The Ndiyo Blog

The latest episode of This Week In Tech has some interesting discussion of the trials, tribulations, successes and achievements of the OLPC project.

If you haven’t seen Hans Rosling’s 2006 TED Talk, I strongly recommend it.

If you have, then here’s another treat - he did a follow-up at TED 2007. Fabulous stuff, and very relevant to Ndiyo.

There’s a piece about the history of Ndiyo in the Technology supplement of today’s Guardian. More details here.

Michael and I got a couple of new toys for the Ndiyo office. We took them out of the box and plugged them in, ran some of our experimental software, and they just worked.

So we decided to point a camcorder at them and make a little movie…

We’re biased, of course, but we think this is pretty cool. It doesn’t have the range and reliability of a standard Ndiyo system, but it could be very easy for anybody to put together. We’ll work on it.

While upgrading the underlying software, we’ve moved the location of this blog slightly. It used to be at ndiyo.org/blog, and it’s now at blog.ndiyo.org.

I hope nobody will notice, because all links from the old location should redirect automatically to the new one, but please let us know if you see problems!

Last month I was invited to give a talk about our work at the GOVIS conference in New Zealand.

The video of the full talk is now available from the news pages. If you want to know all about where Ndiyo came from and why, this is a good introduction!

At Ndiyo, we have a standard chicken-and-egg problem.

We’re starting to get Nivo devices in a form that we could actually sell in the fairly near future, but we’re only making them in small prototype quantities, which makes them rather expensive. To sell them at anything like the price we’re aiming for, we’d need to be building them in batches of a few thousand at a time, and that requires the type of capital that, as a small not-for-profit, we just don’t have. But we won’t get those numbers if we tried to sell them now, even at a price that would just cover our present costs.

So we need to find organisations who might, in due course, be interested in placing orders for hundreds or thousands of units to get the ball rolling. And with this in mind, we’re launching a Starter Kit (which might be better named an Early-Access Kit) which will allow interested parties to get their hands on some Nivos, try them out, and help guide their progress towards wider commercial availability.

This is being done in conjunction with our new sister company, Cambridge Visual Networks, and you can find out more about the kit on their site. Please consider whether your organisation might be able to support the ongoing work of Ndiyo by signing up for one of these!

Microsoft researchers in India have been experimenting with splitting a screen in two so that two people could share a computer simultaneously.

We had a similar idea a few years ago, as evidenced by this work of art from my Ndiyo notebook:

It makes greater sense now, with the growing popularity of wide-screen monitors.

Microsoft’s announcement that developing countries will have access to a package including Windows XP Starter Edition and Office Home for $3 is of course very controversial: some see it as insidious, some as a sign of desperation, others as highly philanthropic.

It’s a dramatic headline, but it’s not clear to me that it really benefits anyone. It means people can now get a cut-down version of an old release of Windows legally for the same money that they’ll pay for a full version of Vista illegally, and of course for more than they’d have to pay for a legal copy of Linux. And they can only do this as long as they’re students, and buy it through the government, at the same time as purchasing a PC.

What would be much more interesting to us would be if cheap Windows licences became available which could be used under virtualisation, or a if cheap version of Terminal Server were released, so that Ndiyo’s PC-sharing model could be used legally with Windows…

Ndiyo aren’t the only people trying to open up access to IT to places where people cannot easily afford it currently. One such project that’s been getting a lot of attention recently is the One Laptop Per Child project. Their aim is to help educate children in the developing world by making an affordable low power laptop. Although the hardware gets a lot of focus, they’re also developing a new software environment called SUGAR tailored for learning. SUGAR provides a very minimal environment that allows users easy and unobstructed access to the programs they want and has built in collaborative features. If successful, SUGAR would be a good way for very young children to use computers without having to learn the cumbersome user interface found on computers today.

Here at Ndiyo we thought it would be nice to see the SUGAR software running on a Nivo terminal. A classroom with a single PC and many Nivo terminals could prove easy access to the SUGAR learning environment. Getting the SUGAR system up and running was quite easy, and the result can be seen below: