$100 Laptop
 

http://www.plastic.com/article.html;...9174428;cmt=75

Maybe it should go hand in hand with ultracheap satellite ISPs as well. This reminds me of the old dilemma from the 1980s.... people bringing PCs to dirt village classrooms. You couldn't use them because there's no electricity. Same situation with mobile technology... it's only as productive/beneficial as the availability of 'supporting technology' such as electric grids and Internet availability.

It does have a handcrank to generate power.

i heard it on the news.. sounds cheap lol

This is an awesome development to alleviate global poverty. See

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013...83155&v=glance

Quote:

Connecting to the Poor

Technological advances, particularly in computing and communicating, seem to be taking place almost entirely in the developed world. Granted, India and some of the Caribbean islands are providing the staffing for sophisticated call centers and India notably has a thriving software development industry. But the employees of those enterprises are mostly well-educated and come from the middle-class or affluent segments of their populations. The inhabitants of urban slums and rural villages have not been targeted as a market for technologically sophisticated products or services.

Yet when technology has been made available to them, Prahalad has found residents of the bottom of the pyramid to be readily accepting of technology. In Bangladesh, women entrepreneurs with cell phones do a brisk business renting out the phone by the minute to other villagers. Indeed, Prahalad finds in the spread of wireless devices proof of the size and viability of the market at the bottom of the pyramid. By the end of 2003, for example, China had an installed base of 250 million cell phones. The market for wireless devices in India stood at about 30 million installations and was growing at the rate of 1.5 million handsets per month.

Where connectivity exists it is resulting in major efficiencies in traditional occupations. Within three months of the installation of personal computers in some Indian villages the farmers there were making decisions about planting based on futures prices being quoted on the Chicago Board of Trade. In Kerala, India, satellite-based images of fish shoals are downloaded on village PCs and read and interpreted by women who then direct their husbands where to fish. The husbands, after a day of fishing, use their cell phones to check prices at various ports along the coast to obtain the highest bid for their catch.

To Prahalad, all these examples are evidence that there are market solutions to the problem of poverty. The task that he sets out for multinational corporations is to break out of the dominant logic that views the world's poor as a distraction to be aided by governments and non-profit organizations. Involvement in markets at the bottom of the pyramid will challenge many of the assumptions that managers of large companies have developed over the years, ranging from packaging and pricing to marketing and distribution. The result of such efforts will not only be profitable, both for the large companies as well as the consumers, but it might also contribute solutions to the serious political and environmental problems confronting the developed world.

nice project!

Wow.. so we can start outsourcing to Ethiopia soon!!

I think it is genious.

Im registering a new gfy nick:

$0.05 submissions

yeah i've read about it earlier, great project

you just made me laugh to the point of hiccups :1orglaugh

Its not a joke.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1116/csmimg/p4a.jpg

thats why i laughed :1orglaugh :1orglaugh
could you imagine rebootin that thing??
"START UP YOU PIECE OF SHIT" *crank crank*

:1orglaugh

If they can set up a cheap ISP, this might happen sooner rather than later.

One thing that is problematic about technology adoption in developing nations is the availability of cheap and reliable infrastructure. While the labor costs are lower, sometimes this is offset by the the high cost of infrastructure. Also, there's regulatory and other issues. While technology can be adopted, it can either seep into the underlying culture (see South Korea in the 70s to 80s) or be very shallow and unstable (see World Bank 'boondogle' projects in the 3rd World in the 70's)--it has to be APPROPRIATE technology as well as SUSTAINABLE technology.

Leo Tolsoy's quote from Anna Karennina comes to mind "Happy families
are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Same with countries that successfuly adopt technology. They all have the infrastructure to host approporiate technology that is sustainable. Failed tech transfers usually fail because of some missing element that is particular to that particular region, political system/culture, and/or economic model.

heheheheh:1orglaugh

This IS genious!!!

Im not sure if it is... but if it's OPEN ARCHITECTURE and they let CHINESE MANUFACTURERS get a crack at it... I wonder if they can make $25 or $50 laptops.

An open architecture Processor/CPU... hmmmm.

Hmm , I saw this article in another site...

so Its great I think...

It will be good for everybody if the milions poor ppl be more educated

btw the low price coming coz the cheap LCD

LCD price is crashing. There's also a more expensive version (unrelated but addressing the same idea of computers for the developing world) that uses solar panels.

Looks more like a toy to me.. heh

This shit is almost funny.

soooo some dude was asking God, "God, how come you gave Africa everything - great weather, gold, diamonds, beautiful beaches, it is not fair to other continents, don't you think so?"
God looks at him and says: "Wait untill you see the people I'm going to put there!!!"

/end of racist joke

you can make 3 dolla laptops, 90% if the African countries are run by corrupt idiots, and nothing positive will come out of this

unfortunately youre kinda right

What solution do you see in solving poverty in Africa?

I want one lol.

hmmm very nice project :thumbsup

Internet fraud is about to skyrocket