OLPC
Latest
Oculus exec Mary Lou Jepsen resigns to create new MRI tech
Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is well known for her work in pioneering display technology as a co-founder of OLPC, former head of the display division at Google X and lately Oculus VR, which she joined about a year ago. Tonight during the Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision awards banquet, the founder and former CEO of Pixel Qi capped off a keynote speech by announcing she will resign her post as Executive Director of Engineering and Head of Display Technologies at Oculus. Instead, she will focus on "curing diseases with new display technology," by bringing MRI machines to every doctor' office in the world. It's an ambitious goal, but a peek at Dr. Jepsen's history shows why she's the person to tackle it. For more info on what she might be working on, there's video of a recent TED talk with Dr. Jepsen discussing MRI and fMRI tech, which you can watch after the break.
OLPC's modular hybrid laptop could last schools for years
The One Laptop Per Child project is going modular. The non-profit's Australian partner, One Education, is gearing up to launch a new hybrid laptop in a few weeks that will let you swap out components similar to Google's Project Ara. There aren't any official details yet, but Ink, Bits, and Pixels has managed to dig up several images that give us a basic sense of what's going on. Dubbed the XO-Infinity, it can be used as both a laptop and tablet; it shares the colorful aesthetic from current OLPC devices (XO-4 tablet and laptop); and it looks like even kids will be able to easily change its different modules. And, if it works as we expect, it could end up serving as a platform for an infinitely upgradeable machine that will last you for years, making it ideal for schools and international markets. One Education has confirmed that the XO-Infinity will be officially announced soon, but for now it's not revealing much else.
Documentary shows how One Laptop Per Child helps kids in Peru (update)
The staff changes, massive layoffs and the shutdown of its entire Boston office over the years make the One Laptop Per Child program sound like a huge failure. But this documentary by filmmaker Michael Kleiman shows that OLPC really did change some of its recipients' lives, particularly those who've never heard of computers and the internet before the organization gave them laptops of their own. The documentary, called WEB, looks at the OLPC rollout in the poor areas of Peru, showing kids typing on their small laptops in dingy classrooms and teaching their parents how to use Google underneath trees. It's been shown in several film festivals before, but it's now available for download from iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Instant Video, Xbox Video, Sony Entertainment Network and Vudu.
Bringing internet to the Amazon takes more than cables and laptops
Internet access is something most of us likely take for granted, but for portions of the developing world, reliable connectivity isn't available. The New York Times recently cast its lens on an ultra-tiny Peruvian village and the struggle to install and maintain a solid communications system, chronicling the journey and hardships of maintaining telecommunications in the middle of the jungle. There, a a busted internet connection takes as much as a year-and-a-half to repair and One Laptop Per Child computers are charged via a series of car batteries. Despite the village being a world away, however, there are familiar arguments. The issue of not having enough laptops for everyone in the village (some 65 people) is countered by the argument that they serve as little more than entertainment or an anesthetic; if the village had a road, the kids could travel to bigger cities nearby and be inspired by the real world instead of cyberspace. It seems that some things don't change regardless of where you live. [Image credit: markg6/Flickr]
OLPC shows off its two new kid-friendly tablets (hands-on)
OLPC's Giulia D'Amico swung by our CES stage a little while ago with the organization's two new tablets in tow - so, naturally, we kindly asked her to stay behind a while, so we could spend a little quality time with the devices. The 7-inch XO-2 looks nearly identical to its predecessor, the company's first-ever consumer-facing device. It's still a bit chunky and the rear has that same plasticky dimpled design. There's also that great Yves Béhar-designed silicone slipcase. The really significant changes are all inside the slate, including a quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of stage and built-in GPS and Bluetooth. The custom Android software will remain largely the same, as well (built this time on top of KitKat), though the company is added more content to its offering. The 10.1-inch XO-10, meanwhile, shares most of the same internals as its little brother, but brings a truly sleek industrial design that puts the little one to shame. There's a green metal back (the final color has yet to be determined, though we like the fact that it matches the company's other offerings) and a much slimmer profile. Of course, the thinner design calls into question just how rugged the bigger model will ultimately be.
