OLPC, which was rejected by Indian government and later embraced by Reliance ADAG has launched localized keyboard laptops supporting Devanagari script.
OLPC project is currently working in rural village at Khairat near Navi Mumbai where laptops have been deployed and every child carries one laptop home.
Initially these kids felt that education was not really important but now with laptop they feel like we have moved ahead, and they want to compete and work with their urban counterparts [via]
Another development – Researchers at MIT are on a quest to build $12 laptop
A six-member team at the MIT conference is working on writing improved programs and hooking the devices to the Web through cell phones. The group also wants to add memory chips – which the devices currently lack – to allow users to write and store their own programs.
A $12 computer of sorts – a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console – already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and program [source]
Indian govt. too is working on a $100 laptop.
What’s your opinion on these initiatives?
“Initially these kids felt that education was not really important but now with laptop they feel like we have moved ahead, and they want to compete and work with their urban counterparts”
Very true indeed.Technology is a great leveller and for good.
-Sri
What a waste of money on such initiatives? Isn’t it better and cheaper if you can combine the power of cloud computing with thin clients to provide these capabilities? It would be more cost effective and probably could use large chunk of monies from these initiatives to fund basic infrastructure for the schools and the welfare of the kids. I thought it was so obvious or am I over simplifying the issues?
Hi Ashish,
Any idea on the ground level success of these of the OLPC initiative? Another interesting development in this space is of course Rajesh Jain’s ‘NetTV’ initiative the $100 ‘UN-PC’. While Negroponte is apparently critical of Novatium’s approach because he believes that rural India doesn’t have the network infrastructure required for this thin client – there are drawbacks with the OLPC. For one, its about 40% more expensive. Added to that, its a completely new medium, possibly alien to people in villages – whereas moving from a TV (something that has become commonplace in rural India) to to a NetTV somehow seems like less of leap.
I do, however like the fact that the OLPC is trying to overcome the connectivity issue by trying to hop on the back of mobile networks (which is why the fact that R-ADAG is the perfect partne for the OLPC). Surely NetTV could get some buy in with a similar mobile network to overcome the same issue?
Gautam Kshatriya
gautam.kshatriya@moneyvidya.com
http://www.moneyvidya.com/blog
Pingback: And now 3G Connected Low Cost PC (alternative) from Qualcomm |Technology and Business Startups in India
Pingback: Rediff to speak Different Languages |Technology and Business Startups in India
We tried to tackle the problem of computer literacy in different approach at Project Vyas. We are teaching people Virtual Working so there is no need to store content in their own gadgets. While the towns themselves suffering from lack of communication infrastructure experimenting in villages leads to nowhere. Many of such efforts failed before and going to fail again and again. We have seen iStation from Bangalore failed and many such ventures causing bitter experiences to early adopters like us a decade back ( memories of 128 MB )