[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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Many people wouldn’t touch coffee or cereal without sugar. And the XO laptop would be useless without Sugar—the standard, Linux-based graphical interface for the little green laptop, nearly a million of which have been distributed to classrooms in developing countries by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

While OLPC and Microsoft have been talking for nearly a year about shipping XO laptops that run Windows XP rather than Linux and Sugar, that hasn’t yet happened. Which means Sugar and the XO are still cohabitating, despite the acrimonious divorce last year between OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and Sugar creator Walter Bender, the foundation’s former president of software. In fact, not only are Sugar and all the programs that come with it (”activities,” in Sugar lingo) still the keys to the XO laptop’s educational value, but they’re spreading beyond the XO to other platforms—and may well end up overshadowing the little laptop when it comes time to write the histories of technology and education in the developing world.

Bender came by Xconomy’s Cambridge office yesterday to give us the latest news about Sugar, whose development is now led by Sugar Labs, the non-profit, open source community he set up after leaving OLPC last April. Sugar Labs—which Bender says is based in “cyberspace,” though he himself works from his home office in Newton, MA—provides a forum for the global community of educators and volunteer developers that has sprung up to support and extend Sugar.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news from Sugar Labs is that Sugar is going portable: the community has created a version of the Linux-Sugar stack that can be copied to a so-called “Live USB” thumb drive, which can then be used to boot virtually any laptop or desktop PC into the Sugar environment. Bender calls it “Sugar on a Stick,” and he’s in discussions with USB drive manufacturers to create a branded version that would be available for sale from the Sugar Labs website (though you can also create your own version for free). The implications are big: separating Sugar from the XO means that any child or teacher, in Minneapolis or Mumbai, could take advantage of Sugar’s educational tools without having to wait for OLPC to find funding to get XO laptops into their schools.

And next month, Sugar itself is getting an upgrade, in the form of the next major release, called “Sucrose 0.84.” Bender says he and the Sugar community have built some major improvements into the new release, including a better system for storing and accessing saved work (the Sugar environment is built around an automatic diary called the Journal rather than old-fashioned files and folders); easier ways for users to edit the Python source code underlying Sugar activities; and a portfolio presentation tool designed to make it easier for students and teachers to engage in periodic critiques. As Bender explains, critiques of open-ended problem-solving work—as opposed to standardized testing of students’ performance on closed-form problems like arithmetic or vocabulary questions—are a big element in the constructionist educational philosophy from which Sugar grew.

When OLPC announced drastic staff cuts last month, the last two people who were being paid full-time to work on Sugar development lost their jobs. And Sugar Labs has yet to raise the money Bender says it needs to bring the community together for more face-to-face brainstorming and software critiques. But overall, it sounds like the split between OLPC and the Sugar community may end up being a healthy one, with each platform now free to develop in its own direction. Indeed, Bender says “a lot of people have actually come forward now [to help with Sugar] because they see a cleaner separation between the two organizations.”

Certainly, “Sugar on a Stick”—or on a netbook, or another low-cost laptop like the ASUS Eee PC—could help the software find its way into classrooms around the world much faster than OLPC is able to build and distribute XOs. And if there’s one thing Negroponte and Bender agree about, it’s that the One Laptop effort is about learning, not about hardware.

An edited version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Thanks for coming by. So, where are you with Sugar?

Walter Bender: [Holding up a USB thumb drive] This is where we are. Live USB is going to be a really big part of Sugar in the next year or two, because it’s an easy way in the door. Most schools’ IT departments don’t even let teachers install software. The overhead associated with large IT infrastructures forces these people to be very conservative about adopting new ideas. So having Sugar on a stick means we can hand this to a teacher or a student and they don’t have to have any impact on the existing infrastructure at all. They can be off to the races using Sugar and all its advantages, in a computer lab, a classroom, at the library, at home, on their parent’s computer, at an Internet cafe—wherever they can get a computer that they can boot off a USB, which is most computers these days. Everything is stored on the USB, so essentially, your schoolwork walks around with you, in the form of your journal. We think it’s going to really make Sugar a lot more accessible.

X: It sounds like “Sugar on a Stick” lets you pretend you’re using an XO laptop, without actually having one.

