MIT Team Working on a $100 Laptop

"Negroponte, founder and director of the MIT's Media Lab, has long had an interest in providing information and communications technology (ICT) to developing countries. He has worked in Senegal, Costa Rica, India and, most recently, Cambodia, where he and his wife Elaine set up a school - the Elaine & Nicholas Negroponte School - to teach English and IT to schoolchildren. Their son also joined them and installed satellite and Wi-Fi links to connect the 25 Panasonic ToughBooks the children had been given.

Having seen the changes that can be wrought with a bit of IT infrastructure, Negroponte wants to do more to bridge the digital divide between rich and poor by providing inexpensive computing to schoolchildren across the developing world. Google and chip maker AMD have committed $2m each to the project, and the MIT team is talking with Samsung, Motorola and News Corporation. They hope to have the first working prototype ready by September 1 and samples by the end of the year..."