[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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The “Give One, Get One” program introduced last holiday season by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation—which gave consumers in the United States and Canada the opportunity to buy two of the foundation’s XO laptops for $400, and have one sent to a child in a developing nation—was a success in several respects. It generated public excitement about the XO by giving the general public its first chance to buy the machine; it created more orders for the laptop, improving the economies of scale involved in its manufacture; and, of course, it meant that more children received laptops (100,000 more, according to the foundation).

But judged by the standards of most commercial consumer-electronics rollouts, the “G1G1″ program was a fiasco. The foundation didn’t have enough staff to respond the tens of thousands of orders that started rolling in as soon as the program launched. The company it hired to manage fulfillment, Miami-based Brightstar, lost thousands of customer addresses through computer glitches. Many customers—some of whom had planned to give the XO to their own children, grandchildren, neices, or nephews as holiday presents—didn’t receive their laptops until March.

Now OLPC says it plans to repeat the offer for the 2008 holidays—but this time, Amazon will be in charge.

IDG News Service broke the news on Wednesday, after speaking with an OLPC regional director who said the XO will be available from the Seattle-based e-retail giant starting around Thanksgiving. The director, Matt Keller, who runs the foundation’s operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said the foundation is still too small (with only 25 core staff) to handle such a large program on its own.

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spoke with OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte for a story published today that says the switch to Amazon should eliminate last year’s delivery problems. “Many things in the last G1G1 did not run as smoothly as we would have hoped,” Negroponte told the Globe. “Those things, mostly related to fulfillment, by their nature, are what Amazon can fix.” But Negroponte didn’t share additional information, saying Amazon would announce the details of the program when it’s ready.

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Wade Roush wrote:

The department (or state) of Caldas in central Colombia has signed an agreement to purchase 65,000 XO laptops for public-school children, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation announced today. It’s the third largest single order received by OLPC, behind Peru’s purchase of 270,000 machines last December and Uruguay’s order of 100,000 last October.

Caldas, a small, mountainous state with a population of just over a million, is one of three Colombian departments covering the Paisa region, where most Colombian coffee is grown. It’s the first state in Colombia to buy into OLPC’s educational mission, which is built around low-cost computers carrying software that enables collaborative learning and experimentation.

“My government and our state legislators are fully committed to giving each and every child of primary school age the same opportunity to access knowledge as the most privileged children in New York, Berlin or Tokyo,” Caldas Governor Mario Aristizabal said in a statement about the purchase. “The One Laptop per Child program is the right vehicle to reach that goal and its potential socioeconomic impact cannot be underemphasized.”

OLPC says the laptops will be reserved for children in small towns and rural areas in Caldas, with 15,000 machines to be delivered this year and 50,000 in 2009. The government is discussing a separate purchase to cover the capital city of Manizales.

“OLPC is now gaining good traction in signing up countries to undertake significant deployments,” said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte. To bring down the unit cost of manufacturing the XO, the foundation needs to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of the devices. But it’s had to scramble for orders in recent months as big commitments from countries such as Nigeria, Thailand, and Brazil failed to materialize into purchases.

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I’m “live blogging” from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s day-long media event at the MIT Media Lab. The big news is that OLPC founder Nicholas Negrponte has just unveiled the design for the foundation’s second-generation laptop, which isn’t really a laptop at all but a double-screened, fold-up electronic book.

Below are five shots of Negroponte’s presentation taken with my iPhone. [Update 4:15 pm 5/20/08: And below those are three high-resolution images that OLPC sent out to the media after the presentation.]

Negroponte says the cost of this 2nd-generation device, which uses dual-touch screens with 16:9 aspect ratios, will be kept to $75. (Compare that to the $188 cost of the foundation’s current first-generation XO laptop.) Costs will be kept down in part by using screens built for portable DVD players, which are rapidly coming down in price, Negroponte says. “The reason you can have the audacity to do this is that the 16:9 displays on DVD players are so inexpensive that to anticipate them costing $20 each is not out of the question,” he says.