WB: You get all the advantages of the XO software environment, but you don’t need to be tied to any particular hardware. You don’t even need a laptop—you could do it with a desktop. So, that’s a big thrust, in terms of our strategy for outreach and getting Sugar into the hands of more kids.

X: But if you boot into Sugar on a home computer or a library computer, aren’t you missing the mesh networking built into the XO and the collaboration aspect that’s so important to the pedagogical theory behind Sugar?

WB: When you stick in the Live USB, you’ve got Sugar and you’ve got collaboration. You might not be doing the collaboration through peer-to-peer networking; you might be doing it through Jabber [an open-source instant messaging platform]. But the mesh-networking is not necessary to make Sugar work. It’s a nice-to-have. And one issue with a lot of schools is that they don’t want kids using the Internet—-they want to keep the kids containerized. With Live USB, you could run a classroom environment over a local Jabber server and have the kids collaborate without ever going out onto the net.

X: What are your plans for distributing the USB version? Can people make their own?

WB: If you’ve got a blank USB drive, you can download the Sugar image off our website. For Windows and Ubunto and Fedora, there are utilities for writing the image to a USB key. There must be one for the Mac as well. At conferences, we set up little USB stations so that if you’ve got a key, you can walk up and we’ll make you an image right there. I’m also talking with a couple of USB manufacturers about …Next Page »

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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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Walter Bender, the former president of software and content for the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, contacted Xconomy this morning to alert us to the creation of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation that will work on new versions of Sugar, the learning-oriented graphical interface Bender developed for the OLPC’s XO Laptop.

Coming on the heels of last night’s announcement of a formal deal between OLPC and Microsoft to make a version of the XO that runs Windows rather than its original Linux-Sugar software stack, Bender’s move gives concrete form to a split that has been developing in recent months among the leading engineers and educators behind the XO—something he spoke about in a detailed and revealing interview with us a few weeks ago.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has said that OLPC needs to become more systematic and pragmatic about the way it manufactures and distributes the XO—which, in practice, has meant working with established commercial software organizations such as Microsoft and even, as yesterday’s deal showed, replacing the XO’s own software with Microsoft’s. Bender, meanwhile, leads a contingent who believe that it is important that the learning software educators offer to children in developing countries be based on open-source principles.

Sugar Labs “will be a unifying catalyst for free and open-source learning systems across multiple distribution[s] and hardware platforms,” Bender wrote in an announcement on the new Sugar Labs wiki. “In order to provide a rich learning experience to as many of the world’s children as possible, it is critical to not just provide computers to children, but to ensure that the software that runs on the computers maximizes the potential for engaging in activities that promote learning: exploration, expression, and collaboration. By being independent of any specific hardware platform and by remaining dedicated to the principles of free and open-source software, Sugar Labs ensures that others can develop diverse interfaces and applications from which governments and schools can choose.”

The announcement says that Sugar Labs will work on adapting Sugar for low-cost platforms other than the XO, such as the ASUS Eee PC. Many of the developers who helped Bender create Sugar will participate in the new lab’s projects, including Marco Pesenti Gritti, Bert Freudenberg, Simon Schampijer, Bernardo Innocenti, Aaron Kaplan, Christoph Derndorfer, and Tomeu Vizoso, the announcement said.

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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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On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It’s an amazing thing to watch—at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn’t get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal’s Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student’s XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine’s arrival at the school last year.

Uruguay was the first country to purchase a large number of XO laptops, ordering 100,000 of the small green machines from Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation last October. If you dropped a couple thousand bucks on your last laptop, you may be alarmed by the idea of a student taking her brand-new XO into a muddy cow pen and getting up close and personal with a caul-enmeshed calf still shining with amniotic fluid. But to the folks at OLPC, who designed the $175 XO to be rugged and portable, yet powerful, finding the YouTube video was a triumphant moment. This bit of barnyard reality spoke volumes about an often-overlooked aspect of the project—namely, the software, which is designed to overturn old notions of classroom learning and give kids the ability to collaborate and express themselves in many media.

“I was in Brazil, at home, and it’s around 1 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, and being an idiot, I’m on e-mail,” says David Cavallo, OLPC’s chief learning architect and the former Latin American coordinator for the project. “And I get a note from a regional coordinator—who reports directly to the president of Uruguay—who sends me this video from Villa Cardale, where there are 150 kids and every kid got a laptop. Nobody taught them how to do this, but they’re already making their own stuff and posting it to YouTube! You can see this fluency developing, a sense of what it means to express something in video. It’s really quite articulate.”

