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.
There are some people who were associated with OLPC for whom one feels genuinely sorry. Take Ivan Krstic, for example. His latest blog entry about the project says this: "To those on the outside and looking in: remember that, though he takes the liberty of speaking in its name, Nicholas is not OLPC. OLPC is Walter Bender, Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Mark Foster, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Mary Lou Jepsen, Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Michael Stone, Tomeu Vizoso, John Watlington, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, and the community, and the rest of the people who worked days, nights, and weekends without end, fighting like warrior poets to make this project work. Nicholas wasn’t the one who built the hardware, or wrote the software, or deployed the machines. Nicholas talks, but these people’s work walks."
He refutes Negroponte's statement about the SD slot: "Remember that even when Nicholas talks, it is all to be taken with a fistful of salt. The SD card slot didn’t get added to the XO for Microsoft, as he is fond of saying, but because we were getting terrible read/write performance with our solid-state storage. Hardware architect Mark Foster designed a dedicated chip to speed things up; that chip, as an unanticipated bonus, made it easy to attach a camera and an SD slot."
And Krstic has something to say about the claims Negroponte made about Sugar, the interface used on the laptop:
"Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way” is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone. So yes, there was no architect, but that’s because Nicholas didn’t want one. If he believes that’s the cause of Sugar’s problems, he has no one but himself to blame."
People in Australia will be watching the price of the XO keenly; sub-notebooks have become immensely popular after Asus' eeePC was launched. With a price of $499 Australian dollars, it had no shortage of takers and is vastly superior to the XO. And Asus has the option of Windows too. Plus, a bigger model is expected to hit the market pretty soon.
To me, the OLPC project is beginning to resemble some of those bands which find that making a buck in the US and other parts of the world is tough; they then make a tour of Australia.
This story has been corrected at 11.20pm AEST May 7 to reflect the fact that Barry Vercoe is a New Zealander (something which Jeff Waugh posted in the comments) and not an American.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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