Not too long ago, I was channel surfing and I came across some news show featuring this guy named Nicholas Negroponte. I’ve got a weird last name (Buolamwini), he has a weird last name, so I decided to linger on the channel for a while.

The man, an MIT professor, held a strange looking laptop, with “little green ears” and started talking about the OLPC (one lap top per child) project. I was instantly captivated when he painted his vision of children of all means having access to the internet, cool applications, and educational tools. Sounds like some of the goals of a certain organization I know…

I couldn't find the footage of the show I watched, but here's another video for you to see.

To me, the best part of the program I watched was when Negroponte went over features that were added to keep the little laptop working in an underdeveloped region. Turns out those little ears are actually wi-fi antennas that had better range than the most advanced laptps on the market. Another feature that I liked was the crank power generator.

Say you are out in the middle of nowhere, and you don’t have access to any electricity. Suddenly, your laptop battery dies. WHAT DO YOU do? Simple. "Crank dat handle", or pull a YoYo string type device. This kind of thing would have been great for times spent digging for batteries or the right adapter.

Plus, you can spill liquid and get dust all over the machine. You can even throw it on the ground (Not recommended). Point is, the device is built to last.

After seeing all it could do – built in camera, wireless internet access,networking capabilities, e-books, etc – I was expecting a pretty hefty tag. WRONG!!! $100—(well that’s the target price right now it $188, but if more people buy it, the price will go down) Once it reaches the $100 mark it will be about the same cost as getting text books in underdeveloped nations. This means Negroponte’s goal of having one lap top per child can become a reality. I’ll definitely keep my eye on this one. Sign up for the newsletter , and I'll let you know when they start selling them again. Feel free to post comments!

You can too. Check out the following links.
www.laptop.org
www.olpc.tv
www.xogiving.org