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One Laptop Per Child Morphs

The One Laptop Per Child program, promoting a $100 laptop has apparently morphed into a $176 laptop that can run Windows, reports Engadget.

Furthermore, 19 state governors have reportedly shown interest in grabbing a few of the inexpensive machines for their own schoolkids, and while the creator initially stated that the XOs were “designed for a totally different situation,” Nicholas Negroponte was also quoted as saying that business in the US “couldn’t be ignored.”

Two students’ work with OLPC led to a corporate gift of $500,000 by RealNetworks to the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. RealNetworks was interested in seeing its open source Helix multimedia player modified for use in the children’s laptop.

Meanwhile, Intel’s World Ahead Program is developing the ClassMate PC, a similar project.

The Classmate PC was initially expected to sell for $200 per unit, but the price has steadily climbed and could reach between $250 and $400 at the official launch. Laptop Magazine has a side by side comparison of the OLPC and ClassMate laptops. OLPC News has the latest news.

OLPC’s XO laptop includes:

Processor: 433 Mhz AMD Geode processor
RAM: 256 MB dynamic RAM
FLASH: 1024 MiB SLC NAND flash
Batteries: nickel-metal hydride battery that allows anywhere between 6 and 20 hours depending on what features are in use. When power sockets aren’t available, users can recharge the battery with a built-in pull-string charger.
Screen: 7-1/2 inch dual-mode LCD supports a resolution of 1200×900 in monochrome mode and 800×600 in color mode.
Networking: wireless mesh network technology
MultiMedia: built-in microphone and an integrated camera can capture video at 30 frames per second with a resolution of 640×480.
I/O Options: a rubber-membrane keyboard and a touchpad that also supports stylus input.
Operating System: Linux
Price: The XO laptop was initially targeting $100 per unit, but the price reached $140 after the addition of several features, including the video camera.

Intel’s Classmate PC features:

Processor: Intel ULV 900 MHz Mobile Processor, Zero L2 cache, 400 MHz FSB
RAM: DDR-II 256M SO-DIMM
FLASH: 1GB/2GB NAND Flash
Screen: Seven inch LCD that supports a resolution of 800×480,
Batteries: Six-cell battery that provides approximately four hours of uptime when fully charged
Networking: built-in Ethernet and 802.11G wireless hardware.
MultiMedia: Stereo 2 Channel Audio, Built-in Speakers and Microphone, Jack for External Output and Microphone Input
I/O Options: Users can input notes with an optional wireless pen device
Operating System: Windows XP Pro*/ Linux*
Price: Classmate PC was initially targeting $200 per unit, the price has climbed and could be anywhere between $250 and $400 at launch.

Mobile applications are the key. They make city clouds work. They set a tone of collaboration, playfulness and productivity. They create demand and make money. For the next billion.

Especially when they’re open source.

Belair and Lucent teamed to develop The WAGZone (Wireless Athens Georgia Zone), the first (and arguably the best) municipal wireless network in the United States. It uses seven BelAir200 units to form a wireless network throughout 24 blocks of downtown Athens, Georgia.

The Wireless Athens Zone has developed hundreds of mobile applications. Each year, they select a theme to anchor its investigation of mobile media. Students and faculty collaborate with industry leaders to produce prototypes around this theme.

UG’s New Media Institute director, Scott Shamp, launched the WAGZone in 2002 and the Mobile Media Consortium, a public/private partnership to develop mobile applications. Sybase iAnywhere is used in many of their projects.

Java Micro Edition (Java ME) has become a popular option for creating games and applications for cell phones, since they can be emulated on a PC during the development stage and easily uploaded to the phone. Sun Microsystems released significant portions of the J2ME source code last year, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and released under the project name phoneME.

Harvard University and BBN Technologies are developing a city-wide, real-time sensor network. Their CitySense network will monitor urban weather and pollution. Each CitySense node includes a Soekris motherboard running the Linux OS with 64MB of RAM and 1GB of flash memory.

A new telematics platform by Ezurio - the Wireless Intelligent Telematics System (WITS) combines inexpensive, intelligent vehicle data logging with a cellular-free (Wi-Fi) connection. It uses a standard SQL database.

Google has a free map tool that allows users to easily create a Google Maps mashup with a few clicks. It’s designed to make it easy for people to share knowledge about their neighborhoods.

Platial has many features that Google doesn’t. Platial’s slider bar will find the best stuff from around the web using terms which have been tagged on Platial, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Local, etc. Platial’s MapKit works on Wordpress and Typepad.

The SenseWeb project at Microsoft Research is building a common platform and set of tools. Microsoft says SenseWeb will enable data owners to easily publish data and users to easily make queries of live sensor data.

At Mix ‘07, Microsoft turned the spotlight on Silverlight, its Flash challenger, and opened up about its Web strategy. Silverlight Streaming, a Microsoft-hosted service, lets people embed streaming media in a Web page. Silverlight is a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, Visual Basic .NET, C#, Python, and Ruby. Silverlight is a serious development environment that puts desktop performance on the web, says TechCrunch.

Ruby on Rails is a web application framework, that increases the speed and ease with which database-driven web sites can be created and offers skeleton code (scaffolding) from the outset. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. MySQL, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, has formed a new Telecom business unit with better performance and availability than proprietary technology.

A billion people will be using these new platforms. One City Block at a time.

Every big-city municipal wireless installation needs a Location Based Services development lab at the local community college or university. Ask your administration what they’re doing.