Inhabitat » VIDEO: Yves Behar Talks About the $100 Laptop

December 20, 2007

VIDEO: Yves Behar Talks About the $100 Laptop

One of our favorite examples of a great green gadget for the greater good, the One Laptop Per Child is getting all kinds of attention and is now widely available for purchase. Check out the latest video interview from Scribemedia of designer Yves Behar talking about the design. Also known as the $100 laptop, the cute and socially innovative computer will be one of the topics of discussion at our upcoming Greener Gadgets conference.

+ Video by Alexandra of Scribemedia

13 Responses to “VIDEO: Yves Behar Talks About the $100 Laptop”

Samina Ali Says:

December 21st, 2007 at 5:20 pm

Hi,
Can I connect the computer to the internet using an Ethernet cord or a phone cord?

James Shaw Says:

December 22nd, 2007 at 12:42 pm

Hi,
Thanks for posting this video, it will really help me in a current uni project I’m doing, to design a handheld study-aid for children of developing countries. You’re website is really good and i check it everyday, keep up the good work! James, Manchester UK

Amir Zaspoor Says:

December 24th, 2007 at 6:53 am

Hey man!
This is adorable not because it is for charity but because it is a really good piece of design work. Congrats to the designers

lilricky Says:

December 24th, 2007 at 8:18 am

Wow, first off, I’m very excited about this project. However, they may want to rethink the application that they’re going to be using with the kid’s microscope that they will be releasing. An application that will tell them if they have malaria?? How many kids are they going to scare to death? I can hear the application now, “Welcome! You got malaria!”

Ray Says:

December 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am

Samina,

The OLPC laptop can access the internet via any wi-fi hotspot or your wireless home network. It does not have an ethernet port, but can use a USB-to-Ethernet adaptor to connect to a wired network. It does not have a modem for connecting to telephone lines.

Tim Says:

December 24th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

Very interesting video, thanks for posting it!
Yves really does a good job showing why the XO is just not another cheap laptop. Gets right to the point about the quality of the XO and it’s kid friendly design.

joe Says:

December 24th, 2007 at 6:37 pm

Same applies for a modem as long as its Linux compatible a usb modem can be made to work…

Everyone is so use to the limited cooperate Microsoft structure where you use what we give you and are limited to what we license out. You will use it how we want you to and like vista watching your every move reporting back into us every 20 mins. Kinda not too appealing knowing your privacy is one of the three backdoor keys the NSA has and that you need a shady antivirus company to protect you from the Operating system.

Linux is the exact opposite its made by the people for the people and is completely compatible with more older and new hardware and innovation is of the wall. Only things not compatible with windows is dot net compiled stuff.

Soon companies like quickbooks will wake up and realize that companies like adobe who muilti platform compile are eating up companies who live in a limited world. Linux is the future if your not running Linux now you will be soon. (adobe bough macromedia)

links of interest http://knoppix.net http://kanotix.com http://sidux.com
make sure you take a moment to video search on a video site like video.google.com for linux to see how far it has come..

why have you not heard of it ?… probly because no one owns it.
yet walmart is selling out .. not to mention anything that has linux in it that properly complies with the GPL licencing model (not people to claim linux but do not openly freely release the GPL code) is selling out. Take a peek at linksys wrt54gs (older versions) the community has made the products in demand x 10. made the product faster with more options that they literally canceled the product and released a limited wrt54gl memory model (One can only guess ) to maybe stop the mainstream home routers from eating up on there cooperate cisco business routers line of features.

Microsft still wants them to port or they want to port a windows to this unit. I think its great taking advantage of a yound community to turn into linux savy break the heavy patent trolling companies that stiffly innovation ..

I want one too..

g510 Says:

December 26th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

This machine and its UI are the next revolution in the computer universe. I ordered one five minutes after the orders line opened up on the first day, and got it a few days ago. Coolest thing since the first Macintosh.

