From Lee Thorn,an truly exceptional human being writes - on another
list (forgive cross posting.)
From: Lee Thorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dear Colleagues,
I hope this finds you well. I have been following all the various
threads on GKD with interest and wish to comment on this one. Thanks to
all of you.
The Jhai PC and communication system is prominently mentioned as are the
MIT and Via projects in the EE Times:
<http://www.eet.com/issue/fp/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=59301178>
Our project is different from the others in seven ways:
(1) Our process includes a consumer-designed, well thought-out business
model for village implementers to use for their own self-realized and
customized development. This business model was developed by villagers
and with a local internet cafe owner and Stanford business and
engineering students. It is for villages without electricity or
telephones of any kind.
2. It was developed in response to well expressed community needs of
remote Lao villagers.
3. We have built, tested, and installed briefly our system already in
Laos, but we had to bring the system back to the US due to a political
glitch. This glitch was not related to regulatory or technical issues. I
own the glitch.
4. We are preparing for thorough proof of concept (POC) and betas using
prototypes.
5. Ours is an open source, ***open design*** project.
6. We, too, expect the price of production versions of the Jhai PC and
communication system to drop hugely, but we will not project that cost
until we have finished preliminary research. The next version of the PC
will have no moving parts. Our computers are designed for very harsh
conditions.
7. We project being in the consulting business, not the hardware or
software business. Projections are just projections. No one knows the
future.
We are preparing for a Proof of Concept (POC) on the Navajo reservation
in accord with the desires and vision of a school district there. If
everything continues to go well, we expect to be up in mid-to-late
March.
Lee Felsenstein is Jhai Foundation's chief volunteer designer and
engineer and is still deeply involved in our project. He and I have
been helped by nearly 100 volunteer engineers, IT managers, programmers,
and marketing people over 2 1/2 years. During the last two months,
thanks to Cisco Foundation's help via Teachers without Borders, and in
cooperation with Intel on the social side, we have employed four people
at non-profit rates to:
1. finish the software,
2. wrap up the hardware (under Lee Felsenstein's leadership),
3. assemble,
4. document,
5. develop training materials for,
6. and test our equipment prior to the POC.
Our hard-working, very experienced staffers, Jim Stockford, Alex Rudis,
Gerard Cerchio, and Jon Toler, join Lee Felsenstein and Stan Osborne and
other volunteers. You can follow our progress at <http://69.17.55.171>
I am going to China, Laos and India next week for discussions
preliminary to memorandi of understanding with prominent
non-governmental organizations in each country. ***I will bring a Jhai
PC with me on my Asian trip.*** In China we are in discussions with the
Amity Foundation. In India we are in preliminary discussions with
Datamation Foundation Trust, which we hope will lead to an MOU. In Laos
we continue discussions with the government and other potential
partners. We expect to be lead implementers in Laos, if that works. We
are looking at various kinds of beta tests in each of these locations.
We are also in earlier stage discussions in South Africa, Congo,
Namibia, Mozambique, and several other countries. We have plans for a
consulting firm allied to or within our non-governmental organization to
facilitate the roll-out of our project. What we project is:
1. to give away our plans and software
2. and pass on our growing knowledge base on a professional basis.
We would like to have a well-established, very grounded NGO partner in
the Southern part of the Americas. Other than that, we can only open
discussions with others, now. We cannot commit to any more activity
until we believe our research substantiates our process and open source,
open design products.
I am not a techie. I am lucky to work with caring people with great
technical expertise.
I started this work because I was involved in the American bombing of
Laos many years ago and I wanted to help people there, who actually were
helping me heal by their compassion and ability to be present. Some of
these villagers decided they could use IT and communication devices as a
way to increase their income ***without losing their culture***. We are
helping poor people with similar ideas and we are helping people like us
who understand this situation, either first-hand or from deep and
continuing direct discussions with poor people themselves.
We need partners who can help us fund this development and scheme. We
have a business plan.
I hope our gift helps poor people in exactly the way they choose. We
are not selling to poor people. We are partneriJhai Foundation
Lee Thorn
Chair
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.jhai.org
350 Townsend St., Ste. 309
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
tel: 1 415 344 0360
fax: 1 415 344 0360
mobile: 1 415 420 2870
------------------------------------ng with poor people.
Our ultimate gift is our process. The medium is the message.
The article follows as text.
Yours, in Peace,
Lee
------------------------------------
Here's the article as I received it from the writer:
EETimes
PC builders feel pull of developing world
By Rick Merritt , EE Times
February 04, 2005 (2:49 PM EST)
URL: http://www.eet.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=59301178
San Jose, Calif. - Wayan Vota lands in Ghana this week to show that
nation a Wi-Fi Web access network patched together with wire mesh,
plastic bottles and bamboo poles. Ultralow in cost and already serving
200 radio stations and a host of cybercafes in Mali, BottleNet is bound
next for western Africa.
"We built antennas with a 3- to 5-kilometer range for less than a
dollar," said Vota, who estimates the same gear "would cost $30 to $50
at Best Buy."
Vota is program manager for the nonprofit Geekcorps, a dozen-person arm
of the International Executive Service Corps. Geekcorps installs
computer networks in developing countries and trains people to use them.
Its work is but one small piece in a growing patchwork quilt of efforts
from large and small companies and nonprofit groups - including some
veteran personal computer designers. Whether inspired by benevolence or
the bottom line, they are all doing their part to wire up the developing
world with ultralow-cost computers.