The book-like design of the device “comes from something we’ve learned over the past couple of years—that the book experience is key,” Negroponte said during his presentation this morning. “Some people have asked me why not just give kids cell phones? And in fact there will be 1.2 billion cell phones manufactured this year, and cell phones are of huge consequence in the developing world—but the cell phone is not a learning device. The next generation laptop should be a book.”

Negroponte said the foundation plans to bring out the second-generation device by 2010. By that time, he added, the cost of the original XO Laptop will also have been brought below $100.

Click on the images below to see larger versions.

UPDATE 4:15 pm 05/20/08

Okay, we’ve got the official high-res versions of three of the XO 2.0 images now. As before, click on the thumbnails below for larger versions.

Addendum 4:30 pm 5/20/08

I’m back at the office, and wanted to add a few more details.

In a press release issued shortly after Negroponte’s presentation, OLPC said that key goals for the so-called XO-2 computer include the aforementioned $75 price tag; power consumption of 1 watt, reducing the amount of time required for children in unelectrified areas to generate power manually; a smaller footprint (the XO-2 is about half the size of the XO) so that the device is easier to carry to and from school; and an “enhanced book experience” that resembles the right and left pages of a book in vertical format, a laptop in hinged horizontal format, and a flat continuous tablet in flat two-screen format.

The dual touchscreen display is being designed by Pixel Qi, the hardware design firm founded by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen.

OLPC also said that a new version of the original XO laptop, called XO-1.5, will be released in the spring of 2009 “with the same design as the first generation but with fewer physical parts and at a lower cost than XO-1.”

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Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation have reached an official agreement to produce versions of the foundation’s XO Laptop that run Windows XP.

The move is intended in part to overcome resistance to the XO among bureaucrats in countries where OLPC would like to distribute the laptop. “The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told the New York Times today. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows” than with the XO Laptop’s current operating software, a variant of the open-source Linux operating system that supports a learning-oriented graphical interface called Sugar.

The Windows announcement will likely add fuel to the increasingly public debate among some of the leading minds behind the XO over whether open-source software is fundamental to the foundation’s mission to provide the world’s children with technology that facilitates learning. The division has led to the departures of at least two high-profile staffers in recent weeks, including former software president Walter Bender and former director of security architecture Ivan Krstić.

In an interview with Xconomy three weeks ago, Bender, Sugar’s lead architect, criticized Negroponte’s budding alliance with Microsoft as a sign that the foundation had abandoned its original mission to shake up the educational computing business.

“It’s a lot easier to cater to people’s comfort than to be disruptive,” Bender said. “Nicholas had that wonderful quote in BusinessWeek about a month ago—that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft. If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that’s a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers. Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them.”

In a bitter blog post published May 13, Krstić charges that Negroponte’s deal with Microsoft shows that that he is uninterested in education, and simply wants to sell more laptops. “I quit when Nicholas told me—and not just me—that learning was never part of the mission,” Krstić writes. “The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there.”

At the same time, Krstić says that he is not opposed to the idea of a Windows version of the XO, as long it’s not the only operating system available for the device. According to the Times, OLPC’s agreement with Microsoft is non-exclusive, and there will continue to be a Linux-Sugar version of the XO, as well as a dual-boot version (though this will add roughly $7 to the price of the $200 machine).

Update 5/15/08 7:25 p.m.: Microsoft has just published a press release on the OLPC agreement. The release states that “trials of the XO running Windows are planned to begin as soon as June in key emerging markets.” Negroponte is quoted in the release as follows: “From the beginning, the goal of OLPC has been to use technology to transform education by bringing connectivity and constructionist learning to the poorest children throughout the world. Today’s announcement, coupled with future plans for a dual boot version of the XO laptop, enhances our ability to deliver on this vision. In addition, OLPC will work with third parties to port its user interface, called ‘Sugar,’ to Windows.”

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Walter Bender, the former president of software and content for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, says he left his post last week because of a growing split with founder Nicholas Negroponte over whether the foundation should continue in its gadfly role in the computing world.

