$100 Laptops

Recently an article in Computerworld discussed a project to provide $100 laptops for children in developing countries. The laptops should be available by the middle of next year and hopes to ship 100 million laptops by 2008. The hope is that the price of the laptop will drop down to $50 by 2010.

In order to get the price of the laptop computers down to $100, sales and marketing teams have been eliminated (which generally make up 50% of the cost of a typical computer.) Huge companies are participating in the project including: Red Hat, Google, Advanced Micro Devices, News Corporation, BrightStar, Marvell Technology Group, Nortel Networks, eBay, 3M, and Quanta Computer, the large Taiwanese notebook manufacturer expected to build the laptops.

The laptops will have keyboard and USB ports sealed in order to protect the computers from dust and water. They will also be designed to use only 2 watts of power. A crank will be attached to either the notebook or to an AC adapter, and other innovated designs are being considered to allow users to power their machines through solar or manual power.

The infrastructure and satellites are already being put into place for small rural communities in third world countries in order to connect these computers to the internet.