In a move that could help poor nations and boost its market share at the same time, Intel will announce today that it plans to produce a sub-$400 laptop and will spend $1 billion on wireless Internet access and teacher training over the next five years. The initiative is called World Ahead and reflects a doubling of what Intel had planned to spend on training and support in areas that are behind the digital curve.
Intel says it plans to train 10 million teachers world-wide, and that it already has a running start with the training to date of three million teachers. The low-cost laptops that Intel plans to support differ from the hand-cranked $100 devices envisioned by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte in that they will be full-featured, with enough memory and power to run Microsoft applications.
Update: The San Jose Mercury News has this article that notes that AMD also has a low-cost computer initiative called 50x15, which is designed to get 50% of the world’s population using computers by the year 2015. AMD has already debuted a sub-$300 computer that runs only a subset of Windows applications.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:51 AM|Comments(0)
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