It’s hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you’re going to depend on the community to make software for it.

Most people don’t realize that common sense is the real thing computers are missing,

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

In emerging nations, the issue isn’t connectivity,

Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away.

Give One, Get One generated about 100,000 zero-dollar laptops. Somebody else paid for them, but from the recipient’s point of view, that’s zero.

Studies have shown that kids take up computers much more easily in the comfort of warm, well-lit rich country living rooms, but also in the slums and remote areas all around the developing world.

We’ve been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the...

The idea is to have it play many roles so that the child takes it home, uses it for play, study. The whole theory is that learning is seamless, it’s not something you just do...

If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.

Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one’s studies. Maine’s program demonstrates how laptops can serve as a window into the world and a tool with which to think.

It might not be long before we have jackets that can recharge cell phones and you can be sure that is a jacket I’m going to wear more often. In an aging society, it would...

I’m not good at selling laptops. I’m good at selling ideas.

And what’s really frightening, or interesting, depending on your perspective, is that the change from now will even be faster and bigger than we’re expecting.

By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.

So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide – digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we...

This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.

Red Hat’s experience and core strategy of open collaboration made them a natural fit with this project. Open source and Linux will both reach and engage people in the rest of the world.

People aren’t thinking about small, fast, thin systems. Suddenly it’s like a very fat person (who) uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.

Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.

We call the concept ‘standby bits.

One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want...

When we talk about an Internet of things, it’s not just putting RFID tags on some dumb thing so we smart people know where that dumb thing is. It’s about embedding intelligence so things become...

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

It is going to happen, and if it comes out at $138 so what? If it comes out six months late so what? I tell people I used to be a light bulb and now...

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

If you get those kind of results, I’m going to build the machines. There’s enough passion and enough kids that are able to do things they were not able to do before that justifies it.

This selected group of organizations has shown their commitment and leadership in closing the digital divide in emerging countries, focusing on providing access to life-altering technology and information to children across the globe.

is still too expensive.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

I said, ‘That’s too bad, because I need 100 million a year.’ They said, ‘Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.’ That’s the reason you need scale.

It bothers me when people spoil the market.

I do tell governments we’re selling you a Trojan horse,

Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education,

We have been asked directly about this, … Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.

Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn’t have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They’re going to adopt e-books much faster...

When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you’re doing something right.

The laptop brings back a more seamless kind of learning.

This is not teaching as we know it; only part of our learning comes from teaching. Much of it comes from curiosity. These are tools that can help cultivate that learning process.

We really believe we can really make literally hundreds of millions of these machines around the world,

The computer provides the only way to give students a real foundation in 21st-century skills,

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it’s a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way – and I mean that in the most generous...

Children are the greatest natural resource of any country, and educating these children is at the root of solving our largest and most complex problems. Yet the best education may not come from sitting in...

We have to make machines understand what they’re doing, or they won’t be able to come back and say, ‘Why did you do that?’

unbelievably silly, because terrorists and drug dealers aren’t waiting for FedEx to deliver a disk to Libya or Colombia.

A colleague of mine said it made him think twice about kissing his wife goodbye in the morning,

I am always asked in my travels through the developing world: ‘If this is such a good idea, why isn’t America doing it?’ … Well, now they are.

Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they… can never be without some element of education.

I have come to a conclusion that every new release of software is distinctly worse than the other. Why? It’s because the fat lady can’t sing. There’s a natural tendency to add stuff. Suddenly it...

Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.