One Laptop Per Child Talks

Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child, presented the keynote address at this year’s Internet & Society conference, "University - Knowledge Beyond Authority" on May 31 at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

The audio podcast of the keynote is transcribed below:

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Welcome everyone and good evening! My name is Colin Maclay, I am the Managing Director of the Berkman Center, and I am thrilled to have you here for this very special event in this very special place, which although I have been around for the last four or five years now, I have never even really heard of before this event happens. So this is a big deal to be in here and our great thanks to the Dean and HLS for allowing us to be here.

So it is my great pleasure to have the honor to introduce to you Nicholas Negroponte who really as they say, needs no introduction, so I will not be tempted to engage in a long one which I list things like "Co-founder of the Media Lab" and author of "Being Digital" and all these things that many of you will be very familiar with. What I would say is that he is, as you know, a big thinker and "big-thinkerness" I think comes in volume as we have seen – not the size of the cranium, but in terms of the size of the ambition in the case of Excel, talking lots of million to start with.

It's big! It didn't surprise, I must confess, because I am harking back to a project that I was involved in with it my colleague, Mike Best, some years ago when we planned to wire an entire district or wireless an entire district in India, something on the order of 2 or three million people, which at that time and probably now would have been the most densely connected real poor place in the world, to which Nicholas said, "dangerously small!"

So this is how he thinks. He thinks big and I think the excitement of that is that it means he thinks big when he thinks about changing education and learning and this project isn't really about the device, so much rather the devices are very nifty, but it is about what it means to learning and what it means to shift the paradigms that we are all so familiar with, particularly those in the developing world.

And I think his participation today is particularly useful in that in some of our discussions earlier this afternoon, we found ourselves coming back time and again to the same old problems we have dealt with respect to copyright, file sharing [indecipherable]: these kinds of issues which comes back and forth within the US that matter, but don't matter quite the same way as they do in developing countries. And what the Excel and OLPC and all the attention and the competition, in fact, which has been so important to this movement, have generated this enthusiasm and this recasting.

I think it should remind us, those of us here, to think about a larger context, to think about the world, to think about not just solving problems in Western Europe and North America, but the impact of technology and learning and everything we do to enable them to be effectively used at a global level. So, with that, I give you, Nicholas, who will speak on the order of 20 minutes and then very generously has consented to do lots of Q&A. Just one word of note, I would say that there is a camera so that if you can stay out of this line, it would be most appreciated. So Nicholas, take it away!

[Applause]

NN: Ok. The single most important thing that I can get you to remember and everybody is going to forget, but I will keep trying to remind you and I will look like I have forgotten it periodically and that is that this is an education project, not a laptop project. It happens that the laptop is cool as hell so we all sort of spend a lot of time looking at this wonderful, marvelous laptop. But, it really is an education project and the reason it was started, was a very simple belief that all the big problems of this world, the really big ones: whether it's peace, the elimination of poverty, the environment: that they are all addressed with solutions, always with an "s", that include education, in some cases it could be just education, and in no instance are without an element of education.

So, by tackling education, particularly primary education, we think that that's, if you will, the tool to do much bigger things, and if you look around at the world there are in rough numbers, 1.2 billion children are in the primary, secondary age group. Fifty percent of them have no electricity, fifty percent are rural; usually those overlap considerably.

You have some countries like Nigeria and Pakistan where 50% of the children get no education, period. [indecipherable] sixth grade, I am talking about first graders. In Afghanistan, 75% of the young girls get no education. You got some numbers that are absolutely horrifying and what's also important is if you go to these remote places and I am talking about remote parts of poor countries, it's often a tree if you are lucky, the teacher probably has very little training or qualification. As teachers get that, they will migrate to the city; they won't want to stay in the rural in remote part. So when you look at the sort of educational landscape around the world, it is pretty grim. How do you fix that? The answer is certainly not by building more schools and training more teachers not in the sense that's a bad thing to do, but that's going to take a very, very long time.

