@CES, Las Vegas - Non-profit attempts to bring affordable computing to the developing world suffered a setback this week, while there were a couple of steps forward at the Consumer Electronics Show for commercial efforts.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, announced a 50 per cent cut in his team and pay cuts for the remaining 32 people.
“Like many other non-profits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources,” he said.
The cuts appear to have been precipitated by the failure of the Give One Get One campaign in the holiday season, despite extending beyond the US the deal where consumers pay $399 to give one XO laptop to a third-world child and receive one themselves.
Mr Negroponte told the Boston Globe that only around 12,500 were sold, generating $2.5m, a 93 per cent decline from revenues in 2007.
“That was a real shocker,” he said. “We’re not the newest story in town, the novelty has worn off.”
OLPC’s efforts have been superseded to some extent by the emergence of the netbooks category. Its XO has not been updated and a new version, with a larger display that will turn it into more of an electronic book, is not due until well into 2010.
In contrast, NComputing showed off its newest product at CES – the x550. Operating on just one to five watts, the $70 device allows the computing power of a single PC to be shared among 11 people at the same time.
Intel also announced a new version of its Classmate PC, which differs from the basic clamshell machine in having a swivel touch screen that allows it to be converted to tablet mode. It is thinner, runs Windows XP on an Intel Atom processor, has a four-hour battery life and will cost between $200 and $500, depending on how Intel’s partners pitch it.
“The 49 OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that we have worldwide have shipped in total around 1m units to date,” Lila Ibrahim (pictured), general manager of the Intel Emerging Markets Platform Group, told me.
Finally, Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm chief executive, talked at CES about his company’s Kayak platform, announced late last year and expected to appear in India later in 2009.
“Kayak is basically a low-cost cell phone in a box and instead of driving a phone’s LCD screen, it can drive either a TV or a computer monitor,” he said in an FT interview.
“It’s an interesting option for emerging markets where they don’t have wireline connectivity to the Internet – Kayak has got a built-in 3G modem, so an operator can subsidise it, and then there are governments that may be interested in it to try to bridge the digital divide.”
