Monday, January 31, 2005
Negroponte back again
There was a time when Nicholas Negroponte was the reigning god of the dot-com/new media world. Since the collapse of the bubble and the winding up of Media Labs in both Asia and Europe, he's not been in the news much. Until today. Both Red Herring and the New York Times are carrying stories about Negroponte's idea for a $100 PC, from the WEF at Davos (where pointless discussions about the digital divide seem to have been shown the door, thank god).
The machine is intriguing because Mr. Negroponte has struck upon a remarkably simple solution for lowering the price of the most costly part of a laptop - the display - to $25 or less. In partnership with Joseph Jacobson, a physicist at M.I.T., he wants to persuade the education ministries of countries like China to use laptops to replace textbooks. Mr. Negroponte said that he had found initial backing for his laptop plan from Advanced Micro Devices and said that he was in discussions with Google, Motorola, the News Corporation and Samsung for support. The device includes a tentlike pop-up display that will use the technology now used in today's rear-projection televisions, in conjunction with an L.E.D. light source.
Mr. Negroponte and his supporters are planning to create a company that would manufacture and market the new portable PCs, with MIT as one of the stakeholders. It is unclear precisely what role the other four companies will play, although Mr. Negroponte hopes News Corp. will help with satellite capacity. An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.
I'll give him this much -- he's got the price point right. Long time readers of this blog will remember that I have constantly advocated that prices of computers needed to drop to around $100-$150 for computing to really take off in the developing world. I just wish Negroponte would talk to people like my colleague, Rajesh Jain, who has been working on the 'massputer' for a while now.
The machine is intriguing because Mr. Negroponte has struck upon a remarkably simple solution for lowering the price of the most costly part of a laptop - the display - to $25 or less. In partnership with Joseph Jacobson, a physicist at M.I.T., he wants to persuade the education ministries of countries like China to use laptops to replace textbooks. Mr. Negroponte said that he had found initial backing for his laptop plan from Advanced Micro Devices and said that he was in discussions with Google, Motorola, the News Corporation and Samsung for support. The device includes a tentlike pop-up display that will use the technology now used in today's rear-projection televisions, in conjunction with an L.E.D. light source.
Mr. Negroponte and his supporters are planning to create a company that would manufacture and market the new portable PCs, with MIT as one of the stakeholders. It is unclear precisely what role the other four companies will play, although Mr. Negroponte hopes News Corp. will help with satellite capacity. An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.
I'll give him this much -- he's got the price point right. Long time readers of this blog will remember that I have constantly advocated that prices of computers needed to drop to around $100-$150 for computing to really take off in the developing world. I just wish Negroponte would talk to people like my colleague, Rajesh Jain, who has been working on the 'massputer' for a while now.