OLPC and the XO Laptop have received mountains of media attention over the past year, most of it focusing on the laptop itself, the foundation’s difficulties getting the device into mass production and lining up solid orders, and OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte’s public clash with Intel (a saga we hope we have helped put to rest with our January 25 analysis and our January 28 interview with Negroponte). In one recent post, CNET blogger Tom Krazit complains about delays in the delivery of XOs to donors who participated in OLPC’s recent “Give One, Get One” program (See “Give one laptop, get one sooner or later“); while Krazit’s blog is usually valuable for its level-headed coverage of Apple, his XO post typifies the punditocracy’s skeptical, often mystifyingly angry and dismissive stance toward OLPC and the XO.

What almost all of the coverage of OLPC has omitted—and what came out over and over in my recent interviews with Cavallo and OLPC software president Walter Bender—is that the XO does not really matter as a piece of hardware. It matters a great deal as a vehicle for a very specific vision about learning, education, and the possibilities for engagement through digital technology. And that vision is much more evident in the software that comes pre-loaded on the XO than in the physical design of its hardware.

The hardware, it must be said, seems almost expressly designed to baffle and frustrate adults; in the name of durability and portability, the designers have thrown out most of the comfortable conventions of laptop design, evoking predictable reactions from the computer industry’s usual media gatekeepers. With icy British sarcasm, one Economist reviewer (in a January 4 article entitled “One clunky laptop per child“) derided the machine as having buttons too small for adult hands, a frustratingly slow processor, a cumbersome and buggy operating system, a “screwy” track pad, and a keypad that (horrifyingly) “lack[s] the normal press response that allows smooth typing.”

Bender, who runs the software side of the OLPC Foundation and designed the XO’s top-level interface, called Sugar, admits that the laptop wasn’t designed for “fat-fingered adults.” (It was designed for elementary school students in the 6-to-12 age bracket; see Bender’s point-by-point response to the Economist review here.) “They’re right—it is a clunky laptop, depending on what your metric is,” Bender told me when I visited OLPC’s Kendall Square offices two weeks ago. “But my response is …Next Page »

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On January 16, Bob and I had the opportunity to interview Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, at the organization’s Kendall Square headquarters. Negroponte is on leave from MIT, where he joined the faculty in 1966 and co-founded the MIT Media Lab in 1980. We had a wide-ranging conversation covering both the recent collapse of the foundation’s relationship with Intel and Negroponte’s vision for changing education in poor, rural, and remote areas of the world by giving children the means to create, collaborate, and communicate digitally.

We published my overview of the conversation last week, but the interview itself still makes fascinating reading, so we’re presenting it here, in mostly unedited form. (We’ve cut a bit for length.)

Xconomy: What have the last couple of months been like for you here at the foundation?

Nicholas Negroponte: Something I didn’t expect…is that before the Intel incident we were a little bit untouchable. If you criticized us it was like criticizing motherhood. So people who had reservations kept them to themselves. Then when the Intel thing happened it unleashed a pent-up disgruntled voice—not disgruntled about the Intel thing, but [about the fact] that the laptop didn’t run Office or it didn’t work for big fat fingers or it didn’t do certain things. Some of those came out of the woodwork. Which created a simultaneous cacophony of people saying, “Ah, well, you see Intel is pulling out because they’re really losers.” Which is okay too. If you can’t take the heat you shouldn’t be in the kitchen.

We’re talking to several groups—and I really can’t identify them—about how to pick up some of the things that Intel was supposed to be doing. But you never want anybody to walk. That’s never a commendable thing, and the fact that we couldn’t make it work with Intel reflects badly on both sides.

X: What kinds of things were they supposed to be doing? Obviously, you did find a low-power chip, from AMD.

NN: We’ve had a low-power chip. We were looking to [Intel] more in terms of the distribution—what would be called sales and marketing in a profit-making entity, and we looked to them because they had such a big network worldwide in most countries and they have a stated claim of being interested in education. So it seemed like the obvious thing to do, in spite of all their shenanigans.

But I don’t think that’s the substance of the story. I think the real story is that OLPC has been, if you will, a terrorist group, up until recently, and now it has to really deliver the ideas and the concepts and the scale. And that’s a real transition for us. Most of the people in these offices, in fact most of the people you’ll be meeting today, are not qualified by their experience to make that transition. We’re good at new ideas and being disruptive and so on and so forth. So that’s one of the reasons we shifted basically all of what we would be calling sales and marketing to Miami. They are people who have lots of experience doing that sort of thing and the whole logistic side, basically from the end of the factory to the schoolroom door. Brightstar has picked all of that. And OLPC America, which is just in formation, based in Washington DC, is a locus of activity. Those are run by people who actually wear suits, and know that world, whether it’s the political world or the business world. That’s a big change, versus us trying to go from short pants to long pants.

X: I think that’s one of the criticisms we’ve heard– that “Oh, these guys don’t really know the real business world.”

NN: We don’t!

X: And you never made any bones about that. It wasn’t the time for that.

NN: Exactly. Ignorance is bliss. Because when you do know those things, you really wouldn’t dare to do some of this stuff. It’s a little bit like building your first house. If you knew what you were getting into, you would never do it.

X: Nobody wants to do it again.

NN: A lot of people don’t. You go into it and I think that’s very important because that’s how new ideas come about.

X: Not to dwell on the past, but just to kind of get it all swept up neatly—You were hoping to depend on Intel as the sales and marketing partner. But at a certain point you must have realized that this was not going to work out. Did they ever indicate to you that they would actually try and sell the two products on their merits? Did it turn out that they were being more aggressive about the Classmate than you expected?

NN: There is no reason for them to be in the Classmate business, other than to have a reference design. Rolls Royce doesn’t make airplanes. They make engines. The margins on this kind of thing are very, very low—maybe even …Next Page »

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One day in early November, the first batch of mass-produced XO laptops—the little green-and-white machines designed by the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) to revolutionize education in the IT-starved developing world—rolled off an assembly line in Changshu, China.

Coming less than three years after the launch of the so-called “$100 laptop” effort by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the manufacturing milestone was cause for some back-slapping within OLPC, and might have been expected to quell a few of the organization’s outside critics.

But instead, the foundation has spent the last few months bogged down in bad publicity. It started with a Wall Street Journal article that concluded Negroponte’s project had been “derailed” by canceled orders, cost overruns, and competition with established hardware and software companies. Then came a round of extraordinarily bitter and public infighting between OLPC and Intel, the foundation’s largest monetary supporter and the company Negroponte had hoped to lean on for help promoting and distributing the XO around the world. A fragile rapprochement between the two organizations, negotiated last summer after Intel chairman Craig Barrett traded barbs in a 60 Minutes segment, fell apart completely on January 3 with Intel’s stormy departure from the OLPC board.

Intel and OLPC have given conflicting accounts of the final dispute: the giant chipmaker says Negroponte was trying to strong-arm the company into abandoning its low-cost Classmate laptop (an XO competitor), while Negroponte says Intel wouldn’t stop bad-mouthing the XO to education ministries in OLPC’s target countries.

Whatever the case, Negroponte is now working to shift the focus away from past controversies and onto the foundation’s future, especially its educational mission. While getting the newly minted XOs into the hands of children is obviously a key step, Negroponte talks even more about the laptop’s potential to upend the way kids learn in developing countries where schoolwork is a dull, regimented affair.

“It’s not about selling laptops,” Negroponte told Bob and me when we visited OLPC at its Cambridge, MA, headquarters one day last week. “It’s about leveraging the children themselves”—meaning, putting better tools for exploration and collaboration into their hands, and encouraging them to play with these tools in ways that will (in theory, at least) rewrite the old rules of the classroom.

“Most people think that kids drop out of school in the developing world to go to work and earn money for their family, or to work in the fields, or to take care of the siblings or something like that,” Negroponte says. “That happens—but the primary reason is that school is boring. It’s not relevant.” He believes the XO laptop is versatile enough to help change that.

