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Eye of the Needle by David Needle (bio)

Insights from Silicon Valley and beyond



OLPC Taps Amazon for Low Cost Notebook

The One Laptop Per Child project is looking to mega-online retail giant Amazon to try and pump more sales for its kid-friendly, XO notebook computer. Specifically, Amazon will be the main reseller for OLPC’s “Give One, Get One” program it developed last year, according to a report . Neither Amazon nor OLPC has anything about Amazon’s participation at their sites, and I couldn’t reach anyone at either company for comment.

(UPDATE: The One Laptop Per Child folks got back to me, and along with a statement posted by Amazon, offered some new information and corrected a few misconceptions here.)

The Give One, Get One program is designed to provide a way for generous consumers to help get the notebooks into the hands of kids in poor countries. Essentially, you buy two of the notebooks; one goes to you, the other is donated to a child in a developing country. The report said Amazon will start selling the colorful XO notebooks later this November.

Back in 2006, the founders of the project said the goal was to develop a notebook with easy to use, educational software installed that could sell for $100 in mass quantities to developing nations.

When the XO came out last year though, OLPC wasn’t able to get the price quite that low. The OLPC Web site says a donation of $200 will deliver a new XO laptop to a child in a developing nation.

It’s not known what the price on Amazon will be. OLPC has been a somewhat controversial project. The organization charged Intel with trying to undercut its plans overseas, then made peace, agreeing to let the chip giant join the non-profit organization as a board member. But then later the two had a falling out and Intel went back to focusing on its own “Classmate PC” line of low cost computers. The XO runs on AMD processors.

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1 Comments

Kyle Austin said:

"As it has been reported, One Laptop per Child will sell its XO Laptop on Amazon.com later this year as part of a global 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program. Although the first iteration of the 'G1,G1' program was extremely successful and sold more then 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

In addition, contrary to some media reports, it will be a Linux-based XO Laptop that will be offered as part of the global initiative and not a dual-boot machine running both Windows and Linux.� - OLPC

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