Excellent article on the MIT Media Labs plan for low cost laptops for developing nations. Great idea. Especially this part:
What about connectivity? Aren’t telecommunications services expensive in the developing world?
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.
One Laptop per Child – A $100 Laptop for Every Kid. With a plan to distribute up to 15 million rugged, innovative, and very low cost laptop computers by the end of 2007, MIT Media Labs may be calling Steve Ballmer’s year old bluff, in ways commercial vendors haven’t. [more inside]
(Via Metafilter)
Damn it! I’ve been working on a long post related to this project off and on all week. Now you stole my thunder, man.
I’ll still post it this weekend, I’m sure. Short version, though – this project is incredibly ambitious and it blows me the hell away. These guys don’t think small, man.