User talk:SudarshanP

A very nice idea, but does it scale? It will provide a laptop for 10000 children, but we need 1000 such ideas.


 * I was speaking of a 100 million$ not 1 million$. I feel it is definitely possible. The case of the brit kid, he was an anonymous guy... the advertisers were low key advertisers... would not mind blowing away a few hundred dollars but thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands remain a big issue for them. If you chose advertisers who are one or tier/s higher, you get proportionately bigger budgets. In short, more zeroes per pixel.


 * Do you remember the $250,000 collected for the Firefox publicity campaign. If people could just "donate" money for "spreading the word" about a certain favorite product... What do you think people would do when it comes to empowering children in remote areas without facilities to educate themselves... Do you think people will only spend 4x of what they spent on a publicity campaign? At least my gut feel tells me that $100 million is a Nobrainer.

But I guess 80billion$ would be reqd for 800 million young people
The cash reqd is 80 billion dollars for a 800 million kids. The primary funding source can only be a government. That is why I suggest that this should be used as a catalyst. Not as a full solution. It can be used to increase the initial critical mass for Eg.

Let us say after a lot of lobbying, the OLPC gets 10 million orders from governments. Now if we put appropriate conditions that a government that doubles its commitment within a certain timeframe will get these extra laptops for free. The order say goes upto 14million + 1million free. Now that is 50% initial increase. Some reduction in cost is possible as well.

In all developed/half developed(like India for Eg) countries it can be given out through a loan which the recipient will pay back when he grows up. Another solution could be making the Laptop self financing. End users can sign up for sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Thus they can earn out their own Laptops without shelling out hard cash.

Walmart could sell a $200 laptop for each of which a $100 laptop would be given out in a poor country. I guess I read the $200 laptop idea on Slashdot.

Each country can have a National Laptop Fund to which philanthopists,IT companies etc. can contribute. There are a large number of companies that benefit from increasing the installbase of Linux, Firefox etc. Companies like IBM,Google,RedHat to name just a few. They could easily shell out some cash into these funds for merely commercial reasons.

The worldbank could give loans to poor nations with a genrous payback period.

By the time all these options are executed the laptops would begin to cost $50. and some day $25. By that time every one will have enough ideas to finish off remaining requirements out of this 1 billion or 800 million. The countries that see relative success in certain parts will come for a repeat purchase.

So our goal here would be to maximize the rate of growth of OLPC without being obsessed with one or two particular methods. Even if the method I suggest will not be 1000x scalable, every million counts and acts as a further catalyst. This is a compounded growth scenario. So even small differences matter.

Of course the best and possibly sole distribution authority should be government so that we can achieve saturation in certain areas to maximize usefulness. SudarshanP 14:08, 6 January 2006 (EST)

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