May Technology Salon: Dialing for Digital Development
Mobile phones have established themselves as the communication and networking platform of choice for billions of the world’s consumers, most of whom are at the base of the global economic pyramid. Worldwide, mobile phone subscribers outnumber Internet users almost 3 to 1, with much of that gap coming from skyrocketing mobile phone use in Africa, India and China.
Yet new mobile computing platforms, such as the XO laptop from One Laptop Per Child and the Asus Eee PC promise to radically change Internet access with breakthrough portability, performance, power and price. Does “4P Computing” pose a challenge to mobile phone dominance, or does each approach blend into the other?
April Technology Salon: The Rise of 4P Computing
One year ago this week, One Laptop Per Child changed its mission, dropping its invitation for lower-cost alternatives to the XO laptop. Was that a reaction just to Intel’s Classmate PC, or amazing foresight?
Either way, a year later we are witnessing a dramatic change in the low-cost laptop marketplace. New low-cost laptops, or as I am now calling them, 4P Computing (Power, Performance, Portability, Price) are popping up daily with entrants from the practical Asus Eee PC to the seemingly comical Van Der Led.
The Rise of 4P Computing Solutions for the Developing World
The first 4PC entrant
Last August, I crowded a few friends into a Japanese restaurant in Silicon Valley to talk about technology in the developing world. Back then, the discussion swirled around One Laptop Per Child, as it was the most visible manifestation of our collective drive to spread appropriate information and communication technology beyond the world’s elite.
That’s because three years ago, Nicholas Negroponte stunned the technology industry and the development community with an amazing idea: One Laptop Per Child – a rugged yet low-cost computing device, the XO laptop, can empower primary education in the developing world.
His idea that low-power, appropriate performance, highly portable, and low-priced computers were not only possible, but could also radically change education in the developing world and computer manufacturing in the developed world was an instant hit with Presidents of the Global South.
While the global telecommunications industry was quick to dismiss his idea as folly, as I told the Economist in its article “The rise of the low-cost laptop“, they did not laugh long:
A New York Taxi Story
Where are we going now?
3:15 pm – Leaving a Battery Park office Its time to go. I have to give a speech on One Laptop Per Child in 45 minutes in Brooklyn. I’ll be part of The World in Your Library at the LACUNY Institute Series, talking to librarians about one of my favorite topics and its impacts on the dissemination of knowledge in the developing world.
Brooklyn College has invited me to NYC, one of the rare speaking engagements where I’m going to be a paid speaker. Before you think that amounts to much, this trip is netting me train, hotel, and $100 for meals and such. In New York, a $100 lasts about a minute.
3:19 pm – Getting in a taxi I hail a cab, and climbing in, tell the driver to take me to the Brooklyn College Library in Brooklyn. I’m running a few minutes late, but I figure I can still make it in time. That’s until, as we’re crossing the Brooklyn Bridge I hear:
Read MoreThe Thomas Lee Bachelor Party
Thomas enjoying the night
I’ve never been a Best Man. This realization came to me late one night at my dinner table. It was around midnight, long after a party I’d thrown was over and Thomas Lee and I we talking. Or, more to the point, Thomas was asking;
“Wayan, will you be my best man?”
This was an odd question for me. Both because I’d not been a best man before, but also because I’ve not been to that many weddings. Yes, I’ve been to mine, both of them. But I didn’t pay much attention to what Sean, my best man for both was doing.
Outside of those two moments of sheer terror joy, I’ve tended to avoid weddings. I stay so far away from them in real life that Amy stopped asking me to attend her friends’ weddings. I don’t even watch movies about weddings!