Third World PCs

Nicholas Negroponte is still trying to bring cheap wind-up laptops to third world children the only catch is now he says they will cost $175 instead of $100 and production may not start until October.

The former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project said that project has been set pack from their original goals by the rising price of materials and changes in the design.

At least seven countries Uruguay, Nigeria, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, and Libya have expressed interested in buying the Laptops that have a crank so they can be wound by hand.

Quanta Computer, the Taiwanese manufacturer which will assemble the machine has agreed to take a profit of about $3 per laptop and the laptops will work on a low cost version of Windows.

Mr. Negroponte also said that the project was considering shipping the machines to poor schools in the U.S.

While the U.S. is second in the world for personal computers per capita.

There is still a major gap in internet access between the rich and the poor according to the pew research center.

While 82 percent of those living in households with more than $75,000 in income now have internet access only 38 percent of households earning less than $30,000 have internet access.

Only 34 percent of Internet users have logged on using a wireless connection.

We need to close the income gap in internet access by making it cheaper and easy for people to get high speed Internet access at least school if they are unable to afford it at home. More teenagers are using the internet to learn more and research topics but they are also adding content and videos.

According to a recent study by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 57 percent of teenagers who are online, create content for the internet. Another study determines that more than 79% of U.S. broadband Internet users watched video in 2006.

The U.S. has a long way to go to provide the next generation with internet access so they can use the internet to its full potential.

According to a report in the Economists Intelligence Unit Asian and African nations are catching up to their European counterparts in affordable broadband.

The best way to truely connect the world is to increase the amount of broadband available so that people in third world countries can communicate and add content in the same ways at first world countries. AS the internet connects the world in brand new ways the media is looking at new ways to work with citizen journalists to cover world events. Citizen Journalists can cover events from the perspective of a witness who has lived in the area and knows the people rather then an outsider reporter who is throw into a war zone with little first hand knowledge of the conflict or the people involved.

MySpace is launching a new site for China last Friday. There are already 7.7 million blogs in China with 17.5 million active bloggers. MySpace China will face competition from similar sites like WangYou.com which has 11 million users.