We should certainly continue doing that, but that's not the way, at least in my life time that that's going to change. What you have to do is leverage children. So we took, if you will, pages out of our own history: We didn't wake up one morning and say we are going build the laptop! I am constantly asked "When did the idea come?". This goes back to 1967-68 when Seymour Papert first introduced Logo in April, more precisely April 11th. 1970, he gave the major public address called "Teaching Children Thinking." It certainly affected me, many of my colleagues; I was already on the faculty at MIT and at least 25% of the Media Lab since its inception had, if you will, children and learning as a component whether that is measured in the number of people, the number of dollars we spent, whatever.

So 'children in learning' is not a new topic and the twist that Seymour brought to it was that the best for a child to learn is really by doing. And in particular, if a child can write a computer program, the process of writing the program is in fact the closest you can get to thinking about thinking. And that if a child has to write a program to make a circle that child is going to understand 'circle-ness', a lot better than it being just drawn on a blackboard or being told about radiuses and diameters and circumferences and even more importantly, and I am really going back 30 years, more importantly whenever you write a program, it never works the first time so you have to debug it!

And the process of debugging is literally the closest we can come to learning about learning and we found that kids in the 1970s who were involved in programming, the debuggers if you will, actually took that experience into their own learning and how they were learning in other subjects like spelling and so on. I am a terrible speller, when I was a kid if I would have got eight out of ten words right, the 'B' was glorious: and I really loved to be in spelling and I certainly was not interested in the two words I got wrong. I really wasn't interested. The debuggers loved the two words I got wrong, you know, and they would look at that and so on.

That sounds very abstract. In 1982, Seymour and I started doing work in Senegal, Cambodia, and Pakistan, way ahead of its time the IBM PC wasn't even around. Steve Jobs gave us a few hundred Apple IIs; we were doing schools outside of Dakar, way ahead: didn't sustain itself, it didn't continue, but the one thing we learnt in '82 is that kids in Africa didn't speak English or French. In fact the kids we were working with spoke only Wolof and those played those keyboards like pianos. And when I hear people ask me, and it is often asked, who is going to teach the teachers to teach the children to use computers, I wonder what planet are they on.

Ok, there is not a person in this room who hasn't asked a child for help using a computer.[Laughter] Probably your own child and not only did you ask your child, it actually improved your relationship with your child. It established a kind of relationship that I certainly didn't have with my parents, not because my parents were horrible, they were wonderful, but it was a different child-parent relationship and the self-esteem that kids get from helping their parents, helping their aunts and uncles, helping their friends is really quite, quite important. So we said could we take some of this, and I am going to walk you through some slides very, very quickly, could we take this and sort of basically amplify it. It's kind of embarrassing to put on a pair of glasses to see which side is forward, there we go.

That's Seymour, 27 years ago outside of Dakar, and this school, which for me, was very much the motivation was built in 1999 in a village in Cambodia has an annual income, the per capita income in that village is $47 per year: I am not making a mistake, that's per year. That's less than a dollar a week; none of that dollar-a-day stuff. No electricity, no telephone, no nothing. There are now five villages, two of them don't even have a road. You can't get there in July and August. What happened in the whole set of circumstances [indecipherable] is that we connected the village, brought in the satellite you see in the background, and the kids take these laptops at home at night, they are connected broadband to the internet: they have never seen a cell phone, they have never seen a landline and they use Skype everyday.

The first English word of every kid in that picture was 'google.' [Laughter] The parents loved it when the kids took the laptops home because it was the brightest light source in the house: hey, there is no electricity, oil is expensive, oil lamps are expensive, the laptop opens and just illuminated their all living single rooms, the whole family. I looked at this and this is a kind of boutique experiment who had a tooth fairy who in this case was me, I had sort of people doing it and I said, "Does that scale, could you scale it, could you do it on sort of a planetary level…Could you do it very, very large."

