What propitious timing. At a press conference in New York City later this morning, Amazon is expected to announce a new large-screen Kindle designed for reading periodicals and textbooks. And yesterday, on the eve of that announcement, came word that the company had been awarded a patent on the original Kindle design. The patent, #D591,741, is entitled “Electronic media reader” and it makes just a single claim.
Read More »
Since its launch four years ago, the One Laptop Per Child foundation has fallen far short of its initial goal of supplying Third World countries with 150 million laptops by the end of 2008. To date, little more than 500,000 children have received laptops. Though a noble idea, providing $100 $200 laptops to children in developing nations clearly hasn’t quite caught on. So it was only a matter of time before the project was forced to rejigger its operations.
Read More »
OLPC is proving as apt an acronym for “One Lawsuit Per Child” as it is for “One Laptop Per Child.” Lagos Analysis Corp., the Nigerian company that claims the nonprofit stole its design for a multilingual keyboard, has put a dollar amount on the damages in its patent-infringement suit against OLPC, and it’s a jaw-dropper: [...]
Read More »
Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s wisecracking chief executive officer, is stepping down after nearly a decade on the job. He’ll remain with the company as chairman of the board, but Jim Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer (yes, an airline exec), will take on the CEO role.
Read More »
Apparently unable to stomach the idea of thousands of school children in developing countries running the Linux operating system on their new laptops, Microsoft is working on a version of Windows XP for the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO machine.
The company has assigned some 40 developers to the project and plans to begin [...]
Read More »
The XO Laptop (pictured above) wasn’t engineered with affluent children or the tech-industry subculture in mind, but they’re getting a chance to own one nonetheless thanks to a new program from OLPC–the One Laptop Per Child project. Under “Give 1 Get 1,” Americans and Canadians can purchase two of the pared-down laptops for $399: one [...]
Read More »
