptop down to Zero for the Least Developed Countries — the $0 Laptop.”

It’s a sad, but not unexpected, turning point for one of the great humanitarian visions of the last decade. OLPC has struggled with departures of top staff, difficulty in achieving sales, defection of key sponsors, and claims that it was mismanaged, among other challenges. At the same time, it is clear to me that Negroponte’s vision inspired many people around the world—and focused far greater attention on educational initiatives in developing nations than there would ever have been otherwise.

And the story is not over, as Negroponte’s post, which also describes a new focus on deploying computers to the Middle East, Afghanistan, and parts of Pakistan, makes clear. We’ll try to find out more in the coming days, but here is Negroponte’s post on the OLPC blog:

Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources. Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries. We thank team members who are departing for their contributions to this important mission.

This restructuring is also the result of an exciting new direction for OLPC. Our technology initiatives will focus on:

1. Development of Generation 2.0
2. A no-cost connectivity program
3. A million digital books
4. Passing on the development of the Sugar Operating System to the community.

With regard to deployments:

1. Latin America will be spun off into a separate support unit
2. Sub-Saharan Africa will become a major learning hub
3. The Middle East, Afghanistan and Northwestern Pakistan will become
a major focus

Separately, OLPC will be dedicated to bringing the cost of the laptop down to Zero for the Least Developed Countries — the $0 Laptop.

Restructuring brings with it pain for some of our friends and colleagues who are being let go. These are people who have dedicated themselves to the advancement of a noble cause, and to say that we are exceeding grateful for the time, the ideas, the energy and the commitment they have given OLPC does not — cannot — adequately express our admiration or our gratitude. The fact that there are 500,000 children around the world who have laptops is testament to their extraordinary work and is already a key part of OLPC’s legacy.

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. I hope that each one of you will remain supportive of OLPC, and its mission of opening up a universe of knowledge to the world’s poorest children living in the most remote parts of the Earth.

— Nicholas Negroponte

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It’s an unofficial tradition in my family to spend the last few days of the year—often New Year’s Eve itself, I’m embarrassed to admit—deciding what charities we’d like to support before the tax-deduction clock resets for another year. So for any of you who are thinking along the same lines this week, and who are fortunate enough to be able to do a little giving at the end of what’s been such a tough year for so many, I thought I would mention a few causes near to Xconomy’s heart. These are all local organizations that are helping give kids and other folks access to the scientific and technological skills and tools they need to participate in the innovation community. The list is by no means exhaustive, and your additions to it are welcome; just post a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

Computer Clubhouse
Established via a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Boston’s Computer Museum (which is now part of the Museum of Science), the Computer Clubhouse is a free, safe after-school environment where kids can get access to not only computers but a host of other cool technology and adult mentorship. With support from Intel, the original model has been replicated at 100 locations around the world.

East End House
The East End House’s broad range of services includes free computer classes and an after-school program that, with help from local biotech firms, aims to bolster kids’ understanding of science and their interest in pursuing it as a career.

FIRST Robotics
This is the local outpost of Dean Kamen’s program aimed at encouraging middle and high school students to pursue science and engineering. The program is centered on a giant international robotics competition; the next Boston regional contest will be March 6th and 7th.

Freedom House
The Freedom House provides free access to its computer labs, as well as computer-skills training for seniors.

Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House
In addition to numerous other services, the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House offers free computer classes and free daily access to its computer lab.

One Laptop Per Child
Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and other veterans of the MIT Media Lab, OLPC wants to ensure that every school-aged child in the developing world has a networked laptop. There are several ways to contribute, including OLPC’s current Give One, Get One (G1G1) program, through which consumers can buy two laptops for $399. One of the computers will be shipped to a school of OLPC’s choice, the other to any recipient that the buyer chooses.