If you look at the communications piece, it is very elastic: this happens to be a megabit down, and half a megabit up and you know there are 50 kids then 10 more kids come, it's ok. It's kind of elastic. But if you believe in one laptop per child there is no elasticity, get 10 more kids and you need 10 more laptops. And so we looked at this and asked ourselves, "why is that device so expensive?" and the reason it's expensive is very simple: as the electronics industry, and I can say this with some authority actually, goes the price of all electronics drops 50% every 18 months. So what do you do if that's your DNA? What you do is you add features and hopefully you can add enough features that right since your cell phone that you last bought, the next time you buy one, you are going to pay at least as much because we really don't want you to pay less next time because there are things like margins and shareholders and stuff like that.

So what you do is keep adding features and we have done this so long, the fat lady can't sing anymore. Your laptop works worse today than it did a decade ago: powering off is a nightmare, powering up takes forever, and I will bet if we took a sample in this room your laptop, unless you are using an Apple, [Laughter] crashes more than it did ever before. It's in fact we are at an inflection point. It's like an SUV you are using most of your gasoline to move this ridiculous heavy car. It just doesn't make any sense any more. Every laptop is an SUV today. So could we, in fact, revisit it, redesign from the bottom up. This isn't cost downing a laptop. Instead of trying to make it cheaper, could we rethink it? So this is what we did very quickly.

The first decision we made which quite frankly was I think was the most important is we created a nonprofit. That is absolutely critical that we were nonprofit so that the clarity of purpose was just impeccable. It's has given license to speak to whomever we want: heads of state will see us, I may sound like a laptop salesman at times, but it's a nonprofit, I don't draw a salary. So people get the picture pretty clearly that there is something different about this and I put scale there not because of trying to get the component cost down which is obvious, because you can corporate strategy. I will give you a very specific example. When I started this project I went, because of the Media Lab you know all these characters, ok. I am older than most of them. So you know them. So they usually take my phone call. Certainly when I started wired magazine they took my phone call, but they even took it afterwards and went to the display manufacturer and said we need not too bigger one, it can have some color defects, this just has to be very inexpensive.

And he said to me, "Nicholas, our corporate strategy is to make large, bright, without any color artifacts or defects displays so our corporate strategy and your project are just incompatible. We are sorry we can't help you." And I said, "That's a shame because we need a 100 million units a year…" [Laughter] And he said, "Well, let me rethink." And they did. And the display manufacturer today just invested one billion dollars in a fab to make the display you see on that laptop. Why would a manufacturer invest one billion? It's because it's big. The scale is there and there is the motivation to do it. So the real issue of scale is changing corporate strategy. So when they come to you and start whining, no whining allowed, we are taking about tens of millions and it really gets things moving in a very, very different way.

It also gets people angry. The partner's art is important perhaps except the two in the upper right which you may have never heard of are Quanta makes 40 per cent of the world's laptops. So your laptop was probably made by Quanta. They make most of the Apples, Dells, HPs, Compaqs so on and the one below which I am sure you have never heard of is the world's largest producer of plastics and Taiwan's second largest producer of LCDs. There are very important players. In fact, when Quanta joined, it was very important because a lot of people initially said "Great project, wonderful, but they can't do it." And that meant one of two things: 'They' mainly us as a bunch of academics couldn't do it or it meant that nobody could do it. And that was kind of with the street was thinking. Quanta comes along, raises their head, and says "We will do it." It took the wind of everybody's sails. They said "it's going to happen." So now the question isn't "will it happen", but kind of "when", "how much" and so on. So Quanta was very important.