OLPC's got two new consumer kid tablets and accessories for CES
After months of waiting, we were pretty psyched to finally get our hands on the final version of One Laptop Per Child's first consumer-facing device, first announced this time last year. The anticipation may have played a role in our disappointment, but inevitably we just couldn't get behind what was essentially a rebadged Vivitar device from an organization that had done so much hardware innovating for its non-profit wing. OLPC is celebrating this week's big Vegas show with the announcement of two new slates, and while Vivitar is still the hardware partner for this go 'round, the game has certainly been upped in the spec department. And the company's also offering up two sizes: the 7-inch XO-2 and the 10.1-inch XO-10, which sort of throws a wrench in what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward naming process. On the whole, the specs are pretty similar with the two devices, right down to the 1,200 x 600 resolution on both. Inside each, you'll find a quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage and built-in Bluetooth and GPS. The 7-incher will give you seven hours of battery on a charge and its bigger brother should give you more than 12. Both systems are running a heavily modified version of Android KitKat and ship with 100 pre-loaded English and Spanish apps, which the company values at around $200. The tablets themselves will run you $149 and $199, respectively. Also new are those digital microscopes and telescopes that we saw in early forms last year, along with a wireless keyboard, which was designed by superstar designer/OLPC pal, Yves Béhar.
10 tech non-profits worth donating to before 2014
Granted, the holidays didn't exactly leave us flush with cash, but as every charity we've ever contributed to has reminded us via e-mail over the past couple of days, the year is drawing to an end, which means we're running out of time to rack up those tax deductions. And what better way to do that than by donating to a cause you really believe in? In the seasonal spirit of not entirely altruistic giving, we've asked our editors to suggest some of their favorite non-profit tech organizations. Sure there's an endless list of non-tech orgas we could have included like, say, The Red Cross, the Humane Society or even the first amendment defending Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, but for the sake of brevity -- and staying comfortably within our own wheelhouse -- here's a list of tech non-profits to get you started. If we skipped one of your favorites, feel free to add it in the comments below.
Switched On: What's become of the $100 laptop
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Back in 2006, at the height of interest in the One Laptop Per Child-fueled $100 computer, I embarked on a quest to find such a device on the market -- with a catch. Since there were no such computers readily available in retail channels, the search was conducted via eBay for used, but still-capable PCs that cost less than $100. (It was a lot easier to find one that ran Windows than Mac OS.) The past seven years have seen a lot of changes in the broader personal computing market. The Hisense Sero 7 LT, which arrived at Walmart earlier this year, exemplifies the kind of product that can now be considered the "$100 laptop" for the American mass market. Since then, others have followed. What it delivers, though, varies widely from what we thought such a device might look like.
Geeking out young: gadgets and coding need to be core in US schools
Remember readin', 'riting and 'rithmatic? According to our Rethinking Education panelists, the three R's need to be joined by a "C" -- for computer science -- or the US risks getting run over by more progressive nations. That was the opinion of Rodrigo Arboleda from the One Laptop Per Child organization, who spoke at Engadget Expand along with Jeff Branson from SparkFun and Pat Yongpradit from Code.org. Pat kicked off the discussion by playing his organization's YouTube video featuring the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, which has been seen by some 10 million viewers. While motivational, it emphasized that only one in 10 American schools teach students how to code, a deficit that all three speakers found scandalous. Arboleda chalked it up to an educational system that still processes students like a factory that doesn't take an individual student's ability to learn into account. He added that more progressive countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Finland might soon be pumping out more computer scientists and engineers thanks to a strong emphasis on coding.
