My friend, Arun Mehta, has some advice for the public sector telecom providers. They are losing customers. Arun believes that their approach is wrong and that they should see the opportunity in using their last mile access for affordable internet connectivity. I reproduce (with his permission) his recent contribution to the india-gii mailing list.

A magazine article in the New York Times of April 13th has the rather mistaken and misleading title “Can the Cell Phone End Global Poverty?” (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda). The article title is misleading because it doesn’t even remotely attempt to answer that question. It is instead about what is called a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist,” in this case someone who works for Nokia and essentially tries to figure out how people actually use their phones and thus how phone companies should design phones for greater usability.

I have a piece in today’s Mint. It is titled “The Magic of Technology.” Here it is, below the fold.

Information, Not Plastics
The world has come a long way since the 1960s when the future was defined by one word – “plastics” – as Mr McGuire advised the young graduate Ben. Now the future is defined by another word and the word is “information.” Plastics was a wonder product of the world of industrial technology which fundamentally transformed the world of objects. Information is the new thing, the product of information technology, which is going to transform the world of ideas. Actually, information is not a “thing” in the usual …

Yesterday, the Indian Express carried a column by me on the OLPC, a favorite topic of mine. There’s nothing new in there for those who have read my views on the OLPC before. The text of the column below the fold.

Here’s another guy who is not all that thrilled with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. The Strange Case of One Laptop Per Child is made by Eric Posner, a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. Money quote:
It takes little insight to see that laptops would be low on the list of priorities of the developing-country poor. One Laptop per Child makes as much sense as One iPod per Child or One Snowmobile per Child.

Barely six months after joining the OLPC project, Intel announced that it is leaving. The OLPC people wanted Intel to stop work on any products that are likely to compete with the OLPC. Which basically means that contrary to what the OLPC people were claiming–that it was not about the laptop but rather about education–is clearly not so. If indeed it was about education, wouldn’t they have welcomed more and varied efforts by others in the same game?

John C Dvorak writes in PCMag “One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Change the World.” (Hat tip: Shiv Senthilvel.)
He quotes some figures from the world hunger site:
In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years. Throughout the decade, more than 100 million children will die from illness …

As if the OLPC was not Rube Goldbergian enough! What will they try next, I wonder. Try this definition of a Rube Goldberg device from the Wikipedia and tell me that it does not fit the OLPC to a t.

Perhaps you have read it before on this blog. Now “The Age of Profound Ignorance” is available to a wider readership on LiveMint.com. (If the previous link does not work, please use this one.)

Cyrus Farivar has a piece on Slate today titled “Still waiting for that $100 laptop?“. He writes: “Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops into the hands of every schoolchild across the world, why not start with an intermediate step? Probably because One Blackboard per Child or One Teacher per Classroom just doesn’t sound as sexy.”
You know, I have …

I am a big fan of using technology in education. Information and communications technology (ICT) is tailor-made for application in education. What I don’t understand is why some people are going on about the use of “wireless, low-orbiting satellite, fiber-optic” communications in the context of education. Those hi-tech channels are clearly required when the information is dynamic and real-time, such as in the case of market information and sports events. But what does one gain by beaming down static information — say, history or physics content — as opposed to …

Everything has a cost and this arises from the basic fact that we are mortals. We are given a finite amount of time. Time is the limiting constraint, not money or stuff. The more stuff out there that clamors for our attention, the more acutely we wish “had we but world enough, and time.”[1] Aside from material stuff, we are also drowning in information. They call it the “attention economy.”[2] The result of a surfeit of things to attend to is the premium on attention.

Everything you have ever wanted to know about the One Laptop Per Child but never dared to ask has been answered in an excellent feature titled The Laptop Crusade by Tekla Perry in the April 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. (Here’s a link to the print version of the article.)

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”

This one is a pointless ramble. OK, most blogging is. But this one is only more so.
Invariably during discussions on India’s development, technology is thrown around and often the notion that India will leapfrog some barrier or the other surfaces. I find myself disagreeing with many of those propositions. I think much semantic confusion is caused by not having a clear understanding of the terms.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has powerful interests on both sides of the debate. It is easy to guess who’s on which side. Bill Gates, for instance, is predictably against the OLPC as it does not use Microsoft software. The OLPC is not using Intel chips. That could explain why Intel Chairman Craig Barrett will be a critic. Mind you, merely because they are not disinterested observers, it does not follow that they are wrong in their criticism of the OLPC project of Mr Nicholaus Negroponte.

The total volume of information available in the world is unbelievably large and is increasing exponentially. Much of this information is becoming available on the world wide web. I refer to this subset as the WAC, or “Wide Area Content.” WAC includes everything from journals on quantum physics to home videos on YouTube, and everything in between. One just has to do a Google search to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the information available at the click of a mouse.

I am having a conversation with a bunch of people on the net about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its relevance to education. I am of course speaking there from an Indian perspective. I would like to share it with you. Of course, you may have already read many of my arguments about the OLPC here already. So pardon me for some possible repetition.

Entrepreneurs, philanthropists and established computer firms have for the better part of a decade invested millions of dollars to lower the cost of a desktop PC and develop cheaper alternatives. Intel has made its Eduwise laptop; AMD, a Personal Internet Communicator; Microsoft, the FonePlus. MIT computer guru Nicholas Negroponte’s Children’s Machine, now called the XO, is the most publicized recent attempt at converting the poor into computer users. But Negroponte’s idea is to spread computers to the poor, with the help of heavy subsidies from private and public philanthropy. His …