The Ndiyo Blog

Business Weekly has written a very nice article covering Ndiyo.

Andrew Donoughue’s piece about Ndiyo and the digital divide is now on the Web. The nice thing about it is that it sets our work in the wider context.

An alternative to both the refurbished PCs and the OLPC approach has been developed by two UK academics. Ndiyo, the Swahili word for “yes”, is a project that aims to allow multiple users access to the same PC. Rather than trying to push more bespoke devices on countries with meagre IT budgets, Ndiyo allows one PC to be shared by five to 10 individuals by turning it into a mini-server networked to a series of thin clients.

The brain-child of Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former research scientist at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Ndiyo is based around the untapped ability of the Linux operating system (Ubuntu) to support numerous simultaneous users. Together with his partner, technical author and Open University professor John Naughton, Stafford-Fraser decided that the traditional idea of one machine per user was a model that just didn’t make economic or functional sense for the developing world. Instead, in the Ndiyo model, a Linux PC becomes a server to a series of “ultra-thin-clients” — called Nivos — which allow an extra display, keyboard and mouse to be connected to the computer via a standard network cable.

ZDNet UK caught up with Stafford-Fraser and Naughton recently to find out how their technology works and why it makes more sense than the strategies being developed by heavyweights such as Intel and OLPC…

Kevin Sullivan has written a great article in the Washington Post describing some of the ways in which cellphone-connected computers are affecting rural life in Bangladesh. Extract:

The 28-year-old mother of three said she was confused and terrified. She could barely imagine open-heart surgery. She had no idea how her family of farm laborers could pay for an operation that would cost $4,000.

The next day, Sept. 16, her father went to see Mahbubul Ambia, who had recently installed the only Internet connection for 20 miles in far northeastern Bangladesh. Ambia sat down at a computer, connected to the Internet by a cable plugged into his cellphone, and searched for cardiac specialists in Dhaka, the capital, 140 miles away. He found one and made an appointment for Marium, who like many people here goes by just one name. The specialist examined her and said she needed only a routine surgical procedure that cost $500.

The equipment roll-out described here is not using Ndiyo hardware, but it is a result of the broader set of trials initiated by the GSM Association, of which our deployment was a part.

This is a great article, and since the Washington Post would charge non-profits like us $400 for reproducing it on our server for a limited period, I suggest you grab it from their site before it goes away!

We’ve just posted our first Ndiyo sourceforge project! Don’t get too excited, this is just a small utility which is only likely to be of use to a handful of people at present. But it’s a starting point.

More information about ev2vnc can be found in our news section.

Our friends at the Seattle office of the Grameen Foundation have just officially launched their MIFOS project. The press release is here.

MIFOS (Microfinance Open Source) is a great initiative. The concept goes something like this: Microfinance is making a huge difference around the world, enabling many who would not otherwise have access to capital to get loans to finance projects.

However, these loans are expensive. This is sometimes because the risks are higher for the lenders, though the repayment rate can be suprisingly good. It’s mostly because the costs of administering large numbers of very small loans are very high.

In many situations, technology can help dramatically, but not if the organisations concerned have to pay large amounts to have their own custom software developed from scratch. MIFOS aims to provide a standard platform for microfinance institutions on which they can build their own customisations if necessary.

We wish them all the best!

Newnham Research, the company which grew out of Ndiyo three years ago and makes the underlying technology that we’ve been using in our thin clients so far, has formally switched to its new, and rather better, name of DisplayLink.

That means I have some web-page-editing to do. Please let us know if you spot the old name lurking anywhere!