Consider this. The user interface is based on an outdoor, learning & play & collaboration metaphor, rather than a desk, cubicle, office metaphor. Yes there are people in the world who don’t work in offices, but you’d never know it from our conventional user interfaces. The new UI metaphor makes it accessible to people who will never see (or want to see) the inside of an office tower, and has cultual implications at many levels (I’ll leave it to y’all to figure ‘em all out!).

The keyboard is definitely kid-sized and a bit cramped for grownup hands, so if you plan to do any serious work with this at your desk (or under a tree), get a USB plug-in extension keyboard and mouse. However it’s usable as it is, so long as you don’t mind typing more slowly. I haven’t tried doing the USB-to-ethernet thing yet but would like to, and would like to be able to selectively turn off wireless when I have a landline connection. On the other hand, this thing picks up signals like crazy, and apparently has longer range than the conventional built-in antennae in regular laptops. It’s clear that an incredible amount of design smarts went into this at all levels.

What OLPC needs to do is release them on the USA market permanently, and start donating them to schools in the US. And then provide online libraries and other services that can be customized to be age-appropriate for all ages from 5 to 18 for schools to use.

What would also be cool in addition to the microscope add-on, would be a basic weather station: time of day, temperature (F and C), humidity, wind speed, sunlight strength, a rain gauge and possibly a snow gauge. A telescope add-on would also be majorly cool: imagine kids anywhere in the world being able to zoom in on the international space station as it passed overhead, as well as the Moon and Mars and so on, and see them on-screen without having to squint through an eyepiece. There needs to be a regular built-in spreadsheet program (I’m told there’s one you can download) or other means of setting up equations to be able to input data and see results for a number of iterations. There needs to be something that turns equations into geometric representations and musical representations, and also one that turns music into math. And how’bout a ball the size of a soccer ball that can transmit telemetry so you can watch your throws and kicks turn into graphs and equations? That’ll bridge the age-old gap between the jocks and the nerds.

Know what? Grownups could learn quite a bit by playing with these things. Last night I logged into an open connection and ended up reading through a whole series of articles in Wikipedia on a topic in philosophy that I find interesting. I could do that on my Mac or PC any time, but for some reason the XO encourages it. And that says something.

if you haven’t placed an order yet, do it now, there are only a few more days to go.

Colleen Candiello Says:

December 28th, 2007 at 3:46 pm

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

dcs Says:

January 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 am

Can I use it to hack the Gibson?

ROSE HAMMERSTEDT Says:

May 20th, 2008 at 5:04 pm

WE HAVE ADOPTED A SCHOOL IN NICARAGUA. AFTER SEEING YOUR COMPUTERS FOR THIRD WORLD CHILDREN WE ARE VERY INTERESTED IN BEING ABLE TO PURCHASE SOME COMPUTERS TO SEND TO THEM. WHO DO WE NEED TO CONTACT TO DO THIS?

ROSE HAMMERSTEDT Says:

June 13th, 2008 at 11:45 am

I’M STILL WAITING FOR A RESPONSE FROM SOMEONE THAT KNOWS ABOUT IVES BEHAR COMPUTERS.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW HOW WE CAN PURSHASE THEM. SO WE CAN TAKE THEM TO NICARAGUA.
THNAK YOU,
ROSE HAMMERSTEDT

eraidesigns Says:

July 15th, 2008 at 2:29 am

This is nothing but rabid un-checked capitalism. Corporate America is not satisfied with its profit margins and is looking to squeeze all it can out of the people in poor countries now. Anybody interested in this computer has better things to be worrying about like food, shelter and finding a job.
Why is something like this on an \\\”eco-conscious\\\” website?? How will getting loads more countries hooked on energy guzzling electronic gadgets going to help the environment??
As for the supposed educational benefits, the \\\”one-laptop-per-child\\\” thing began years ago as a marketing push by Microsoft to expand into the K-12 education market which had long been Apple territory. How about spending all that money on more teachers and giving them incentives to try innovative approaches rather than needlessly buying computers??

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