We announced it with Kofi Annan a year and half ago. Anything you do with Kofi Annan gets a lot of press; what's important was the picture, this was the machine we showed in Tunis. It is a charming image, absolutely unrealistic: we had wires under the table, it was working just fine, but what everybody remembers is the pencil yellow crank: Absolutely critical. That pencil yellow crank was in everybody's mind. I still today travel with the laptop and people say, "Where's the crank?" The crank is off-board, it's on the AC adaptor we have cranks but having it on the picture, unrealistic as that was, you really don't want it on the laptop, I assure you, was absolutely perfect. Because people realized there is a toy-like look to it. It doesn't need to be plugged into the wall and it just cast the right image way back then.

We have done something different that's if you are interested in the technical stuff that's what we have done: Bless your heart, Windows…now what has happened! Now what have I done! [Laughter] Jesus, I don't want to end the slide show, isn't this sweet. It's a battle, it's a real battle. Here we go. Doesn't it ruin your day? It ruins mine everyday.

There are three things in bold that I just wanted to put there which just emphasize there are several laptops, there are people from one laptop per child... May be you can raise your hands... I see there are couple of people in the back afterwards if you haven't played with it, please do. Are these B3s?

Audience: They are mostly B2s.

NN: Any B3s here?

Audience: We have pre B3 in fact.

NN: You have pre-B3 in fact. It's one back there that is this big and is very really quiet. Do you have [indecipherable] ?

Audience: [inaudible]

NN: Good. There are three things that you should know. One is that the average power consumption which is very important is less than two watts compared to your laptop which is 35 or 40. You have probably heard of the Classmate which is Intel's so called knock-off that has a 65-watt power supply. If Libya were to adopt the Classmate, they have to build a power plant. That number is really important. You also want to be able use human power – everybody in this room, since nobody would turn out to be malnourished or small, we can generate about 15 to 20 watts of power. So you want a 1 to 10 ratio.

The meshnetwork is important because you go into places that they have to make the network in the dual mode display, when I not going to be able to see it very well in here. But I was in Washington at the World Bank today. So I used it in the broad sunlight and it's just incredible. It's about the three times the resolution of your laptop in black and white reflective mode out in the sunlight. Kids have to use it in the sunlight and the reading experience has got to be as good or better than paper. So it is a different objective.

So this is the laptop which you will see. I won't spend much time on it, but it works in sort of a games mode and you have got the right person, SJ to tell you all about that and it works in other modes. Everybody smiles when the ears, let's get the ears up, it has got the ears back up. The ears are up, everybody smiles. The reason for that is because of those antennae you get very long reach. I was in Vietnam at the meeting in a conference room, about 30 people had their laptops open and nobody got a wireless signal except me. Those ears really, really help a great deal and anyway it folds up. So a few more comments and this picture to me means a lot may be not to you. This was the first one going down the real assembly line with the real people, with the real... I mean this is real.

In other words, these are not hand assembled and made. We had a lot of those: I used to carry plastic models. These are off a real assembly line outside of Shanghai. This particular assembly lines makes everything, it makes iBooks, HPs. It takes them 23 minutes to change the assembly line and a different laptop is moving down it. This particular line can make 40,000 a month. They can run multiple lines. They are tooling up to make a million a month by December. Just to put that in context, a million month isn't a very big number but the world production of laptops, taking all the manufacturers world-wide Japanese, Korean, American [indecipherable] is five million a month.

We are telling you that by the end of December we are ramped to do 20% of the current world production is one of the reasons we are getting so much attention and grief. It does not backspace without bringing me into this mode. That's probably not Window's fault. That's just one of the power generating devices little bit bigger than a hockey puck when you generate this way, you can generate more electricity. The mesh network is probably.. is there a wireless signal in here in the room?

Audience: Little bit.

NN: So if there is little bit, we should be able to get it, right? So we will see. We try to go into the most rural and most remote places. We encourage governments to do it in the rural places first. Peru just agreed to do that. They will run schools in the most remote regions. In Pakistan we are looking at Kashmir and the northern territories we are looking at the areas that separate Afghanistan and in the case of Kashmir, we will probably use the military to bring the stuff in because just there's no way to get there. The General who runs the special command operations is basically has given us their helicopters, their trained troops to bring the stuff in and they will come in on helicopters.

