One Laptop Per Child

Some time ago i heard about the OLPC project and was really excited about it's potential. The reason i'm blogging about it now is because I'd love to be involved in the project in some way and I just read an interesting article in the New York Post giving a good overview of the project and announcing their plans to go into mass production this month. They also plan to offer the laptops to westerners as an initial promo in a give one get one type arrangement. Unfortunately, it's only available for North America at this stage.

The laptops innovative technology (hardware and software) is truly ground breaking. Even though it's a low spec system in terms of processing and storage capacity, it's lean approach to software design enables it to perform well. I especially like the idea behind the mesh networking and it's ease of use. On a commercial scale it would have great applications in China to enable people to get around the government filters. i.e. using peer based routing to deliver blocked urls.

Ignorance and fear cause some of the worlds biggest problems. Let's hope the mainstream media really get behind this project and give it the credit it deserves. Well done guys !!!

There's also a video about it on youtube.com here.