Nicholas Negroponte, laptop creator
Position: 6 Last year: 6
Why? Making the $100 laptop a reality
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Consolidating his position from last year is the man behind the One Laptop Per Child organisation - and the low-cost laptop that is aiming to bring computing to schoolchildren in less developed parts of the world.
The project reached a critical stage this year and full production of what could be a revolutionary device is due to start this month (October).
Negroponte founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's innovative Media Lab in 1985, which has been carrying out important research into communications ever since. It was here that the possibility of the $100 laptop first emerged.
The panel felt that Negroponte's efforts to promote access to the internet and technology in regions that have lacked the necessary resources are extremely important.
The significance of the project was underlined in July by the addition to its board of Intel, an organisation with which Negroponte has had disagreements in the past. Other heavyweight board members include AMD, eBay, Google and Nortel.
The laptop will be available for a short time in the US, where people will be able to take part in the Give 1 Get 1 scheme where for every laptop they buy, another will go to a child in Africa.
And despite the $100 laptop now costing $188, the project represents a major effort to broaden access to technology for people in developing countries around the world.
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Simon Briskman,
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Content featuring Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind the XO - the device formerly known as the $100 laptop - makes his third appearance on the Agenda Setters list. While his own agenda of bringing better education to the developing world through a mini laptop may...
XO Generation 1.5 will arrive in November, OLPC chief Nicholas Negroponte told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Monday. The first of the XO 2.0 laptops will launch in early 2011, Negroponte said. The One Laptop per Child project's XO laptop will...
Earlier this month, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte announced the organisation's intention to open source its hardware design and invite commercial PC makers to copy it. In an email interview with ZDNet Asia, Negroponte said the OLPC intends to...
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the group that aims to provide low-cost laptops to children in developing countries, announced the cuts in a company blog post: "Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child...
On Thursday last week, the founder and chairman of the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, said that the XO version on sale via Amazon would not have the dual-boot facility that allows the laptop to run either Microsoft Windows or the OLPC's open...
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the OLPC project, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday that version two of Give One, Get One (G1G1) will enable European users to participate in the scheme.
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