The Ndiyo Starter Kit
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!
May 30th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
It’s a problem of building the image.
With OLPC, the big thing everyone knew was the cost - $100. The “$100 laptop” project. That number-name propelled the project around the world in no time.
Here’s I think it’s the “$10 computer”.
Somehow some cost projections need to be presented to the future buying public, otherwise only a few techheads will understand what it’s all about.
The whole concept is a low cost, people need to know what that cost will be.
Of course it’s a nightmare in guesstimating what the future cost will be. At OLPC it’s actually a cost objective to this day, not an actual price.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
“Cheapest computer on earth”
Perhaps it could be offered to various monitor manufacturers, to offer as an option with their products. The display will become the highest cost component after all.
It would be interesting to buy a monitor and just plug it into the network to display whatever is sent to it from anywhere in the network.
May 31st, 2007 at 1:10 am
Hi! I just got the email announcing the starter kit. I guess I had visited the site at some time in the past and signed up for emails. But I’d forgotten what it was!
I reviewed the site and Ndiyo project.
I’ve been thinking in similar terms for a long time.
Would it not be possible to reduce the required connections to just ethernet and usb?
And could not the power for the lcd monitor be suppied over ethernet and drawn over usb?
Thanks for all your efforts in this direction.
Please keep up the good work.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:40 am
John -
Do you mean ethernet + usb + VGA? Or using the USB to ship the pixels as well? The latter is possible using the USB nivo technology but would work out more expensive. Actually, the problem with USB in general is that it’s a highly asymmetric protocol. Peripherals can be small and cheap, but the host driving them needs to be much more complex and have a large software stack; that’s the main reason we don’t support arbitrary USB peripherals on the Nivo at the moment: it would make the device significantly more complex. We’re hoping to support keyboards, mice, and possibly storage in the next year or so.
On the other point, current power-over-ethernet standards don’t, in general, supply enough current to power the LCD as well. But as LCDs get more efficient, and with the advent of LCD backlighting, that’ll become more feasible.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Yes, I was thinking of the USB and ethernet as the only connections, simplifying the hardware as much as possible. I was not aware that the software needs to be so much more complex to handle the “simpler” hardware.
Have you considered an OS other than linux, say inferno? The only “app” you would need to port is the vnc client, right? And you seem to have a good connection with the originators of that project.
June 4th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
>It would be interesting to buy a monitor and just plug it into the
>network to display whatever is sent to it from anywhere in the network.
basically this already exists for some time and is being called SunRay - invented by Sun microsystems.
anyway - i`m wondering what price we can expect for the starter kit. any public information, or do i need to do a dedicated request for that ?
regards
roland
June 4th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
whoops - sorry, i just found the pricing information at newham site
July 11th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
£1499 ex VAT for 5 little terminal boxes? That’s £300 a piece, pre-VAT. Add a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and fifth of a host PC and you’ve got a terminal for about £370 + VAT. That’s very expensive in comparison with entry-level Dell laptops that have the flexibility to work solo, if need be. I would love to build an Ndiyo thin network and even build a business around it, but at that price, there is no way it would work. When the terminal boxes are less than £50 per piece, it’ll be worth considering. Any idea when/if that will happen?
July 11th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Hi Ross -
Yes, of course, you’re right, which is exactly why this is not on general sale yet and is only in Starter Kit form. When people ask me the price, I sometimes jokingly tell them that if you want 10, they’re $200. If you want a million, they’re $20. Pick your price and I’ll tell you how many you need to buy
The nature of manufacturing is such that it’s highly dependent on volume. And the nature of a small organisation like ours is that, unless we can find somebody to place a very big order, we can’t afford to manufacture large volumes ourselves. If you know anyone who can lend us a few hundred thousand dollars for a couple of years, we’ll be able to offer them at a better prices. Until then, we need to find big customers.
Offering a Starter Kit, to allow those organisations who might be interested in purchasing several thousand units to experiment with the technology in advance, is fairly standard practice in the industry. If it’s any consolation, companies I’ve been involved with in the past who have done this have charged tens of thousands of pounds for the early access kit, not a mere 1500.
We all look forward to the day when anyone can buy a $99 nivo, but that may be a longer-term project! Things are looking encouraging, but may require patience. We thought, though, that it was better to offer a way for people to see the technology as soon as possible and try to cover our costs, even if we couldn’t hit the eventual price target yet, than not to have it available at all.
July 13th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
I’ve very excited about the preview kit, but like others concerned about future price targets. I can understand you reluctance to name specific targets, but I do think it is important.
I think I can justify the current price of a devel kit *if* I have reason to believe future pricing could be low enough.
Camvine/Newham must have some sense of their market size, and based on that an idea what a size production run would likely be.