$100 Laptop Update

Nicholas Negroponte gave a talk on the $100 laptop he is making in Portland. PORTLAND! That's the same side of the country as me. I could have gone. Now that opportunity is lost for ever (i would have sat in the front, he would have seen me, I would have waved... sigh). For those that don't know Negroponte is a personal hero of mine. The author of Being Digital, head of the MIT Media Lab, and founder of Wired magazine,Negroponte is now taking on a project very similar to my senior studio project creating a $100 laptop for emerging markets. Makes me want to move to Boston and offer to make the interface with him. Interaction design for emerging markets for social responsibility. Sounds like my cup of tea. It's right up there with being the first industrial designer hired by the UN.


The Story

Over twenty years ago, Steve Jobs gave Seymour Papert and Negroponte some computers - Apple IIs - and put they put them into a lab in Senegal. The lab wasn’t sustainable and didn’t survive, but a later lab in Costa Rica did, primarily because a local foundation was formed to support it. Nicholas sees a connection - if not a cause - between this success and the fact that Costa Rica’s main export is microchips.

Negroponte has been involved with a number of rural connectivity efforts in Kashmir, Cambodia and elsewhere. By giving laptop computers to Cambodian schools, Negroponte became enamored with the idea of having laptops in developing world schools… and homes, where they’re often the brightest light sources.

So Negroponte became engaged in the idea of building a $100 laptop, which he says is not so difficult to do. 50-60% of your laptop cost is marketing, distribution and profit. The remainder - a quarter of the total price - is the cost of the display. The remaining quarter is processor, disk and everything else. How do you get those costs down as low as possible? <read on>

Negroponte
Being Nicholas
MIT
Wikipedia
Wired Columns

Other People Involved
Joseph Jacobson - Directory of E-ink
Seymour Papert - Theorist in Child Learning

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