And he could be right. On the day Bob and I visited, the foundation’s Kendall Square offices were noisily overflowing with engineers and educators participating in one of its regular learning workshops. Negroponte and the other OLPC managers we were scheduled to see—software president Walter Bender and chief learning architect David Cavallo, of whom more later—were being pulled in and out of meetings, and during one break between interviews, I was given an XO to play with. Once I figured out how to open it (you have to flip up the green rabbit-ear Wi-Fi antennas first), I was impressed to see how much care has gone into the device’s physical construction (it’s unexpectedly solid, for a $175 gadget) as well as its top-level user interface and the individual programs loaded into its memory (which is comprised of a 1-gigabyte, solid-state Flash chip—the XO has no hard drive).

Briefly put, I discovered that the Linux-based XO is loaded with enough open-source programming, communication, and content-creation and editing tools to make any bright young child into a budding journalist, musician, filmmaker, scientist, software engineer, or (as some governments may fear) revolutionary. Some critics—notably, The Economist, in a frosty January 4 review—have derided the XO for …Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X: How will your designs be different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Opening my weekend Wall Street Journal yesterday, I found the following headline: “A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions: How a Computer for the Poor Got Stomped by Tech Giants.”

The article vividly detailed the woes of the One Laptop Per Child effort, and how far OLPC is from achieving founder Nicholas Negroponte’s 2005 vision of putting $100 laptops in the hands of up to 150 million children in developing nations by the end of 2008—and how unlikely it is to ever reach that goal.

In one sense, the program’s a mess. So far, only 2,000 kids have received an OLPC computer through pilot programs, according to the Journal. The current price tag is $188. Potential buyers are balking over the possibility of software bugs, and the lack of training and support. Meanwhile, OLPC is facing competition from the likes of Microsoft and Intel. The latter is already selling its ClassMate computer for $230-$300 and is using its powerful sales force to outpace OLPC in places like Nigeria, Pakistan, and Libya. And these are just some of the woes chronicled. Not only is the original goal likely “unattainable,” the Journal concludes, the problems raise the possibility that OLPC “will end up as a niche player.”

No doubt the piece accurately portrays the formidable challenges OLPC faces, and it’s a good testament to the powers of entrenched market leaders and how they respond to a threat like OLPC. And even though we love to celebrate path-breaking ideas, we sometimes fail to recognize that conventional, more incremental technological improvements can often produce the same end results more rapidly and efficiently than a disruptive concept. To a degree, at least, all these things appear to be happening here.

Still, I think the Journal article gives short shrift to a critical issue—how in “failure” something like OLPC is really likely to be an incredible success, no matter what the final numbers are. The Journal noted how the project had galvanized competition, chiefly by Intel, but also from computer makers in India, Israel, and Taiwan, who are all out to produce cheap PCs to tap emerging markets. It even gave him a back-handed complement, noting how his “ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea.”

But let’s step back and ask ourselves what “derailed” means. Negroponte had a vision, a bold vision, and he …Next Page »

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An assembly line dedicated to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO Laptop went into operation yesterday at Quanta Computer’s new Changshu factory north of Shanghai yesterday, a few days ahead of the timeline One Laptop CTO Mary Lou Jepsen projected the last time Xconomy spoke with her. CNET and Top Tech News have good writeups.

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As a member of the proposed committee to oversee Dow Jones & Co.’s editorial integrity in light of its presumed sale to News Corp., MIT Media Lab visionary and One Laptop Per Child organization founder Nicholas Negroponte has come under scrutiny for his close ties to Rupert Murdoch and his company.

Yesterday, Yankee Group founder Howard Anderson (an Xconomist), who is advising the OLPC, told the Boston Herald that “Rupert and Nicholas have had a strong, strong relationship for years.” The article also pointed out that News Corp. executive vice president Jeremy Philips is a member of the laptop project’s board.

Today’s Wall Street Journal made a bigger deal of the possible conflict, pointing out that News Corp. has donated at least $2 million to OLPC. According to the Journal, the merger document specified that committee members should be those “who, in the sole judgment of the Special Committee, are able to consider and evaluate objectively any issue that comes before the Special Committee and whose judgment is not impaired by any interest in or relationship with the company [News Corp.], Dow Jones, the Murdoch family, the Bancroft family or their respective affiliates.”

Both Dow Jones and News Corp. spokespeople defended Negroponte’s selection, expressing confidence that all members of the committee will make independent judgments, the Journal reported.

Like the Journal, we contacted Negroponte for comment, which he declined to give.

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