"The Internet is a strange place. Child-to-child Communication is as Important as Child to Internet"

I went to a talk yesterday given by Michael Bleitsas of the MIT Media Lab & One Laptop Per Child project over at PARC. It's fascinating to see how details are emerging and in fact this project seems to be getting cooler as it moves along.

Some new details I haven't seen elsewhere:

• Scope: Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil, and Argentina are expected to commit to 1 million units each for 2007. Total world laptop production is only 45 million, so this is a very optimistic and ambitious schedule.
  
• Life cycle: the $100 laptop is designed to be low maintenance... everything will be sealed against environmental contaminants, it has no moving parts, the plastic housing is 70% thicker than a normal laptop, the batteries are NiMH rather than lithium due to longer life cycle (2000 cycles and are easier to dispose.
  
• ROI: $20 is the average annual cost for textbook distribution per child in the target countries. Times 5 years equals $100.
  
• Timeline: developers will receive prototypes this Fall. expected rollout is 1Q2007.
  
• Parts: the "ears" on the prototype shown below are WiFi antennas
  

What really interested me though was to hear about the project's philosophy regarding the device's anticipated mesh networking capability and Internet access. I've been thinking about this since the days I started NYCwireless and was building free Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City's parks - how will the proliferation of wireless local area networks impact the way we use the Internet? Will they diminish the importance of the Internet? That is - as social networking begins to grow, does it become true that most of my communications can stay local?

As Michael described, in the early days of the Internet, almost all applications were end-to-end (today the term is peer-to-peer). Most communications were between one server and another or one client and a server, with few intermediary servers. As the interent grew, partly by design and partly by accident, intermediate servers have become really important. To use IM for instance, you need to have an Internet connection to the authemitcation server. This wont do for developing countries where Internet connections will be scarce and spotty. In his words "the Internet is a weird place... child to child communication is as important as child to Internet."

This may be the most interesting outcome of this project, as kids in developing countries build open source peer-to-peer applications for their ad-hoc, mesh-networked, and sometimes Internet-connected local swarms.