Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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Boston has no place for “serious, venture-backed startups” to grow from five employees to 25 employees, akin to San Francisco’s RocketSpace, or New York City’s General Assembly, says Mark Kasdorf.

Enter Intrepid Labs, the co-working space he recently established in the former digs of another co-working space (Dogpatch Labs) at 222 Third Street near Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

Intrepid Labs comes as the answer to a problem Kasdorf himself was facing. His mobile development company Intrepid Pursuits started with three people in the co-working unit (C3) of the Cambridge Innovation Center around the spring of 2010. It grew pretty quickly to eight people, so was kicked out of the C3. The building gave them an attractive “transition” rate to move into the more grownup office space, says Kasdorf, but they outgrew that, too, hitting about 15 employees last fall.

“We had to get real office space, which was more expensive than we could afford as a bootstrapped consulting company,” Kasdorf says. “As we started digging into commercial real estate, we realized how bad it is for startups.”

The Boston area has its share of coffeehouse-style co-working spaces for pre-seed companies with a few employees, but nothing for the more mature (revenues, funded, five employees and up) crowd, says Kasdorf. Traditional office spaces require three-year leases, a time period in which a lot could change for a startup, says Kasdorf. They also require companies to get their own furniture, printers and scanner, and the like. “This whole litany of things that CIC had been offering to us became obvious, but it was still really expensive,” Kasdorf says

In October he started checking out other office space in The American Twine Office Park at 222 Third Street, and saw the vacant fourth floor. “We walk in here and I’m blown away,” he says. “Everything about it screams, ‘This would be a fun place to work.’”

Inspired by General Assembly, he signed a lease for three years, with the intent of creating a co-working space for growing startups like his. Kasdorf and his team moved in during November. While Intrepid Labs has the long lease it originally wanted to avoid, it’s subletting to other startups on a month-to-month basis. So what about that big expense? Kasdorf says it is pre-paying some of the rent, while the “landlord has taken a real interest in what we’re doing and is really flexible with us.”

For startup tenants, a dedicated desk costs … Next Page »

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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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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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A roomful of 850 business leaders and policy makers got some serious food for thought at yesterday’s annual “State of Technology” Luncheon in Seattle, organized by the Technology Alliance. The guest of honor was Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “disruptive innovation” in a series of bestselling business books starting with The Innovator’s Dilemma. It was fascinating to hear Christensen’s ideas and research lessons applied to everything from the steel industry and mainframe computing to the contemporary concerns of healthcare and education.

Before diving into Christensen’s talk, I first need to cover a few Seattle-area concerns. Speaking of the steel industry, Seattle-based Modumetal, a nanotech and advanced materials startup, was named “2010 company of the year” by the Alliance of Angels at the lunch. Modumetal has been getting an increasing amount of attention as it wins contracts and forms partnerships to integrate its nanomaterials into more mainstream applications like cars, jet engines, buildings, and bridges. (There is some debate about whether Modumetal fits with Christensen’s “disruptive” model—it might hinge on how the company handles its partnerships with potential competitors.)

Technology Alliance chair Jeremy Jaech, the CEO of Verdiem (and the co-founder of Aldus and Visio), gave an impassioned talk on the impact of the tech sector on Washington state’s economy and employment stats. For example, there were more than 380,000 tech jobs in the state as of the first half of 2009, which account for 13 percent of all jobs in Washington. What’s more, he said, those tech jobs support a total of 1.2 million jobs in fields like construction, recreation, and service industries—a whopping 42 percent of all employees. Jaech urged state leaders to do more to support education and to “stop treating the technology industry like Mount Rainier”—noticing it on sunny days and taking it for granted the rest of the time.

Then it was time for the keynote. Christensen’s recent interests have been in how to manage innovation in education and healthcare more effectively, and he went into some depth on these topics. First, he gave an overview of his “disruption” theory, which says, in a nutshell, that across a wide range of industries, successful startups have won not by creating breakthrough innovations, but by going to market with “a product that was simple and affordable,” gaining market share at the low end of cost and performance, and then gradually working their way up-market, while decentralizing access to their products. Conversely, the big, centralized incumbents have trouble dealing with such new entrants, but will usually crush adversaries who come in trying to be better than them and selling to their mainstream customers.

One example is the familiar historical progression in computing from mainframes to mini-computers to personal computers to laptops and mobile devices, Christensen said. (Mainframes actually still exist, but they have been marginalized.) His discussion of the steel industry since the 1970s—how cheaper, simpler mini-mills gradually displaced billion-dollar integrated mills—was particularly captivating. And some ongoing case studies include low-end automakers Hyundai, Kia, and Chery threatening the long-term future of Toyota and other incumbents.

Turning his attention to healthcare, Christensen said, “I had thought competition drives cost down. It turns out that’s not true. Sustaining competition among similar business models generally … 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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Sugar Labs, the Brookline, MA-based non-profit organization developing the Sugar educational operating environment originally designed for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO Laptop, has released a new version of Sugar on a Stick, an edition of the software that allows PC, netbook, or Mac users to boot directly into Sugar. The new version, called Blueberry, includes more educational programs, simplified toolbars, improved support for wireless networking, and improved support for EPUB-formatted e-books and Adobe Flash content, according to an announcement issued at the Netbook World Summit in Paris today. Sugar Labs also announced that Nexcopy, a company in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, that specializes in USB drive duplication, will be loading Blueberry onto used USB sticks so that Sugar Labs can distribute them to schools. More information about this recycling program is available at http://recycleusb.com.

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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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In a presentation at the Boston Book Festival last weekend, Jon Orwant, a Google engineer involved in the company’s Book Search project, made a memorable and, I thought, quite perceptive remark about the e-book business.

“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize them at all. Some of you may organize them based on the person who reads them—Mom’s books, Dad’s books, the kids’ books. Some may organize by subject or genre. I’ll tell you one way you don’t organize them: you don’t say, ‘Here are the books I bought from Barnes & Noble, here are the books I bought from Amazon, and here are the books that were given to me as gifts.’ We need to be very careful to make sure that we don’t create an environment in which digital books end up that way.”

What Orwant was talking about, of course, is the siloing going on in the nascent e-book industry—the fact that if you buy an e-book for your Amazon Kindle, you can’t read it on a competing e-book device such as Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or vice-versa. That’s because book publishers, who are understandably spooked by the music industry’s implosion, are worried about losing revenue if people can copy, transfer, and share their digital content too easily. It’s also because many of the companies getting into the e-book market aren’t happy just selling you a gadget or a couple of megabytes of digital content—they want you to buy into a whole ecosystem (i.e., the Kindle family of devices and the 360,000 books formatted for them, or the Nook and its claimed one million titles).

And so far that plan is working, at least on early adopters like me. I bought a Kindle 2 in May, and since then I’ve purchased about $120 worth of books for the device, plus subscriptions to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and multiple Sunday editions of the New York Times. All of this content is protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology that would prevent me from opening it on, say, a Nook or a Sony Reader device—and that quite likely will prevent me from reading my books 10 or 20 years down the road, when my Kindle will be dead or obsolete and reading technologies and content formats will undoubtedly be completely different. But those restrictions haven’t kept me from scarfing up more e-books: since I became a Kindle user I’ve bought about 20 Kindle editions and exactly four physical books (two that weren’t available as Kindle editions, and two that were gifts for other people).

But while I’m not particularly concerned about the fact that my Amazon e-books are tied to my Amazon hardware (hey, I’ve also bought hundreds of songs and videos from Apple’s iTunes Store that only play on my Apple MacBook and my Apple iPhone), a lot of people are more skeptical toward the Amazon model. As e-books gradually catch up to and surpass physical books as the main way many people access book-length content—which they will, mark my words—continued reliance on proprietary formats and DRM could wind up fragmenting our common literary inheritance in exactly the way that Orwant warned about.

But I have a feeling the story isn’t over, and that market pressures may eventually push all of the big players in the still-young e-book business toward a more open future. The day before the Boston Book Festival, I had a long conversation with Steve Haber, president of the Digital Reading Division at Sony, and I got an earful about … 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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I spent a couple of days this week at CHI, the big annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). It was the first time since 1994 that the conference—the main international gathering for scholars and practitioners in user interface design—has come to Boston. But it wasn’t the first time that a single company, namely Microsoft, has dominated the proceedings. Matching statistics from other recent CHI meetings, authors from Microsoft Research supplied nearly one out of eight papers presented at the conference, and researchers Ken Hinckley and Meredith Ringel Morris from MSR’s Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group in Redmond were co-chairs of the technical program.

I’m a sucker for this stuff, so I thought almost all of Microsoft’s 25 CHI papers were interesting. But two of the talks in particular, presented back-to-back on the closing day of the conference, contained enticing new ideas about how we might use computing devices in the future. One of them was Hinckley’s own paper on Codex, a prototype dual-screen computer system. The other was a paper by Patrick Baudisch on “back-of-device” interfaces, an intriguing alternative to today’s touch-screen-based devices.

Baudisch, a German native, is a former Xerox PARC researcher who joined Microsoft in 2002 and recently accepted a joint position at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany. One of the questions he’s been studying over the past few years is whether it’s feasible to move the main touch interface for small mobile devices (think phones, mini-tablet computers, iPods, Zunes, and the like) from the front—where your fingers occlude your view of the screen—to the back.

After all, the smaller devices get, the less screen real estate they’ll offer, and the larger the fraction of the screen that’s covered up by your finger when you try to manipulate it. “The scientific term for this is the fat finger problem,” Baudisch deadpanned during his talk.

If the touch-sensitive surface on a mobile device were on the back instead, gestures like pointing, tapping, and selecting wouldn’t get in the way of the screen. At least, that’s the idea. But that creates a new challenge—seeing where your finger is going. So Baudisch’s team has been experimenting with a variety of approaches, including using transparent screens (which, unfortunately, don’t leave room for the electronic guts of most devices) and attaching a boom with a camera to a device’s backside (which is predictably clunky).

Baudisch’s newest prototype, and the one he described yesterday, is called nanoTouch. It’s a squarish little gadget resembling an iPod nano, with a 2.4-inch screen that dominates the front and a capacative trackpad similar to the mousepad on a laptop computer attached to the back.

The nanoTouch is designed to be held by the edges in one hand while you operate the trackpad with the index finger of your other hand. The cleverest touch, so to speak, is that the device uses “pseudotransparency” to provide visual feedback—basically, the “cursor” is a life-size picture of a finger that tracks with the position of your actual finger, as if you were looking through the device with X-ray glasses.

It’s a nifty effect that neatly captures the concept of back-of-device interaction; the tip of the simulated finger even turns white when you press harder against the screen, as if the blood were rushing away from that spot. Baudisch’s nanoTouch demo provoked a little flurry of publicity back in December, with coverage by Engadget and New Scientist, among others (I’ve embedded a nanoTouch video from New Scientist below). But as Baudisch explained yesterday, the finger is just for show—it’s there to quickly train the user on what’s happening. “You never see the finger in an application,” he said. “For any real application, we reduce the touch to a single point—which is how we get the finger out of the equation and enable high precision.”

By masking the screen of the nanoTouch prototype and leaving less and less of the trackpad active, Baudisch’s group has been studying just how tiny manufacturers might be able to make future devices without sacrificing usability. They’ve found that as long as a target (meaning, say, an onscreen button) is more than about 3 millimeters across, it’s possible to accurately manipulate a device with a screen measuring as little as 8 millimeters diagonally—less than the size of the fingernail on your pinky.

Baudisch suggests that such devices might be made into pendants, wristbands, or belt buckles—all of which would surely be more fashionable than wearing your smartphone on a geeky belt holster. “Back-of-device interaction is the key to making extremely small pointing devices,” Baudisch concluded.

But while certain types of devices such as music players may keep shrinking (as this classic Saturday Night Live skit about the “iPod Invisa” predicted), we’ll probably still want to … Next Page »

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In February we ran an extensive interview with Walter Bender, the founder of Newton, MA-based Sugar Labs, about the latest version of Sugar, the education-oriented operating environment originally designed for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO Laptop. Today Sugar Labs announced that the new “0.84″ version of the free software, which includes a number of improvements designed to make classroom work easier, is available for download on its website, www.sugarlabs.org. “We’re excited about this release, which runs on more PCs than before and has great new Activities for kids to explore together such as a Mindmap Activity, a critical-thinking tool used to create diagrams representing words and ideas around a central keyword, and a Portfolio Activity, an assessment tool that makes it even simpler for teachers and parents to review a child’s progress,” Bender said in today’s announcement. A version of Sugar that comes installed on a USB memory stick, allowing it to run on almost any computer, is still in the works.

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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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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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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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Google has donated $300,000 to Oregon State University to build more capacity at its open source computing lab, which means the company has now given a total of $750,000 to the lab, the university said in a statement. The money will further the work of the university, which has already played a role in some of the largest open source computing projects, including the Mozilla Firefox browser, parts of the One Laptop Per Child project, and the Linux Foundation’s main infrastructure.

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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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