There's lot of local sub mesh, sub satellite stuff that gets done. I won't go into it. You will see that the interface is designed for sharing. Sharing is absolutely critical. This mesh network isn't just a means to connect the kids in places that are unconnected, but the underlying principle and Walter Bender who is not here today is really thanks to him, is that learning is about sharing and about creating things together. The whole interface is based when you get on there, you see who's on there and so on and so forth. It also runs Windows and may even run the Apple software. It does a lot of things.

Here are the countries we are launching in, the color coding is not too important. The original countries were big: they were Argentina, Nigeria and Thailand. The idea was to get three countries. The head of state in each case agreed to it. We got rolling. One of the problems with going to big countries is they are just that: they are big countries. So there are also markets. And we found ourselves in the cross-fire, if you will, between AMD and Intel so there is certain amount of casualty along the way.

These are the countries that are currently involved. If you ask me which one has signed up and sent us a check. The answer is none yet because we don't we ask them for that. We want them to basically launch it and in some cases, Rwanda, Libya, and Uruguay: they have agreed to do every child in the country. And to me that's stunning. If you can really do every single child in a country and those are noticeably smaller countries, it's to me, very, very important.

A few pictures and then I will stop. Some of these just came in this week. These kids are Cambodia, they are in the same school you saw at the beginning. They are kind of pros, they have been living with laptops for quite a while. We get them to do a lot of testing for us. This class room does the most testing. They have been really brutal.

This one is in Nigeria. First of all, we didn't pay attention. Few of us can tell from the pictures, but these desks are sloped. We hadn't thought about that. So the person who's there tells us that every 30 minutes there is a crash. One of these things slides off the desk and there is a crash. And they have even started in the school, a laptop hospital and the kids run the laptop hospital. I would love to put a little, you know how in things says that if you open this up, the warranty is invalid. I would like to put a little sign on the back which says "Warranty not valid until you open it up!" because we want the kids to open these things up, to repair them.

I don't know what you are holding up, what is it?

Audience: It's a magazine…[indecipherable]

NN: Good, good. Great. Anyway, this is in Uruguay. This was the day the President of Uruguay went to that school. So I can't tell you if the kids are ecstatic about meeting the President or seeing the laptops, but the President was only there for 20 minutes and the laptops have been there for about two weeks. What's happening in all these schools, for example one common denominator is that the spouses of the teachers are complaining because they are all going into school on the weekends and staying late at night.

It's thing like that that are in the first school I showed in the slide, the population of first grade doubled last year. They are not coming from other villages. It's just the kids in school. Last year, the first grade started telling the other kids in the village that school is cool. It's fun. What happens and this is true in a lot of places, but it is even more true in the developing world, you go into a class room like the one in Nigeria. You go into a first grade class and the eyes are big and they are wide open. It's kind of room full of these enthusiastic sponges: they just want to absorb everything and by the fourth or fifth grade the heads are down, they don't look at you in the face.

And there is that belief that kids drop out of school in fifth/sixth grade to go work in the fields because there is an economic need: Rubbish. They drop out because school is boring. It's not only boring, it's often irrelevant. If we didn't believe that, we probably would operate very differently, but the passion for learning is the only thing we want these kids to get. We look at more like a program where you are inoculating people against ignorance. If you want to build a vaccine or you want to vaccinate, you don't do it by doing just a village. You certainly can't do with a control group to see, but this is really done and this is more like vaccination. Two minutes and I will stop.

Target, I probably should edit this slide, it's probably more, 2009. We are subject to the cost of, believe it or not, raw materials. Nickel has tripled since we started this project. Literally, tripled cost per ton. So we are taking nickel out of it and we are leaving nickel and going to lithium ferrite just get back to a price. The cost of things float. We are currently at about a 176 we can get down to 50 etc. Grey markets, very important in these countries, to make sure that we can deal with that issue. There are two ways of doing it. One is interesting, but not fail-safe and the other, we think added to it makes it fail-safe.