Negroponte—who told BusinessWeek in March that OLPC has been operating for too long “almost like a terrorist group” and that it needs to be managed “more like Microsoft”—recently reassigned Bender, his longtime lieutenant at OLPC and at the MIT Media Lab before that, to oversee deployment of the organization’s XO laptops to children in developing countries. But Bender—who led the development of the XO’s innovative graphical interface, called Sugar—resigned that post last week, and says now that he disagreed with Negroponte’s move to de-emphasize radical projects like Sugar and to work more closely with the mainstream computing industry, including Microsoft, which is readying a version of Windows XP that runs on the XO.

“If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers,” Bender told Xconomy in an interview Thursday. “Personally, I think that…a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion [within OLPC], so I left to do my own thing.”

It’s not the first big management change at OLPC. Former CTO Mary Lou Jepsen departed in January to create her own startup, Pixel Qi, which will commercialize energy-saving screen designs and other technologies she originally created for the XO. And Negroponte himself wants to relinquish the administrative reigns at OLPC and take on a more visionary, thought-leader role; he told BusinessWeek that he’s searching for a CEO to handle the foundation’s day-to-day management details.

From one perspective, the changes aren’t surprising. Despite Negroponte’s lofty goal of distributing millions of cheap laptops to students in areas where schools have little access to information technology, OLPC has always been structured far more like a university research project than a laptop manufacturer. “Most of the people in these offices are not qualified by their experience to make that transition” from working outside the computer-industry establishment to actually delivering millions of laptops, Negroponte told us in a January interview. The XO was, in effect, a giant proof-of-concept project—and the fact that the foundation managed to shepherd it through to mass production and then deliver several hundred thousand of the devices to countries like Peru and Uruguay is a testament to the skills and energy of the people Negroponte assembled for the task, including Jepsen and Bender.

But now that concept has been proved, whether or not distribution of XO laptops ever reaches into the millions that Negroponte originally envisioned. And it’s looking as if the project’s biggest legacy may be the individual technologies that had to be invented to make the XO work—many of which, like Jepsen’s screen designs and Bender’s Sugar interface, will now evolve separately.

For Sugar, in fact, Bender’s departure from OLPC is likely to mark more of a beginning than an end. The interface, which is designed around constructionist theories of interactive learning, is available under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL) to anyone who wants to extend it—and Bender says that’s exactly what he hopes to do. Though his plans are still forming, Bender says he wants to find a new central home for the community of educators and software developers who have been creating Sugar-compatible applications. One of the first jobs will be to create versions of Sugar that run on multiple operating systems, meaning the interface could soon turn up on machines other than the XO.

Bender views Sugar as one of the forces unleashed by OLPC that are upsetting the way software developers and computer-makers think about the education market. But he believes it will take a combination of strong leadership and community collaboration to make sure the ideals of freedom, sharing, open critique, and transparency that are built into the Sugar interface actually touch children in the world’s classrooms.

Here’s the full transcript of our interview with Bender.

Xconomy: What are you going to do now that you’ve left the One Laptop foundation?

Walter Bender: I’m going to try to make the work I’ve been doing more broadly applicable. The possibilities, I think, are enormous. I can’t be agnostic about learning. I think we need to try to skew the odds toward children and teachers appropriating knowledge and putting it to use and engaging in critical dialogue. That is not just going to …Next Page »

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If you aren’t on a schedule, you can’t be late.

That was the gist of a conversation I had last night with Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer at the One Laptop Per Child organization here in Cambridge. Jepsen says that a Reuters report yesterday asserting that production delays will cause the organization to miss promised delivery dates for its famous (to some infamous) XO-1 Laptop was misleading.

Jepsen says it’s true, as the story suggested, that final assembly of the first batch of mass-produced laptop—to begin soon at a recently expanded Quanta Computer factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai—was originally envisioned to begin in October, and will now start sometime in November. But neither the One Laptop organization nor Quanta ever claimed that production would be begin on a set day—so it’s a stretch to call the situation a “production delay.” Says Jepsen, “I think we had hoped to start mass production in October, but we were never focused on starting on a certain date. We’ve always just wanted to make the product as good as we can…I am certainly not aware of any promises that we are going to miss.”