Live from Expand: Rethinking Education
Technology is revolutionizing the way kids are learning, from tablets and laptops in classrooms, to introducing coding curricula in public schools. We'll be talking to representatives of three very different educational tech companies, including One Laptop Per Child, SparkFun and Code.org. November 10, 2013 3:05:00 PM EST Follow all of Engadget's Expand coverage live from New York City right here!
Don't miss Wikimedia, OLPC, Leap Motion, Voltaic and more at Expand NY!
We're getting more and more impatient waiting for Expand New York with every subsequent speaker announcement -- and we've got five more names to lay on you right now. This November, we'll be joined by Wikimedia's director of mobile, Tomasz Finc, Leap Motion's director of developer relations, Avinash Dabir, The One Laptop Per Child Association's chairman and CEO, Rodrigo Arboleda, founder / CEO of Voltaic Systems Shayne McQuade and Michael Carroll, a professor of law at American University Washington College of Law and founding member of Creative Commons. And, of course, we've already announced a number of folks who will be joining us on November 9th and 10th, including LeVar Burton, Reggie Watts, Ben Heck, Peter Molyneux, Ben Huh and speakers from companies like Google, Sony, Pebble, Adafruit and The Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and we've still got more to come. Check out the full list below.
Weekly Roundup: Peripheral Vision, Samsung's rumored Galaxy Gear, Nexus 4 price drop, and more!
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Editor's Letter: Color commentary
In each issue of Distro, Executive Editor Marc Perton publishes a wrap-up of the week in news. There's a very good chance you're reading this on a tablet. Distro is, after all, first and foremost, a tablet magazine. There's also a reasonable chance you're reading this on a computer. Distro works on Windows 8; we have a platform-neutral PDF version; and most of what we publish in Distro also appears on Engadget. There is, however, almost no chance that you're reading this on a color e-book reader (no, not a color tablet; an e-paper reader). And that's too bad. In this week's Distro, Sean Buckley tells the story of color e-paper, a once-promising technology that simply couldn't make it in a tablet-centric world. Despite years of development work and the tantalizing promise of high-resolution, daylight-readable, low-power displays, color e-paper was rendered an also-ran once the iPad began gaining popularity and low-cost Android tablets followed suit. Major e-reader makers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo, all released their own color tablets -- at prices below their $300-plus color e-ink competitors. That strategy wasn't without its fallout; B&N eventually got out of the tablet market, and Kobo continues to struggle to gain market share in the US. But color e-book readers fared even more poorly, and color e-paper's future is now tied to other devices, such as smartwatches.
Daily Roundup: Accessories buyer's guide, OLPC XO Tablet review, Employee-only white Xbox One, and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
OLPC XO Tablet review
In late 2007, One Laptop Per Child launched its "Give 1 Get 1" program. While the do-gooder organization had originally shrugged off suggestions that it should offer its XO Laptop as a commercial product, OLPC finally gave in, letting consumers get their own device for a $399 donation (that price also paid to send one to a child in a developing nation). Unveiled back at CES, the Android-powered XO Tablet marks OLPC's first proper foray into the consumer space, with the device available for $149 at major retailers like Walmart and Target. So is it any good?%Gallery-195835%
OLPC's XO Tablet gets July 16th Walmart launch date, more retailers following soon
June has come and gone with nary a sign of One Laptop Per Child's first consumer-facing device. Granted, we spent some time with the final version of the XO Tablet during an Engadget Show shoot back in mid-May, so it seems like the Vivitar-designed slate may not be too far off, after all. Yesterday, the company quietly announced that the slate will get a July 16th Walmart-exclusive launch -- a date that will find the device available through the mega-retailer's site. As for the delay, the company told us, "optimal dates are determined by multiple factors, and we're working with retailers and our partners to ensure the XO launches in a timely and appropriate summer window." According to the post, more retailers in Europe and North and South America will follow "soon." As for specifics of additional availability, the company says, "there will be a formal, detailed announcement on the launch from OLPC and its partners within the next several days." Lilliputing dug out the above little piece of news from a much larger post aimed at refuting a report that things are "fall[ing] apart at the company," due in part to the loss of some key employees. OLPC's post titled, bluntly, "Response to Inaccurate Information Recently Posted About OLPC," suggests that such reports are "contextually inaccurate" and that recent developments at the company mean that, "necessary adjustments in the composition of the OLPC team were required."