The interesting one is you don't have a grey market if there is no secondary market. So in this country, thousands of cars are stolen everyday, but not one single post office truck has ever been stolen in the United States. Because there is no secondary market for post office trucks and the reason is they always look like post office trucks, you can spray paint it and so on. So the idea was could we make the laptop sufficiently distinct, not have grey market, not have a commercial market I should say and that that would help the problem. Doesn't solve it, but helps it.

The second thing is that there is a lot of technology in it: for example, if it is stolen before the kids get it, it is inoperable. If it's stolen after a child gets it, it can be disabled remotely or if it is not on the mesh network for certain period of time 24, 36, 48 hours it also gets disabled. You got to tell people these things whether they are going to steal a truck for them anyway, but really there is a lot of technology in there. In fact the young man who is in charge of that, did a such a good job he gave the keynote at a very large computer and security conference recently. One of the press stories that came out afterwards was "million dollar security for 100-dollar laptop" is the title of the story. I was thrilled.

Again I don't want to really go through this stuff. There are many ways of paying for this, so money is not really the problem. Launching is the problem. This is not an incremental process. You don't five thousand out and get then 50,000 and then 500,000. This is like a marathon where there are people standing there with little cord and somebody pulls the trigger and then "boom" it goes and once the avalanche starts. We are at that point in time and I mean in the next 30 days, and I don't mean the three months to pull that trigger.

So, if you see me even sounding hysterical, it is because I am. We got to pull this trigger very soon and we need the means to do it. There's one last photo that just came in a few hours ago. So I thought I would end on that photograph. And we put a handle on this thing so that people could carry it around and this was just sent a few hours ago from Nigeria and I thought I would show it to you. Thank you very much.

[Applause]

There is a roving mike, we have no secrets. You can ask anything you want, including controversial, hard questions.

Christopher Burnick: Thank you very much for the talk, it was terrific.

NN: You have to say who you are by name for other people to know. The camera to at least record.

Christopher Burnick: Christopher Burnick, student of the [indecipherable], North Eastern University, Department of Free Culture. My question is well first of all this: You jokingly said that may be you will put on the back that the warranty is void, if not opened. Well how do you relate this to the operating system? I think it was rather recently that it became clear that Microsoft would provide an operating system as an option. It is not clear that that operating system is going to be open; kids are not going to be able to tamper with it, play with it, break it, and learn to fix it the same way they can do with other operating systems. How does that change the goal or what is the kind of the deployment idea with that.

NN: It is a very important question. OLPC is an open source house, open source operation and we have five principles we would require each country to abide by for us to be even there one of which is open source. One of the reasons to put or at least to have Windows also run on it is it's hard for me to tell somebody I am open source where the keyword is open, but I am going to exclude something. So the fact that it can run seems to me in keeping with being open.

The fact that itself isn't open, nor is the AMD processor, there is a processor in there the schematics of which I cannot give you. There are other components in there that aren't open in the way you and I might want to use 'open'. But as long as 'open' is, if you will, the basic DNA of this machine, by putting Windows on it, it allows governments to hedge, it allows them to feel that it is not a toy, it actually brings a certain amount of advantage. If I were to tell you tonight, which I am not going to because it is not true, if I were to tell you tonight we are putting Windows and that is our operating system, everybody at OLPC would resign tomorrow.

Audience: And the price would go up…

NN: And the price would go…except that notice that Microsoft dropped it to $3 recently and the drop to $3 is very important and we encourage them to do that. If you read stories about it, you would see in the second line, certainly in the first paragraph, usually in the second line, sometimes even in the first line it said "because of OLPC". And Intel made the Classmate. A lot of people did not think. We don't have shareholders, we could declare victory and pack up our tent: I don't need to make a laptop.