And while Jepsen says she’s happy that audiences are so interested in the details of the One Laptop project, she points out that the One Laptop organization doesn’t work like a traditional manufacturing company, with detailed business plans or Gantt charts showing the dependencies between each part of the project. “It’s much looser and more collaborative, kind of in the spirit of the open-source movement—and yet I’ve never worked at a company where things have come together more smoothly,” she says. “Everyone thought this was impossible three years ago.”

Jepsen’s explanation may sound like spin, and the grandiose claims occasionally made about the “$100 laptop” by the project’s founder, former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, have certainly amounted to an open invitation to the project’s skeptics. But given the unprecedented scale of what the non-profit organization is attempting—distributing laptops to tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s children—small shifts in the organization’s timeline seem insignificant, especially when placed beside the years-long delays seen in some commercial products like Windows Vista.

Some of the criticism leveled at the the One Laptop project since its January 2005 launch has been more serious. Skeptical observers have said that the device will be underpowered, that it will always cost more than Negroponte predicted (indeed, the current projected cost per laptop is around $200), and that the project duplicates efforts already underway in countries such as India to create cheap, mobile computing devices. Some governments have resisted the very idea of spending precious education funds on gadgets, while others have failed to follow through on commitments to purchase the machines.

A “buy one, give one” plan that will allow individuals to purchase an XO-1 laptop for themselves while donating another for distribution in a developing country, planned to begin November 12, has been perceived as a sign that national governments aren’t signing up to buy enough of the devices to allow the organization to reach efficiencies of scale in manufacturing. And the Boston Globe reports today that in a search for more paying customers, the organization is now appealing to wealthy individuals and corporations to help pick up the tab.

But none of those bumps seem to faze Jepsen. She says she’s had her “head down” for months focusing on the XO-1’s technical details and is preparing to leave for China on Saturday to oversee the beginning of the laptops’ final assembly from the thousands of components, such as motherboards, screens, and antennas (the device’s distinctive “ears”), that have already been manufactured. “We are still making changes to the ears, and I’m still waiting to hear how one little spring came out,” Jepsen says. “There are hundreds of little things you have to do. But none of that is really delaying it.”

“What is mass production, anyway?” asks Jepsen. “Is it when you put together the motherboards, or is it when the operators on the line screw together the plastic parts on a conveyor belt? You can say that that’s when it really becomes a laptop—but we designed it so that five-year-old kids in Nigeria can screw it together. In a way, the work is already largely done.” Jepsen points out that Quanta, the world’s largest laptop manufacturer, recently doubled the size of its Changshu manufacturing plant so that it could begin production of the XO-1, which will be the first product off the new lines.

Jepsen says she was surprised by the complaining tone that spread across the blogosphere yesterday in response to the Reuters story about the supposed delays. “On some level I’d just like to say to everyone, ‘Chill,’” she says. “But on the other hand, it’s clear that people are really interested in the process, and in learning about how a laptop is manufactured.”

The amount of information available about the XO-1’s design, production, and testing is already unprecedented; some 4,500 bugs are publicly viewable through the organization’s bug tracker, for example. But Jepsen says she’s inspired by all the attention on the production schedule to think about more ways to open the project to the public. “Maybe we should explain even more about what happens,” Jepsen says. “You never hear about when the new iPod starts its mass production at various factories; you only hear about when it’s going to show up in stores. But I guess I should send out a ‘Hello World’ the day we start mass production.”

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While we were up to our ears in court documents from iRobot and Genzyme, a whole lot of other stuff was happening in New England technology circles.

—With a vote on its proposed $6.2 billion acquisition of Marlborough, MA’s Cytyc (NASDAQ: CYCT) slated for this Thursday, Bedford-based diagnostics and imaging firm Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX) is being sued by Johnson & Johnson for patent infringement related to a biopsy system manufactured by Hologic subsidiary Suros Surgical Systems. In an SEC filing, Hologic says it believes the suit to be without merit.

