TED: Nicholas Negroponte On OLPC

MIT Media Lab founder and "Being Digital" author Nicholas Negroponte stopped by the EG conference last December to give a sort of status update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project he's been driving for the past two years. The project's mandate is to create an inexpensive, durable and well-designed laptop that costs less than 100$ per unit for distribution in 3rd world countries and poverty-stricken communities.

The big message of the night had to do with for-profit sales of the OLPC in a program called Give One, Get One. Basically, buy a laptop for ~$400, and they'll donate one on your behalf to a needy child somewhere. So, rather than suggest each person in the room buy one (there were about 300 people that were present), Negroponte suggested they use their mailing lists and tell all their friends.

In the spirit of that request, here's the link for the Give One, Get One Website: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php, and following through with Dr. Negroponte's message, I ask you to do the same. Send this post (or the link), hit the digg link in the top right corner, even just mention it at that cocktail party you're late for... Just get the word out.

WIth that plug in place, I have some other insights and thoughts after the video...



Marred by both skepticism and controversy (the CTO departed very publicly in March to start her own for-profit company "to commercialize OLPC's technology, including the screen and battery"), Negroponte was back and re-focusing the message, starting with the benefits of being an NFP instead of a for-profit organization (as was widely advised before launch):

"The clarity of purpose is there; the moral purpose is clear. I can see any head of state, any executive I want, anytime because I'm not selling laptops."

The other nifty point he makes, and one that I personally dug, was that part of the user interaction design for the OLPC is to help children learn how to learn:

"Seymour [Papert] made a very simple observation in 1968... that children who write computer programs understand things differently, and when they debug the programs, the come the closest to learning about learning."

See the video on TED

Oh, But The Home Of The Future Is Sooooo 1939

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house."

- Popular Mechanics "The Electrice Home of the Future," Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The "Home Of The Future" is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t's 2013, and you've just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you'll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others -- such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing -- haven't made it into people's homes ... yet.

Check out the full article here

Time Warner Gets Into The IPTV Game

Conventional wisdom pits the cable companies (or MSOs - Multiple Service Operators - as they're known in the trade) against the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Sony as the next-generation delivery providers for entertainment content.

Time Warner broke that mold this week with the announcement of their own IPTV strategy: One that unites PC-bound content and HDTV's through a home networking device that democratizes the Web to TV link:

"Right now it's pretty hard to get Internet stuff on your TV," [CEO Glenn] Britt said at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York [on Friday].

"We're actually going to have equipment we make available to subscribers," he said. "It's actually going to be a new wireless cable modem that will allow you to network everything in your house."

What's significant about this is that there is renewed interest in converging the Web and TV. What's different about this is that the interest is not in driving lean-forward iTV, where the internet's presence in TV is used to deliver "Value-Added" content and shopping opportunities. Rather, this move is about getting the lean-back experience of Web video to the living room. Moreover, it's about competing with IPTV set-top boxes that have similar features but also allow movie and TV show purchases and rentals.

As mentioned on this blog last week, Forrester has predicted that Apple is going to throw itself full-force into this market, delivering products and services to support the home-entertainment convergence. I continue to disagree with this sentiment, and see Apple continuing to want to wrap up its products into opportunities to own the content-conduit-commerce services that live underneath the experience, rather than furthering the front end applications. This play by Time Warner looks to compete with THAT plan, and is further indication that the content distributors and aggregators see that VEBCAR (Value Exists Between Couch And Remote) is the focus of their model.

Link to Reuters Article

iPhone 3G coming to Canada?

The Toronto Star is now reporting that the 3G iPhone will be not only coming out this summer, but that Rogers will carry it. My favourite parts of the article had nothing to do with the iPhone per se, but rather with data pricing in Canada:

"It has been widely speculated that the stumbling block was Rogers' wireless data plans, which typically cost more than those offered by carriers in Europe and the United States – a disparity that critics blame on a lack of Canadian wireless competition.

As well, most of Rogers' wireless data plans have usage caps, with users charged by the megabyte if they go over their allotment.

"We're not fans of unlimited plans," Rob Bruce, president of Rogers' wireless division, told analysts during a February conference call."

I'm not one to tell a business that they shouldn't take whatever they can get. If they're in a position to charge that, and get it, then they should: It's what the market will bear. If I don't like it, my choice as a consumer should be to go elsewhere.

My lack of consumer choice in this matter, and this is the big one, these sky-high prices are actually hurting the wireless telcos! Why, do you ask? Well, first, they're not going to own this game forever, and people in Canada have long memories. Second, and more importantly, wireless data represents some of the biggest opportunities for innovation since Web 1.0, and these guys are the gate-keepers. I think that rather than squeezing the network for cash, they need to get as many people ON the network. It's only through tremendous girth that they will have value to big-boy wireless app (and I don't mean game) developers.

This means that it's also hurting Canada. Why? Not because we're funneling huge sums of cash to Rogers, rather, because a cottage industry of innovation around wireless application development SHOULD be happening here, in the great white northern home of RIM. Such an industry could pay off BIG for wireless providers - Consider, they control the network, they could demand a cut of all mobile commerce transactions for eBay sales - Snipe from your Samsung!

Instead, we're stuck with companies that would rather gouge us than encourage a fledgling industry that could help them make a lot of money in the future.

Link to Toronto Star Article