The Fonly Institute

He came, he saw, he left muttering...

This will be short. On October 5, 2005 the word was breathlessly passed that Trevor Bayliss, famed inventor of the wind-up radio which is making progress in the developing world, would be involved in the crank-powered aspect of the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

The world waited, and I jokingly told friends that OLPC had gotten "the crank crank" to solve their power problem (note well - "crank" in this context is meant to imply dedication in the face of derision, and should not be taken as disparagement).

Then, on Nov. 25th we learned that Bayliss had withdrawn from the project, citing the incomplete status of the prototype and his perception of various failings in the project management.

Unfortunately the headline under which the latter news emerged has Bayliss "rubbishing" the project, which I do not believe the be true. I am on record as disclaiming any interpretation under which I "rubbish" the OLPC project, and I believe that Bayliss would take the same position. He has in the past experimented with powering an Apple Newton eMate with one of his generators.

I hope some day soon to discuss questions about power generation for such uses with Mr. Bayliss. I would very much like to meet him, but I will first approach him through email. We cranks must make common cause.

(Link to my original post on the OLPC)

Comments from Intel

Craig Barrett, Chairman of the Board of Intel, has made the following comment on the OLPC:

"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop--I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," Barrett was quoted as saying at a news conference in Sri Lanka. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful," added the chairman of the world's largest chip maker. "It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. We work in the area of low-cost, affordable PCs, but full-function PCs, not handheld devices and not gadgets," he added.

This comment strikes me as a fairly superficial remark which begs for more explanation. Intel is one of the early companies to make some serious commitments in the area of device and systems design for the developing world. No one knows what the definition of "gadget" is here, and no one knows how Intel knows that "full functionality" (a term whose definition keeps changing) is what "people are looking for".

Intel is working in the area of infrastructure, with a serious focus on wireless, so I would conclude that it is paying close attention to OLPC, recognizing the damage to the market that could be done by OLPC as currently conceptualized. But stay tuned for further developments - if OLPC looks like it's going forward, Intel will probably negotiate a place in the food chain. After all, OLPC now says that they will require all schools to have Internet access, and this is something Intel is positioning itself to provide.

Of course, one thing no company wants is the necessity to enter a vast new market everywhere at once - this has been the death of many a company that's tried it. Intel is nobody's fool, and one likely outcome of this game would be that they set the pace of OLPC implementation by the pace of their network extension activity. But since the expense of that effort would be significant, the pace will more likely be set by the availability of extra money for network extension.

At any rate, since Intel will be in the best position to control the rate of OLPC introduction, it will be in the perfect position to phase in its own solution in a compatible fashion. This would be perfect confirmation of one of Ted Nelson's many dicta: "Everybody wants to be second".

(My original post on this topic has been pushed below the level of visibility on the menu).

some bona fides

Apparently some people commenting on this blog are laboring under the impression that we are simple nay-sayers worthy of criticism by comparison with the dynamic folks at OLPC, who are at least taking action. I realize from this that I have not blown my own horn nearly loud enough.

in 2001 I was approached by Lee Thorn of the Jhai Foundation to discuss possible ways to honor the request made to them by the people of a Laotian village with which they were working. That request was simple - telecommunications for a group of five villages having no electricity or phone lines and shadowed by a mountain from the cell network. They wanted telephone connectivity so that they could get better prices for their agricultural produce.

The resulting design is described here. I volunteered as project engineer through the first attempt to install in February of 2003. From what I learned there and subsequently I determined that a new industry was waiting to be born, and I described it in a paper delivered at the O'reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in 2005.

Since 2003, when the Jhai prototype system was displayed at Geneva and we found that most questions referred to the pedal power generator, we have been concentrating our engineering efforts on designing an all-purpose village power utility in the 100 watt range capable of keeping batteries charged from a number of possible sources, with pedal generation as a backup. I will discuss this design in a later post.

In the meantime people that I recruited into the Jhai effort have gone on to establish their own nonprofit which has installed systems in Uganda and has more in the pipeline. The original Jhai system was installed on the Navajo reservation in Arizona in a slightly different configuration than designed for Laos, where installation was blocked (the valley now has power and cell phone coverage, though I still consider it an unfinished project).

All of this was done on the proverbial shoestring, with parts bought from the proceeds of an on-line appeal for donations over my name. Having had to approach the problem hat in hand has fed my concern that the OLPC might affect funding sources negatively.

Still, if it is to be a real industry, then investment will become available after a certain amount of "internally funded" work gets done. I've been there before, in personal computers,  and I know what to expect. On the other hand, back then we didn't have a huge distraction like OLPC occupying center stage and threatening to drive the audience away.