$100 Laptop

This fall more than 500 children in Thailand will be part of a pilot program for “quality testing and debugging” of the $100 laptop. The One Laptop Per Child program, which is supplying the computers, is the brainchild of tech guru Nicholas Negroponte, who has spent the last several years developing and refining the technology. The computers run on the free Linux operating system and use flash memory instead of a standard hard drive. When access to the electrical power grid is unavailable, the computers can be powered by either a foot pump or a hand crank.

So far, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have expressed interest in purchasing the computers, and Nigeria has already bought the first 1 million. India, which had originally expressed interest, declared the computers to be “pedagogically suspect,” and has decided not to participate in the first round of purchasing.

This is a perfect example of good business in practice. The foundation of free-market economics and business is mutually beneficial trade and production, such as the production and distribution of these laptops.

Thanks to http://www.nextbillion.net/ for this story. NextBillion.net brings together the community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.