—Following on the heels of a $45 million financing round, Lowell, MA’s Konarka Technologies, which makes nanotech-based solar materials, announced it had received funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program to develop transparent, flexible solar modules for building applications such as windows. The award, worth $4.7 million, will be shared with Lehigh Valley, PA-based Air Products & Chemicals (NYSE:APD).

—With cash from a recently closed $13.1 million Series B round presumably in hand, medical device firm WMR Biomedical is moving its headquarters from Cambridge to a larger space on Arsenal Street in Watertown.

—The One Laptop Per Child project has chosen Miami-based Brightstar as the distributor for its “Give 1, Get 1″ program. Slated for two weeks starting November 12, the program will allow consumers to pay $399 for two of OLPC’s XO laptops—one to keep and one for a child in a developing country.

—After a series of downsizings and a move from Boston to Wellesley Hills, MA, Point Therapeutics (NASDAQ: POTP) has agreed to merge with privately held Dara BioSciences of Raleigh, NC. Under the terms of the agreement, which the firms believe will qualify as a “reverse merger” (in other words, a way for Dara to go public without doing an IPO), Dara stockholders will own 96.4% of Point’s common stock, and Point will change its name to Dara BioSciences and move its headquarters to Raleigh.

—Cambridge, MA-based CombinatoRx (NASDAQ: CRXX), which completed a $42 million IPO in November, 2005, announced that it will sell another $35 million of stock in a registered direct offering that’s expected to close on Tuesday.

—In venture news, Littleton MA-based radiotherapy-technology firm Still River Systems garnered “around $6.9 million” in a Series C round, peHub’s Dan Primack reports. Also from Primack comes the news that E Ink of Cambridge has raised $16 million in Series B financing, for a total of more than $130 million venture dollars raised since 1997. (Is that one incredibly long A round, or has E Ink found some letters between A and B that I don’t know about?) Boston’s Octavian, which develops software for the wealth and investment management market, closed a $10 million second round from Vertex Venture Capital, which led the deal, and Carmel Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds. Warren, RI’s TPI Composites, a manufacture of structures for the wind energy, transportation, and military vehicles, took in $22 million in a Series A deal led by NGP Energy Technology Partners.

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With early orders, principally from governments in developing nations, for its lime-green, crank-powered, and low-cost XO laptop computer running short of what’s needed to trigger mass production, the One Laptop Per Child project is today kicking off two initiatives that will allow paying consumers to purchase machines for the benefit of children in its target countries.

Originally envisioned as the $100 laptop, the XO now costs about $188. But starting today, consumers can purchase a machine for $200, and donate it to a child in a developing nation. To do so, go to XOgiving.org and click the “Donate” button.

The same website has details of the second announcement—called “Give 1, Get 1.” Under this program, which runs for two weeks beginning on November 12, consumers in Canada and the U.S. will be able to buy two XOs for $399—one to keep and one that will be donated to a deserving child.

The Boston Globe has a lot of details about the project and its evolution. It cites Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the $100 laptop initiative, as acknowledging that the project has not reached the 3 million initial orders that he had previously projected would be needed to kick off mass production.

“There’s a much bigger gulf between a handshake with a head of state and a real check coming out of the treasury,” Negroponte told the Globe. “You could argue I could have been more realistic in the beginning, but if I had, I would never have done this.”

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Last week left us with lots to talk about, so let’s get right to it.

—In venture news, RFID infrastructure firm Tagsys of Cambridge, MA, closed a $16 million second tranche of a Series C round totaling $35 million. Investors included J.P. Morgan, DFJ Esprit, Endeavour, Elliott Associates, Saffron Hill Ventures, and Add Partners. Shelton, CT-based IT consulting firm CRI Technologies announced it had closed a $10 million Series A round; Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Sigma Partners led the deal. (CRI used some of the cash to acquire Computer Resolutions, a virtualization consulting firm.) Boston-area biotech startup OxyPlus raised $8 million from Index Ventures in a first round; the firm is developing treatments for cancer, heart failure, and diabetic retinopathy based on the regulation of the interaction between oxygen and hemoglobin. Cambridge-based HubSpot, which offers online marketing tools for people with better things to do, took in $5 million in a first venture round led by Cambridge neighbors General Catalyst. And Boston- and Palo Alto-based Globespan Capital Partners announced it has closed its fifth fund, worth $380 million. Unlike the firm’s previous funds, this one will be used to invest directly in Japanese technology companies, among others.