Science Club for Girls –
The name of this organization pretty much nails it—Science Club for Girls provides free after-school programs designed “to increase the self-confidence and science literacy of K-12th grade girls belonging to groups that are underrepresented in the sciences.” (Xconomy is putting its money where its mouth is on this one, by the way: Science Club for Girls is one of the organizations to which we’ll be donating part of the ticket proceeds from our upcoming Battle of the Tech Bands.)

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As the holidays approach, the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has revived its Give One, Get One program, designed to encourage consumers in industrialized nations to buy the foundation’s XO laptops for schoolchildren in the developing world while also securing one for a child in their own family. The foundation, which is relying on Seattle-based Amazon to distribute the laptops this year, has also introduced “Give 100″ and “Give 1000″ programs that, for the first time, enable major donors to specify where they want laptops to be distributed—and it has commissioned a series of slick video advertisements to promote the giving programs.

Under the Give One, Get One (G1G1) program, consumers can buy two laptops for $399. One will be shipped to a school of OLPC’s choice, and the other to any recipient of the buyer’s choice. Part of the purchase price is tax-deductible—though OLPC says buyers should consult their accountants to figure out how much.

The Give 100 and Give 1000 programs are a bit different. By giving 100 or more laptops for $219 apiece, donors can direct which schools within OLPC’s partner countries or any of the world’s 50 least developed countries should receive the machines. By paying $259 per laptop, donors can have the machines sent anywhere in the world. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announced in November that he is donating 1,500 XO laptops through the program for children in Uganda.

In an effort to grasp potential donors’ heartstrings, OLPC recently unveiled a series of video ads promoting the Give One, Get One program. One features an adorable African kid named Zimi who says: “I come from a place you’ve never heard of, a country that you can not pronounce, a continent you would rather forget. Our only problem is access to education, with education we will solve our own problems. To the person who gave me this XO laptop; thank you. You have changed my world.”

Another ad is slightly more controversial. As the alphabet song plays on a toy piano in the background, the video shows young children who have been recruited to labor as weavers, shoeshines, miners, sex workers, and maching-gun-toting soldiers. “Children are fast learners,” the ad says, as it closes on a scene of children using XO laptops in a sunlit classroom. “Let’s give them the right tools.” (We’ve embedded the ad below.)

To make sure that the second go-around of the Give One, Get One program goes more smoothly than the 2007-2008 version, when many orders were lost and some laptops were not delivered to purchasers until months after the holidays, OLPC recruited Amazon to handle online sales and fulfillment. Amazon’s G1G1 page says laptops are in stock and can be delivered by Christas Eve as long as they’re by Monday, December 22.

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Everybody should be back from vacation, and the deal flow surging—but someone forgot to tell the dealmakers, as the past week was pretty light for Seattle tech and life sciences action.

—In a deal worth approximately $131 million, Bellevue, WA-based Captaris (NASDAQ: CAPA), which makes business and documents management software, announced it is being acquired by Open Text, a business-software company based in Waterloo, Ontario.

—Tableau Software, a Seattle maker of data visualization tools, announced it has raised a $10 million Series B round from New Enterprise Associates. The funds will be used to expand the sales and product lines of Tableau, which is already profitable and selling its software to customers like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo.

—Bothell, WA-based biotech company Acucela partnered with Tokyo-based Otsuka Pharmaceutical to develop ACU-4429, its lead drug candidate for the “dry” form of macular degeneration, the top cause of blindness among the elderly. Under the deal, Acucela will receive $5 million up front, and potential milestone payments worth $258 million, with the companies divvying up expenses and profits around the world should ACU-4429 get to market.

—Seattle biotech ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) agreed to hand over its rights to atacicept—its leading drug candidate for autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis—to its partner, Merck KGaA. Darmstadt, Germany-based Merck, which will now have 100 percent of the worldwide commercial rights to the drug, will pay for all of atacicept ‘s development costs, potentially saving ZymoGenetics more than $200 million over the next several years as the drug advances through the last stages of clinical trials.

—Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY), a Seattle biotech company developing drugs against cancer, said it will sell 5.1 million additional shares of stock in the second week of September. The company plans to use the proceeds to support clinical trials of two of its drugs in development, PX-478 and PX-866, and seek a partner to further develop another drug, PX-12.

—Amazon is teaming up with Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The “Give One, Get One” program offered by OLPC last holiday season gave U.S. and Canadian consumers the opportunity to buy two XO laptops for $400: one for themselves, the other for a child in a developing country. But the implementation, as Wade noted, “was a fiasco.” This holiday season, OLPC plans to repeat the offer—but it’s put Amazon in charge. If any company can fulfill orders during the holidays, it’s Amazon.

—It wasn’t about one particular deal, but a host of them, past and future, as Greg got the lowdown on why the Seattle startup community wants Bay Area VCs to spend more time in Seattle. (Hint: it might not just be the money.)

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Summer’s over, school’s back in session, and the deals were jumping in just about every sector as September got underway.

—IRobot announced co-founder Rod Brooks was stepping down as the company’s CTO (but remaining on the board of directors) to devote full time to his new company, Heartland Robotics. Cambridge, MA-based Heartland will focus on developing industrial and workplace robots to “rehumanize and revitalize” U.S. manufacturing, according to its website. Brooks, Heartland’s chairman and CTO, and CEO Ken Zolot (both Xconomists) gave Xconomy the scoop that they had closed a Series A funding round and licensed core technology from MIT. Brooks also took a leave from his MIT professorship.

—Waltham, MA-based Phase Forward (NASDAQ: PFWD), which develops software that large pharmaceutical companies and research institutions employ to manage the vast amounts of data generated by clinical drug trials, paid $40 million for Clarix, a Pennsylvania maker of phone- and Web-based interactive voice response systems used to help manage supplies for drug trials.

—The “Give One, Get One” program offered by Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation last holiday season gave U.S. and Canadian consumers the opportunity to buy two XO laptops for $400: one for themselves, the other for a child in a developing country. But the implementation, as Wade noted, “was a fiasco.” Some orders weren’t filled until March, while others were lost. This holiday season, OLPC plans to repeat the offer—but it’s put Amazon in charge. If any company knows how to fulfill orders during the holidays, it’s Amazon.

—Ryan broke the news on Wednesday that the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, which is focused on genomic research, was receiving a $400 million endowment from its founding benefactors Eli and Edythe Broad. The institute—originally structured as an administrative unit of MIT—also quietly announced it is revamping itself as a stand-alone nonprofit, with an independent board of directors and other major organizational differences from its first incarnation.

—In addition to Brooks stepping down as CTO, Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced it had been awarded a U.S. Army contract for military robots, spare parts, training, and repair services that could total $200 million over the next 5 years. Chairman Helen Greiner told Wade that in addition to the Packbot robots already employed in the Middle East, the contract could include next-generation “SUGVs,” or small unmanned ground vehicles, which iRobot is developing in partnership with the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.

—Merrimack, NH-based maker of equipment for manufacturing photovoltaic cells GT Solar (NASDAQ: SOLR) confirmed that it had won a $173 million contract (its CEO had previously called it a $177 million deal) to supply polysilicon reactors to DC Chemical of South Korea. GT Solar went public on July 24.

—Perhaps inspired by GT Solar’s successful IPO, Essex, CT-based wind power firm Noble Environmental Power set the size of its planned IPO at 23.4 million shares. The company  hasn’t yet specified a price for the shares, but when it originally filed for the offering back in May, it set a maximum target of $375 million.

—MIT spinoff Hepregen, which is working on a way to screen drugs in development for liver toxicity, raised $3 million out of a $5 million first round of venture capital. Investors include Battelle Ventures and Innovation Valley Partners.

—Teradyne (NYSE: TER), the North Reading, MA-based maker of electronics testing equipment agreed to pay roughly $250 million ($15.65 a share) to acquire Eagle Test Systems (NASDAQ: EGLT). Illinois-based Eagle makes analog, mixed-signal, and radio frequency semiconductor test products.

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