Thursday, January 8, 2009

OLPC loses half staff, reduces pay for others

By Mass High Tech staff

One Laptop Per Child has laid off half of its staff and implemented salary reductions for the remaining 32 employees. The announcement was posted on the OLPC blog by the nonprofit’s founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte.

OLPC was launched in 2005 by Negroponte, an MIT professor, with the mission of providing $100 laptops to those who couldn’t otherwise afford them. Mass production of the XO laptop computer in November 2007, manufacturing them to withstand heavy rains in the rainforest, the heat of the desert and a fall from five feet. Since shipping began, however, prices for the laptops have hovered closer to $200 each.

The organization had its share of upsets in 2008. In March, OLPC’s director of security architecture, Ivan Krstic, resigned due to what he describes as a conflict related to the organization’s goals and aims. In January, OLPC’s CTO Mary Lou Jepsen left to start an organization focused on commercializing some of the OLPC’s technology, such as the screen and battery. Later that month, Intel Corp. resigned from the board of OLPC, just more than five months after joining in July 2007. And in November 2007, OLPC was sued in a Nigerian court by Lagos Analysis Corp. for alleged copyright infringement related to the XO laptop’s multilingual keyboard. Lagos Analysis, which is seeking $20 million in damages, is a U.S.-based Nigerian company with offices in Natick.

The XO laptop itself features a screen built to be easy to read in sunlight and the ability to operate without access to electricity. A 12-hour battery charged with solar power and a long-range wi-fi antenna are also built into the machine, which is designed to operate using less than 1 watt of power.

In Negroponte’s blog entry, he also announced plans to dedicate the organization to developing a no-cost laptop for the least developed countries.