— It was a week of mixed news on the university endowment front. On Wednesday, MIT announced that its endowment grew by $1.6 billion, to a total of $9.98 billion, during the fiscal year that ended June 30—thanks in large part to a healthy 22.1 percent investment return for the year. The news didn’t get a lot of play, however, perhaps because people were still buzzing about Harvard’s announcement the day before that the investment manager who helped grow its endowment to $34.9 billion—Mohamed A. El-Erian—will be stepping down after less than two years. Harvard’s less-than-enlightening announcement about El-Erian’s resignation is here.

—Waltham-based Repligen (NASDAQ: RGEN) and MIT accepted a $65 million settlement from ImClone Systems (NASDAQ: IMCL), against which they had filed suit in 2004 for patent infringement related to the sale of the cancer drug Erbitux. Repligen said that it planned to put its $40 million share of the settlement toward expanding its bioprocessing business and its central-nervous-system product pipeline. The market seemed to think Repligen got the short end of the stick: the firm closed the week at $4.29, down from Monday’s open of $4.90. (ImClone closed at $39.02, up from $36.98.)

—In M&A news, Norwood, MA’s Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI) agreed to sell its Othello radio and SoftFone baseband chipset operations to Taiwan’s MediaTek for some $350 million in cash; the Norwood firm said it will continue to address the wireless handset market by focusing on enhancing audio, video, connectivity, and power efficiency. Andover, MA-based NaviSite (NASDAQ: NAVI) announced it will acquire Virginia applications management services provider netASPx for $40.5 million in cash and stock. And acquisition-addicted diagnostics maker Inverness Medical Innovations (Amex: IMA) of Waltham completed its purchase of Hayward, CA’s Cholestech—the eighth company Inverness has acquired this year.

—Harvard Medical School and Merck announced that they have forged a cooperative research agreement to focus on oncology and central nervous system disorders. The announcement indicated that six Harvard labs will get funding through the deal, though it didn’t disclose more specific financial terms, and pointed out that the medical school is within walking distance of Merck’s research labs.

—In nearby Allston, MA, Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) is gearing up for a ground-breaking ceremony slated for Tuesday morning to celebrate the $150-million expansion of its existing manufacturing plant. The plant produces several of Genzyme’s drugs, including Myozyme, a treatment for the inherited muscle disorder Pompe disease; Genzyme is currently awaiting FDA approval to sell Myozyme produced at the plant to U.S. customers.

—Finally, the week brought more bad news for the One Laptop Per Child project. The price tag on its “$100 laptop” jumped again, from $176 to $188. Meanwhile, production—which was supposed to begin this month—was delayed until November.

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I was just wandering around the web on this fine lazy summer Sunday, when I decided to check out the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, which I hadn’t visited in a while. I had missed two posts from less than two weeks ago containing Fake Steve’s thoughts on the One Laptop project, which is based right here in Kendall Square. This one’s called Let the train wreck begin. FSJ (as Fake Steve Jobs likes to call himself) followed up a bit later with another thought, in the aptly titled, Another thought on the OLPC machine.

I have to admit the pieces made me think a little deeper on OLPC—all while bringing numerous smiles to my face. My favorite line (from the follow-up): “To those who say I shouldn’t criticize OLPC, since Apple isn’t giving away hundred-dollar Macs to Third-World kids, let me explain. That’s not our job. That’s not what Apple is here for.”

Happy Sunday.

UPDATE: 8/05 8:46 pm. We just learned the Fake Steve Jobs was unmasked today by the New York Times. Great timing, we thought… It turns out he is Daniel Lyons, a senior editor for Forbes magazine who lives in the Boston area. Score one for home-town creativity.

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