Something interesting I missed

last week was Nicholas Negroponte’s unveiling of the $100 laptop designed to meet the needs of people in relatively poor countries. The other day, Patrick noted that “… the minimum order [of the computer] is a million units, that’s 100 million US dollars” and that this seems to be quite a massive outlay for some poor countries. While that is true, one of the characteristics of such states is that there is a struggling “official” market system with thriving black markets of various kinds. The point of the huge investment that has to be made is not to make the barrier to entry too high but rather to ensure that the computers become so ubiquitous that the market value on the street trends towards 0. One thing is sure – it will be very interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if CIDA or the IDRC in Canada has any formal involvement with this project? Canada has been involved with many computing and networking initiatives in Africa, and it seems that this would fit in quite well.