Kid Power - The Next Billion Innovators
by Imran Ali
Today saw the launch of the One Laptop Per Child foundation’s Give 1 Get 1 programme; a chance for North Americans to donate a much vaunted XO laptop - ‘like a yellow bracelet‘ - to a child in the developing word, at the same time as receiving an XO of their own.
It’s easy to be cynical, but OLPC has attracted legitimate criticism of its educational foundations and also widespread acclaim for the XO’s innovative design; a low power screen, manual charging, mesh networking and most notably the Sugar user interface. With email, videochat, VoIP, IM as well as an integrated camera, microphone and intelligent mesh wifi - the XO is inherently a mobile communication platform.
Also, both hardware and software have been developed with open source principles, to the point where a ‘View Source‘ key directly encourages kids to ‘get under the hood’.
If OLPC’s vision goes to plan, expect to see XOs in the hands of millions of children across the developing world. This could be a profound and dramatic inflection point in the development of mobile communication, as a global generation of children and educators emerge where their principle messaging and computing experience is an XO, unshackled from proprietary software or imprisoned within telco networks.
A utopian vision perhaps, but nonetheless flooding societies with cheap, capable and connected computing devices will have some interesting implications for messaging and mobility in coming years.
