Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Finally, now that large commercial computer makers have
cottoned on to the demand for ultra low cost entry level laptops and
are bringing ever cheaper and more sophisticated products to market,
can OLPC successfully compete with the likes of Asus, Intel, HP and
others?
According to Waugh, the OLPC XO is simply not in
competition with the likes of the Eee PC because they play in different
market spaces.
"They're totally different devices. The Eee PC is a smaller version of
the more traditional laptop computer. The OLPC (XO) is a full spectrum
project that goes through the device lifecycle all through the
education aspect of the project and is a different perspective of
providing a collaborative learning environment on a laptop," Waugh says.
"An Eee PC is the kind of thing that high school students would
absolutely go nuts for and will be perfect to throw in your bag to go
to school with. But it wouldn't last a second with a primary school kid
bashing it over their chair. The OLPC is very much made for the
dangerous environment that exists in primary school. Also the OLPC
hardware does things that Eee PC just doesn't do such as mesh
networking, having a battery that lasts for long hours and you can put
a solar panel on your roof and charge 15 batteries in one hit in your
class room - you don't need power sockets.
"OLPC is 100% designed for the educational requirement for children in
primary school and meant to be deployed en masse rather than as a
consumer device. One other important perspective on that is we want to
make it clear that an adult buying an OLPC shouldn't expect that
they're buying a laptop like an Eee PC. You can certainly run Linux on
it and turn it into a conventional laptop PC but that's not what it was
designed for.
"For a five year old, the collaborative learning communication
environment and the really expressive and intuitive user interface
changes the game on what they're able to do in classroom. They can all share a painting on the same canvas on their laptop or go
and sit under a tree, download a book and read it in beautiful back and
white high resolution in bright sunlight. An added bonus is that the
OLPC has also inspired the small laptop market and so it is improving the
lives of adults as well."
David Bass
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