by Das Brain
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This project is going to have a big global effect on narrowing the digital information divide between the developed countries and poorer countries in the world. Moving forward 5 to 10 years I can see the ripple effects of this monumental technological event.
Think of how India has already changed the information technology landscape. With millions of Indian’s educated in high tech software programming they have already changed the way business is done in regards to software development. Thousands of North American and European companies have already outsourced software development to India in the last 5 years. China is not far behind in competing with India for market share of this global outsourced software development business
Domestically in the U.S and Europe individual software developers and software development consulting companies have been facing global competition from India and China in regards to cheaper software development resources. Therefore, they are usually forced to reduce their service charges.
Now imagine in the next 5 to 10 years, poorer countries such as Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand, Ethiopia and the West Bank begin to compete globally for information technology business. It is going to like an big ultra competitive Ebay market place for brain power which will eventually drive down prices for those information technology services.
Granted that the countries above may still need to have their telecom and internet infrastructure set up before they can become major players. But if India was any kind of benchmark or indication this may happen sooner than you think. It is definitely going to be interesting to see what happens to the global market place for information technologies in the next 5 to 10 years and how it will affect the world.
Read article below.
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By Jason Szep Mon Feb 12, 8:45 AM ET
BOSTON (Reuters) – From Brazil to Pakistan, some of the world’s poorest children will peer across the digital divide this month — reading electronic books, shooting digital video, creating music and chatting with classmates online.
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Founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology academics, the non-profit “One Laptop per Child” project will roll out nearly 2,500 of its $150-laptops to eight nations in February.
The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops scheduled to begin in July, when five million will be built.
Its technological triumphs include a hand crank to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera, wireless connectivity and
Linux open-source operating software tailored for remote regions.
The project’s operators say the price should fall to $100 apiece next year, when they hope to produce 50 million of the so-called “XO” machines, before dipping below $100 by 2010 when they aim to reach 150 million of the world’s poorest children.
“We’re pledging to always drive the price down,” Walter Bender, the group’s president of software and content, told Reuters. “Rather than continuing to add features to keep the price inflated, we’re keeping the feature set stable and driving the price down.”
A string pully, which Bender likens to a “salad spinner,” is replacing the handcrank. A minute of pulling generates 10 minutes of electricity. The display switches from color to black and white for viewing in direct sunlight — a feature unavailable in laptops 10 times more expensive.
State educators in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Ethiopia and the
West Bank will receive the first of the machines in February’s pilot before a wider rollout to Indonesia and a handful of other countries.
CRITICISMS
But not everyone is applauding. Some predict the project will be a financial burden on countries that can least afford it with no guarantee of success. Others say the money would be better spent on food, medicine, libraries and schools.
Some African officials question whether it suits the education of children outside the United States. Still others question whether the laptops simply will end up resold in illegal markets by cash-strapped families and communities.
“On the technology I think the project is amazing and wonderful,” said Wayan Vota, whose blog (http://olpcnews.com/) monitors the project. “What gives me pause is the social implications, the economic implications” of how they plan to implement it.
“Essentially they want developing countries — or countries that already have a significant amount of debt or other commitments — to borrow even more, or to use even more of their limited resources, to buy the laptops and to implement them in a way that is untried and untested on a large scale.”
Vota, who is also director of Geekcorps, a nonprofit that promotes communication technology in developing countries, predicts staggering costs for some poor nations.
“If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73 percent of the entire Nigerian budget — that’s not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria,” he said.
Some educators may also be hostile toward it because the machines are designed to encourage students to experiment with everything from music and creating videos to writing their own computer programs, said Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
“You’ll find some classrooms where the teachers are excited about letting the students experiment and explore but you’ll also find a lot based on rote and repetition,” he said.
But Vota and Zuckerman praised One Laptop Per Child for its pioneering innovations including a laptop that needs just two watts of power compared to the typical laptop’s 30 to 40 watts, and does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add memory devices.
Groups of the laptops can communicate with each other even without an Internet connection under a pioneering “mesh” network so children can swap images and collaborate on projects. It boasts a music sequencer with digital instruments so children can play and create music.
Bender says the laptops can be remotely shut down to prevent them being sold in black markets.
But Vota contends that hackers will try to buy them and will easily crack their code. “For people earning one dollar a day the temptation to sell it for $300 will be very strong,” he said.
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