But if we did that, price of Windows will go up, Classmate would disappear. We have to keep going, we have to remain open, and we have to keep driving the price down: if nothing else, to keep perpetuating this and to keep the slope down in terms of price/cost.

Michael Rand: My name is Michael Rand and I am a former educator, got a Masters in Education at Teachers College Columbia and now I am a MBA student at [indecipherable] College, and as a marketing major I heard your presentation on 60-minutes and I think you described geeks around you to help build the machine. My sense is that given what I am doing now. Wouldn't it have been better and this is the question if you had also brought along some marketing people and may be some human resource people, some people from the Sloan School next door to where you guys are doing your work, and if you had you think that would have made a difference vis-à-vis the problems you are having getting that firm number of orders so that you can actually go ahead and build the machine? And what would you differently now that you know these problems, if you had the chance to do it all over again?

NN: We have a board, we have a lot of people who advise us from the business side and gurus who write text books on it and you know the Sloan's School and the Media Lab have an affinity because there is always the odd-ducks on campus – we never played by the rules: We broke rules and Lester Theroux who is my counterpart at Sloan's School broke rules and there was a great affinity. In fact, people if you say, Sloan's School and Media Lab they roll their eyeballs at MIT because we are usually the foreign in the Institute site. So a lot of these people are close friends, people who helped in the beginning. I go to them for their advice all the time and I usually invert the sign bit:

They say do that, I do the opposite because they are so trained to commercial marketing ventures that things like first the market, and I say, "Boy! That's just not what we are doing!" It is almost as if you are starting a religion and you want this to spread, and you want people to… But not as if you trying to suddenly introduce a product and have it go through the normal channel and so on. So something like 60- minutes. God, we couldn't have asked for something better. That was as good as it gets on 60-minutes and it was very important because it just got a message out albeit to an American audience that I thought was very important. You hear people say, "Well you know you are going to make it or not make it!" You are damn right we are going to make it. There is just absolutely no question.

What might happen is we might slip 15 days, we might slip 20 days, we might have to do something slightly differently. But I wouldn't go back and surround ourselves with marketing people. Depending on how you count, you can't really count the open source community, but if you count the people who work on this day in and day out, there are 250 people at the moment. Most of them are in Taiwan, most of them relate to Quanta and Chemei but back here in Cambridge we may be 35 or 40, and there are people in countries and so on. It is not a big number, but whatever that number is, if you ask how many people are in whatever the equivalent of marketing and sales is, you are looking at it. It's one person. And the reason it's one person is this much more credible. It's no secret…what?

Audience: [inaudible]

NN: If you are looking for a job, come see us. [Laughter] We have to change. It's not going to be that forever. But right now, the charm of that is quite important and it's not as if we have a PR department, a sales department, a marketing department and so on. If we did, these guys wouldn't see me. But they do see us. If at the end, they all run out and buy Classmates that's terrific. That's wonderful. So it is a funny thing since we don't have shareholders, we don't have the normal issues of releasing things. I wouldn't change that, the other things I would change, but I don't think I would change that.

Audience: Why will the laptop not be available commercially?

NN: It will be available commercially under some brand which has nothing to do us and will be probably sold on a basis of pay for two and get one. Just like when you buy a shirt, you can pay for one and get two, we are going to do the opposite: pay for two, and get one. So when you buy one, a kid in Africa gets one. When that happens, let me say, 8-12 months from now, it will be somebody else not us.

The reason we don't do it and the reason that isn't the economic model from the onset is that it is too incremental. And if we start doing anything commercial, then the clarity of purpose goes away. So, we have tried to keep it relatively pure: we may strike up some commercial deals like selling the display, or the rights to it, or doing these buy two get one deals. But they are going to happen after a launch: we have got to launch it differently.