"I think of this as the beginning of an industry," said Lee Felsenstein,
who designed the bike-powered Jhai PC for villagers in Laos. The New
York Times Magazine called it one of the best ideas of 2002.
The technical underpinnings of this new market will be open-source
software, embedded processors, voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) and
Wi-Fi, said Felsenstein, better known as the designer of the Osborne 1
PC and a co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club that helped launch the
PC revolution of the 1970s. "There's a vast market here."
Big companies like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. agree. AMD launched its
$185 Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) in October, targeting
first-time PC buyers in countries like China, India and Russia, where
annual incomes may be less than $7,000. "There is a huge number of
people - tens of millions - that fall into that category, and there is a
nascent movement of large corporations going into this developing
market," said another PC pioneer, Bob Marsh, who co-founded Inveneo. The
new nonprofit, spun out of the Jhai PC team, will ship its first systems
to Uganda by May.
Fewer than one person in 10 on the planet has Net access, AMD estimates,
creating a potential market it values at $7.5 billion by 2015.
For PC processor maker Via Technologies Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan), which
plans to roll out a line of ultralow-cost systems by June, the
developing world holds the promise of real profits.
"We want to make this a sustainable business," said Richard Brown, vice
president of marketing for Via. "In two to three years, it will
represent huge volumes, but it's hard to forecast now."
Under the code name Terra PC, Via plans to use its existing silicon to
launch three classes of systems for service providers and systems
integrators in China and India. They include full-fledged PCs with
gigahertz processors selling for about $250 without a monitor and two
versions of thin-client PCs - "media stations" using flash memory
instead of hard drives and "comms stations" that handle basic browsing,
VoIP and e-mail tasks for as little as $100 without a monitor. "We think
it's too early to define a single system for developing markets as AMD
has done with the PIC," Brown said.
AMD launched its PIC, based on a 500-MHz Geode processor, in October
with partners in the Caribbean, India and Mexico. AMD hopes to snag two
more customers by April.
The PIC road map leads to wireless networking, higher performance and
lower-cost systems, including a single-chip processor/core-logic combo,
said Dan Shine, director of marketing for AMD's Personal Connectivity
Solutions group.
"This year you will see us work toward driving the price down
aggressively below $185. We are looking at SoCs [systems-on-chip] as
part of our road map," Shine said.
AMD recently signed on to build the processor for a $100 PC spearheaded
by Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Media Lab at MIT. A longtime
advocate of low-cost PCs for schools in developing countries, Negroponte
has also signed Google and is talking with Motorola, News Corp. and
Samsung to help design and build budget systems. He hopes to sell them
to education ministries in minimum quantities of 1 million.
Negroponte envisions laptops initially using a novel 12-inch-diagonal
rear-projected liquid-crystal-on-silicon or digital-micromirror display
flat panel with an LED light source. For ruggedness, the machine would
use flash, not hard-disk memory. For networking, it would build in
support for Wi-Fi meshes and General Packet Radio Service as well as
"USB plugs galore."
Taking a more stepwise approach, Hewlett-Packard Co. started a small
emerging-markets group about two years ago that recently fielded its
first system in South Africa, a custom-designed Linux PC that can handle
four simultaneous users. The so-called 441 costs about $1,600, and comes
with a modified Linux kernel and 70 open-source educational apps.
"The 441 is our first entry into this space. [At $400 a seat], we are
undercutting white-box PC prices with performance that is still good,"
said Brooke Partridge, director of market and business development. The
business unit has about a dozen developers. In India, it's piloting a
mobile photo studio for small villages based on an HP camera, portable
printers and a solar power cell.
Startups and nonprofits are attacking the more challenging remote areas
of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. "This is my dream job," Geekcorps'
Vota said. "I get to talk tech all day, travel to interesting places and
be involved in technology development."
Another nonprofit, World Links (Washington), is installing more than 750
laptops in Rwanda that will run on solar power. "Ninety percent of
schools there have no electricity, so the only feasible option is
solar," said Ray Stuart, technology manager for the group that focuses
on training teachers about computers. Most of the several hundred
systems World Links installs each year are donated Pentium 2- and
3-class machines costing as little as $75 from professional
refurbishers.
Vota agreed that tapping old but reliable systems is the best route. "We
are looking for the lowest-maintenance platform around and currently
that is standalone Linux boxes," he said.
But Via's Brown warned that such systems are difficult to service
because they use differing versions of systems software and are no
longer supported by their vendors. Others note that developing countries
have special needs driven by the lack of reliable electrical and
telephone networks.
"You have to design differently for this market," said Felsenstein. His
bike-powered Jhai computer aims to bring not only a basic PC but also
VoIP telephony over Wi-Fi to places where no phone service or reliable
electricity exists. The original system was based on a 486-equivalent ZF
Micro PC104 board in a sealed box with PCMCIA slots for the Wi-Fi
transceiver and flash storage cards. The 12-volt system, which runs a
Lao-language version of Debian Linux and open-source apps, can be
powered by a bicycle generator.
"All the parts were pretty much available off the shelf at relatively
low cost," Felsenstein said.
The system was never deployed, however, due to a political snafu with
Laotian officials about locating a relay station on a hill that was part
of a military installation. The Jhai Foundation hopes to find a new site
for the system soon. It also plans to hold separate system tests this
month in China and at a Navajo reservation in Arizona.
"We expect to issue a final design by the end of the year," said Lee
Thorn, head of the Jhai Foundation, who served aboard a carrier during
the Vietnam War and later aided in Laos' redevelopment. "Anyone can make
it."
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