$100 Laptop and GPS on Sneakers
Feb. 22, 2007 by ravishan
Our kids made an observation one day that all my information sources start with the letter N – NPR, Newsweek and NY Times. I added that they forgot that another important information source of mine also starts in N – Nalini… While reading one of these information sources, a couple of items caught my attention and I thought it may be interesting to some of you.
Many of you have heard about the $100 laptop initiative that originated from the MIT Media Lab. Nicholas Negroponte is the leader of the OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child). Having my origins in Sri Lanka and India, I have strong opinions on why this project is less relevant in many of these countries, but I am fascinated by the technological innovation that has gone into this.
This $100 laptop (which turns out to be more like $150 now) tells us something – that it is possible to produce a powerful cheap laptop with rich functions. The technology is moving back to consolidation and centralizing activities – be it applications or storage. In that sense, what is needed for most of the users is a machine that can read email, surf the web and support word processing and spreadsheets etc. Note that I am talking about MOST users… With both Google and Microsoft providing Microsoft Office like suites running on the web and offering massive storage on the web, having a lean laptop that connects to the web for everything is a very powerful paradigm.
If you believe Negroponte, this machine is designed in a way that it can be charged by human power. What does that mean?
“Human power is not dependent on the number of hours, but the ratio of human movement to subsequent run time. I mean that, simply in the worst case, one minute of cranking means 10 minutes of operation. If you use your legs, like a bicycle pump, it skyrockets, perhaps as much as 25 minutes.”
In addition, they collectively form a wireless mesh through which disk sharing and other things can be accomplished… So, technologically what has been accomplished here is phenomenal. Obviously this is such a change from the mode of operation that it will be considered impractical by many, including Bill Gates. As much as I love Bill Gates, I also think he is getting old and cannot get past “It is either my way or no way” attitude.
This is not available for the consumer market initially, but later on it will be introduced at a price point where for every machine sold in the consumer market, one will be donated to a child.
The other story is how a company is selling sneakers fitted with GPS.? You have to purchase both the sneakers and a service at a monthly cost of $20 to be able to track. The person wearing the sneaker can press an alert button to notify the monitoring agency if he/she is in trouble. Also, if you feel that a person wearing the sneakers has been missing, you can activate the search by calling the monitoring company. To make sure that this is not misused, they have strict controls (it is not clear how they plan to impose them) on the appropriate use. The market for this seems to be the parents/relatives of autistic children and the victims of Alzheimer’s.