Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan have just formally launched the $100 laptop project at WSIS. This is a really amazing project initiated by the One Laptop Per Child organisation chaired by Negroponte with research being performed at the MIT Media Lab which he also heads.

Listening to the webcast it’s evident that they’ve set themselves such a huge list of things to have, it’s just incredible that’s its so cheap. Governments will have to buy at least 1m units, but for that they get a machine which has a dual-mode sunlight-readable display, wifi on such low power that it can still be used to provide a mesh node when the machine is turned off, a power budget that can be provided by a crank, and in multiple colours (probably).

CTO Mary Lou Jepsen said “We basically reinvented the laptop” and it really sounds like it.

Behaving as an ebook is really important because they’re selling it to governments as a “trojan horse.” Buy this which will last five years instead of five years worth of books at $20. Selling through book channels means that it must at least replicate all that a book can do. The dual-mode display runs at 150dpi in black and white mode and Negroponte says one minute of cranking should give over thirty minutes of reading.

The device will use open source software, probably Linux, probably provided by Red hat. OPLC are promising that it will support every single language, even small ones. This is important too as it allows language networks to grow. The internet has a huge English language network, which means the language is very strong. Unless they eventually move on to digital media, languages risk death.

Thailand and Brazil are the most eager countries to adopt at the moment. The plan to launch in six large countries first, two in Asia, two in Africa, one in mid-east, one in South America. Smaller countries hard because of sales force issues!Negroponte thinks that perhaps the UNDP could help with smaller countries later. On the subject of why not try to do this through industry because of the great difficulty of dealing with governments, Negroponte argues that education is a public good. He needs to take the hard road because they can’t be seen to sanction governments not being the providers of education.

Could industry compete, creating an even cheaper laptop in the long run? Alan Kay and Nick Negroponte would love to see it!

Alan Kay say it’s a “Platform for content,” and warns that we’re focussing on the machine when the difficult problem is really the support structures around the machine, training teachers, delivering content and so on. It’s good to hear him say this. Listening to the entire webcast in fact is reassuring, this is being run by a group of people who have done non-for-profit projects before, know the pitfalls and are bursting with ideas to get things moving forwards.

Negroponte would like to see a time when American and European kids sponsor kids in poor countries by buying them a unit and being paired up. I’d love to do this, send or perhaps even take a crate full of them to a group of kids. It’s a great project and will surely have many positive and subtle benefits far beyond what people have envisaged so far. Interesting evidence of this comes from Negroponte’s assertion that this is a platform to “learn learning”, not just one topic, but the skills to educate themselves in later life.