Nicholas Negroponte needs no introduction but still for those unfamiliar with the name, he is the co-founder and Director of MIT and the author of "Being Digital" .. Read the book if you haven't done so yet!!
'' I don’t know if you find the same as me, but my laptop today is slower than the laptop I used ten years ago. It’s less reliable and harder to use. And I ask myself: “Why has the complexity got into such a state that all the mobile and computer technologies we have today are so hard to use these days?” It’s like an SUV, where the vehicle uses all the gas to move the vehicle rather than the person.
Every year it costs 50% less to deploy silicon, so you put more on it. We just keep adding features to make sure that you get to replace your phone every year. All of this is making electronics obese. It’s not just phones and PCs, but cameras. I mean, for example, you press the button on a camera these days and the flash doesn’t go off. This is because it’s computing and digitising the picture, and by the time it goes off, you’ve missed the moment.
Another trend involves people becoming conscious of power – as in power consumption in watts etc – it’s mobility and heat and wanting devices that don’t have fans to cool them. When you use a laptop and it’s fan comes on you should be offended. Why is it burning all that heat?
Soon you’ll hear people talking about watts rather than gigabytes therefore. My watts are less than yours and all that.
Displays will change too. I mean have you ever tried to use a laptop or phone in sunshine? You can’t see the darned thing. When something that basic has not been sorted, it’s just plain stupid.
I have a few other topics I want to pick on and so the second topic is the future of telecoms.
Telecoms is now wireless, and that is not just related to being mobile but also in terms of rollout. For example, I was looking at how Bangkok could improve its telecoms a few years ago. The city of Bangkok was then dug up for three years and they got a nice new telecoms systems. It was all cables underground. In Bolivia, Ericsson deployed a telecom systems and it was rolled out in two weeks this year, because it’s wireless. And all the developing world is now enjoying the rollout of new systems in weeks or days that took us months and years to build because we wired it and they’re wireless.
Second, the idea of a signal having to go out to a tower and bounce around to another tower and then back to here is not right if you’re sitting next to each other in the same room. Instead, it should bounce directly between phones. Peer-to-peer mesh networks will build broadband telecoms so that everyone’s cellphone is both a phone and a router. So we now have a zero cost network with no mobile carrier involved. And we have a powerful telephone system right here, and the more people who come into the room the more powerful the system is.
Third, reach. Reach is extraordinary. You can go to villages in South East Asia and the remotest parts of Africa, and you have to go a fair way to find no coverage. Firms are scrabbling fast to connect the most remote villages in the world to the telecoms network.
This year alone 1.2 billion handsets will be sold. That’s an awful lot in one year when we only have 6.5 billion people on the planet! So telecoms is on a roll, and growth is 99% in the developing world.
Third topic, the future of education. And I mean primary education.
When the United Nations created its millennium goals, they said by 2012 every child should have primary education. Today there are 100 million children who don’t. In Nigeria and Pakistan, half of kids don’t get primary education and, in some areas like Afghanistan, 75% of girls get no primary education. Meanwhile, the good news is that no country in South and Central America is below 90% access to education for the first four grades.
But if you look at how children learn, especially in their first five years of life, school is not involved. You learn from family. In those first five years, you have a great deal of learning – learning to walk, talk, and common sense about how the world works.
In those five years, you did all your learning by interacting with the world.
You learned how to stand up to reach something, you learned to talk because you want to communicate. That whole process of learning through doing, involved you interacting. No walking or talking teachers. Then you go to school at five or six, and you’re told to stop learning that way and instead read and listen. You will learn through being told, not by doing. Very little learning after first grade is like the learning you were doing before, and this will change. My prediction is that you have computers at home and you will have kids who will learn more from interacting with those computers than dealing with people who tell you what to do. Learning interactively from computers will be a major innovation.
That’s why I’ve launched a new charitable cause called “One Laptop per Child”. http://laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
We’ve built a $100 laptop that’s low powered, can be used in sunshine and will be given to every child in the developing world. One laptop per child.
How have we done it?
I went to a display company and said “I want a display that’s very basic, can be used in sunlight and is low powered and very cheap”. They said “that’s the opposite to our corporate strategy though. We build bright, complex and expensive displays”. I then said “I need 100 million units a year”. They’ve now invested $2 billion to build the lab that’s building the display for this unit. We won’t use all of that capacity, but we can change corporate strategies if we have scale.
We wanted a CFO and, as a non-profit, we wanted a good guy but couldn’t offer six or seven figure salaries. So how do you get a CFO. So you put out a job description where the salary is zero and we got the best CFO’s on the planet turning up. Many were retired or had made money out of Silicon Valley or similar.
As a non-profit with a good cause, it’s simple to get the best.
So what we have achieved so far is building a laptop that run on 2 watts (most laptops run on 40 watts). It does several things your laptop cannot do. It can fold up into a games machine which your laptop cannot do. It can be used in sunlight which yours cannot. It can be used in a mesh network which yours cannot. And it costs $100 to make.
So when Bill Gates says get a real computer, I say what are you talking about? I use a $100 laptop and it works. It’s cute as hell and gets all the publicity we need.
The key is low power, sunlight readability and mesh networking, and this is key because it’s for kids.
I go to schools and find children being taught Word, PowerPoint and Excel. That’s criminal. They’re not office workers. They’re not graduating at eight years old to do office work. So on this laptop there is no PowerPoint, Spreadsheet or stuff. It’s not a productivity system, it’s a learning system. The goal of this laptop is to learn. It’s achieved through construction (making things), having access to the internet (learning things) and by interacting (doing things).
My aim is to get a laptop to every child. That is our non-profit charitable cause and mass production is about to start.
We use a factory which makes 40% of the world’s laptops, and the assembly line is amazing. The factory is run by Quanta, a Taiwanese company with factories in mainland China, and there are Dells going down the assembly line one minute. 23 minutes later there’s Apple’s going down the assembly line, and 23 minutes later our laptops are going down the assembly line.
The first roll out is 250,000 machines but they’re contracted to produce 1 million a month. To put that in perspective, the total manufacturing of laptops today is 5 million a month. So at some point in the near future we will be producing 20% of the world’s laptops per month. That gets people’s attention.
We’re starting in Nigeria, Brazil and Thailand. They’re all big, not that poor, and for some reason I had access to the head of state in each country. The reason the laptop is green and white is because it’s the national colours of the Nigerian flag to thank them for being so supportive.
There are five principles to follow in the one laptop per child programme:
The laptop belongs to the child – it’s theirs – they take it home and they own it – it’s not a laptop owned by the school or the state – immediately the maintenance goes down – the kids sleep with their laptops, they clean them and look after them. They’re proud of them. In Cambodia, we gave out 50 laptops three years ago and three years later only 1 has broker. And the child with the broken one wouldn’t give it back for repair because it was his. So we gave him a new one and then he gave us the old one back.
It must be for kids of low ages – 6-10years old – not grown up kids.
You must have saturation – all kids must have one, not just a few. If a family has three children, then every child gets one, not just the oldest. That’s to ensure the older children teach the younger ones and vice versa.
There must be connection for the laptops. We charge around 10cents so it is cheap.
Finally, the system must be free and open. We use Linux open source to run the laptops and there’s a key on the laptop called “View Source” which, when you press it, shows you the commands running and you can edit there and then. You can import all open source software as you want and it’s easy.
We’ve now pulled the trigger to build the machines and have a quarter of a million about to go out that costs us about $188 each to make. From later this year, we’ll then sell these laptops for $399 in Canada and USA. That means for each one sold over here, you have funded one laptop for a child in Nigeria, Brazil and other countries. In other words, buy one, give one away.
We’ve already got 50,000 orders.
One laptop per child.
You’ll see this being discussed on talk shows, soaps, radio and TV. About 80% of Americans will know about this by November 12th and will be talking about it. My aim then is to give these away in Rwanda, Haiti and other war-torn countries because, by then, I have a zero-dollar laptop to give away. Not $100 laptop. A zero dollar laptop.
People ask if they can buy one overseas, and yes you can but, due to regulatory issues, please do it through a friend in Canada or the USA, as they get a $200 tax benefit and the FCC has issues if you tried to order outside the USA.
There aren’t many good news stories in the world. This is one of them. I hope you liked it.
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