The Engadget Show 44: Education with Google, OLPC, Code.org, LeapFrog, SparkFun, Adafruit and more
It's time to rethink the way our children learn. It's all a bit overwhelming, attempting to restructure the age-old classroom model, particularly in a system as bogged down in bureaucratic red tape as education. This month, however, we packed up our things and toured the country to find out how educational institutions are adopting new models to help reinvent the learning process -- rather than sitting idly by, waiting for the system to change around them. Naturally, technology is playing a huge role in that shift, moving from models of teaching to models of learning, where students can explore, express themselves and learn at their own speed. We kick things off in Chicago, where Jackie Moore, a former systems programmer, is teaching inner city students how to build robots in a shopping mall basement at LevelUP. Next up, we head Miami and California, to see how technologies like the iPad, Google Chromebook and One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop are being implemented in three schools, including interviews with educators, students, OLPC CEO Rodrigo Halaby and Google director of product management, Rajen Sheth. We'll also talk to component retailers SparkFun and Adafruit about the initiatives those companies have implemented to help kids learn electronics at an early age, and then we sit down with American Museum of Natural History president, Ellen Futter, to discuss the ways the New York City institution is redefining itself for the 21st century. We've also got an interview with Ali Partovi, a serial entrepreneur, who is working to make computer science an essential part of the elementary-level STEM program, through Code.org. Richard Culatta, the acting director of the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology discusses how devices can help target the learning process for individual students and LeapFrog CEO John Barbour tells us how his company is rethinking the educational toy. All that plus prognostications from John Roderick and some really sweet moose dioramas can be yours to enjoy after the break.
The Daily Roundup for 05.16.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
OLPC XO Tablet final version hands-on (video)
The XO Tablet that One Laptop Per Child was shuttling around the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES back in January wasn't quite the final version of the company's first consumer-facing device. Now, a few weeks out from its official June 1st online availability, OLPC's finally got its hands on the shipping product. It's designed by Vivitar, a price-conscious manufacturer hand-picked by retail partner Walmart, marking the first time that the educational company didn't have a direct hand in the creation of its hardware, a big change from the custom components that have traditionally gone into its XO line. OLPC's made some tweaks to the software, which runs atop of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, taking more advantage of the swipe functionality while navigating through its "I Want to Be An..." UI, which builds the child's experience around dream jobs like astronaut, artist and doctor. It's a super simplified interface built with an even younger target audience in mind than its XO laptops (ages 3 and up, according to the company). The tablet will come pre-loaded with 200 apps (100 in English and 100 in Spanish) and 200 books (also 100 English, 100 Spanish), including selections from content partners like Sesame Street and Oxford University Press. The idea is to offer up enough content so the child can be sufficiently entertained / educated even when not online.%Gallery-188527%
OLPC working on XO laptop telescope and microscope peripherals (hands-on)
So much of what children are taught in the sciences amounts to abstractions. It's a shame, really -- concepts of the universe are so much easier to extrapolate when we can see them for ourselves. OLPC's looking to give the classrooms it serves more access to the very big and very small with two new attachments that we had the opportunity to check out on a recent visit to the company's Miami office. First off is a telescope that secures to the side of its XO-4 laptop with a vice grip, utilizing the device's built-in camera. There's also a microscope that sits atop a swiveling base and plugs directly into one of the laptop's USB ports. Both peripherals run on Fedora-based software designed by the company. OLPC will be bringing these out as soon as it can get the price down through manufacturing. For the France-designed telescope, the company is aiming for $10, with a potentially lower price on the microscope. The idea is to get one of each in a classroom, rather than the one-to-one approach of its XO line.
