OLPC Australia trying to burnish its image

[ Thanks to Sam Varghese for this link. ]

"Srikhanta and I spoke on the phone for nearly 90 minutes. The organisation, which, Srikhanta tells me was only formally set up in January 2008, recently deployed 100 laptops in remote parts of Australia and announced plans for more deployments in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Since it was set up it has distributed 400 of the little XOs.

"I told him that this was a pathetic number, especially since 100 million laptops was the parent organisation's original bold ambition. That's a sixtieth of the Earth's population.

"But Srikhanta didn't want to talk about targets. He actually didn't know what the target was - he made reference to a million deployments worldwide - so let me provide some perspective. As of April 25 this year, the OLPC had half a million units either deployed or in the process of being deployed - and that was five percent of the stated target for the end of 2007.

"Incidentally, that figure is 0.5 percent of Negroponte's original, flamboyant projection.

"Any business which had this kind of record would, no doubt, be considered a failure. But not the OLPC. I see from an OLPC Australia media release that Negroponte is still referred to as a visionary."

Complete Story

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