Jean Diaz: Hi I am Jean Diaz. I am from [indecipherable] Leslie University. I am a teacher educator. So I really appreciate the way that you began with saying that all the world's problems today have solutions and they all start in education and I really believe that. First of all, I want to thank you for beginning there because that's I think the basis of what you are doing and I really admire that. My questions are about… I have lots of, lots of questions, so I will just start with one. And that is the vision of what kids do with this, Where will they go, and what do you do in terms of this network that they have setup? Or, how do you vision where they go with this because my understanding with kids in all my teaching is that they always do things you don't expect them to do and that's what so exciting, but in terms of learning and what kind of visioning have you done with that and where does this go? The other question I have which you don't address is the issue of plastic is forever and waste.

NN: I will, I will address that because it turns out that this laptop is the greenest laptop that has ever been built by an order of magnitude, not by 20% but by a factor of 10. First of all, there are none of the… there is no mercury in it, there is none of heavy metals, there is none other stuff by measures, and I forget... SJ, where are you? What is the name of the environmental agent? They have a gold medal that they have never issued, and they came to us and after seeing the laptop they said we are going to make platinum and want issued to you. And so the environmental side of this and it's not green for that reason, it's green for another reason which I may tell you. There's a story.

But what the kids will do, the most important thing to us is that it will be seamless in their lives. That they use it for music, they use it for games, they use it to look at movies, they use it for books, they use it for communicating, they use it in school, out school the whole thing the kids will use very seamlessly so that learning isn't just what you do at school. It's life. So we look at it from that point of view. In each country, there is a very, very different approach to education.

Some countries we have to go in with what I call a "Trojan Horse" approach. And that is simply to say this is merely an e-book. So it will come with a 100 books, a 1000 books, it will come with the text books and so on and so forth and that's it. It's not disruptive, kids use it, they don't have text books. Brazil and China both spend $19 per year per child on text books. So, just going in as a text book is economically justifying it.

Then at night the kids come out like in a Trojan Horse they come out and use it as a laptop and this is slightly subversive, but it doesn't, doesn't, disrupt school if they think of school in a very fixed and disciplined away. The other would be to take Seymour Papert approach from the get-go and to really have this much more constructionist, much more engaging in the class and so on and so forth and there are mixes of this in between.

Again, I just got along with that picture this afternoon, extraordinary report from Nigeria where the teachers, you know, they just completely change the way the teachers teach. And there is this image we've cast and it is our mistake, because we have somehow done this, that we are kind of anti-teacher, anti-school and so on. No, we are pro-child. The way we approach child inside and outside school.

Let me tell you this story why it's green and then I will stop because unfortunately I have to do my usual trek, which is catch an airplane.

When we started the project, I said we went to Brazil, Nigeria, Thailand. I knew previously Takshin Shrinawathra who was at that time the Prime Minister of Thailand and I knew Lula not well, but I did not know Obasanjo who was the President of Nigeria. So I go to see Obasanjo, who if you have ever seen pictures of him, he always wears robes, never wears suits pretty big guy with flowing robes, had a basically cabinet meeting in his villa. The villa is equivalent to the White House and there was this long table with all the ministers sitting at one end and me all alone on the other hand, head empty, comes into the room with his blue flowing robes and everybody stands up and everybody sits down.

I had never met the man, he points his finger at me, "Professor Negroponte! I have one word for your project..." It's a cliffhanger, everybody is waiting for the one word and the one word was "enchanting." I said "wow!" I went back on such a high, this was two years ago, I said "enchanting". Yes god damn it, this is enchanting. That and Lula and Takshin supporting, I went back.

We made the first machines went to Nigeria. That's the Nigerian flag. The colors of the Nigerian flag are white and green. And that's how it became white and green. The last I saw him I brought him one, I said, "The only reason to come and see you is to thank you." He is no longer the President of Nigeria as of about two or three weeks ago. But that's how it became green and white. On that note, I am going to stop because I really do have to leave. Thank you very much.

[Applause]