Green IT Toolkit

Ndiyo: Sharing PCs to bridge the digital divide

Tags:
OLPC

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 23 Nov 2006 13:55 GMT

...have any of those because we are about to make a new batch shortly of a new design, but we hope to have more of those at the end of the year and then next year to start producing them in large numbers. As with everything, the cost is highly dependant on the numbers — if we made these in the millions they would cost next to nothing, but in the hundreds they cost more. But we can do them at a reasonable price now.

What is your model for financing this project — I see from your website that you have a connection to a for-profit company called DisplayLink (formerly Newnham research)?
SF: The underlying tech for Ndiyo is from DisplayLink — this company that we spun off three years ago. It is developing chip sets and is going into full-scale chip production. As the scale of that builds up then we can offer this at a lower costs. They are mostly using the tech for other things — not for thin clients, digital signage — adding multiple screens to one PC without using extra graphic cards.

We started DisplayLink because we wanted a philanthropic humanitarian effort which we thought could make a huge difference to millions of people but it's difficult to fund that on a conventional basis. But we realised there are applications of the same technology that would be more applicable to standard venture funding. What we hope is that the tech DisplayLink develops can come back and help Ndiyo. You can already buy some of the technology — Kensington makes a USB docking station for your laptop; you can plug in a keyboard, screen, mouse and VGA-out which uses Nivo technology inside.

So do you still have a direct relationship with DisplayLink?
SF: There is no direct relationship. I am no longer on the board but I have a very amicable unofficial one — we are helping to port some of their code to Linux.

So how many people are working on Ndiyo at the moment?
SF: It depends when you ask. It's me full time, John part time and some occasional help. Right now it is one-and-a-half people, but we are looking to expand that — when we move into manufacturing then we will have to boost that.

How close to manufacturing are you?
SF: The prototypes we have had so far have only been distributed on a small basis, as it's not suitable for manufacture on any kind of scale. But we have prototypes in the pipeline. So what I am hoping is that very soon we will have trial units we can get out to people who might be interested in larger quantities and we can get from that a feel of how many we should be manufacturing. So my hope is [to have] trial units by the end of this year and start manufacturing stuff early next year in larger quantities.

How big do you think the market is for the device?
SF: It's an interesting challenge — it is very hard to predict the size of any market that is specifically Linux based. We see evidence [of] huge numbers of Linux users out there and huge numbers who would use it if this kind of system was available. Of course they don't appear on any sales figures so it's hard to quantify the size of the opportunity here, so we need to do some exploratory research to work that out.

The OLPC project has been seized upon as an option for bringing the Linux desktop to schools in the developed world, too — do you have similar plans for Ndiyo?
SF: This is far from being something only for the developing world. We have always tried to say that we don't want to give the developing world something noticeably inferior to what we have — we want them to have good computing, [but] also a way to afford it. There are lots of good reasons to use it here, [for example] green motivation — it's much more environmentally friendly to manufacture and run.

And there are other reasons, such as flexibility. You can put Ndiyo in the kitchen — it is much better than a PC, it's quiet, doesn't generate lots of heat, and there are no moving parts. It is much more suited to these harsh environments — public kiosks and public settings for instance. In a way, it's more exciting to do in the developing world. Our hope is not that this will replace a windows PC on a network. This is a solution people who have nothing will be able to get. [It's] easy for us to say how does this compare with traditional PCs, when traditional PCs just aren't an option sometimes.

JN: We are very enthusiastic supporters for Microsoft's drive against piracy. The more they get a grip on pirating of Windows and Office then there are corresponding surges in other ways of doing it. We can see that in demand for training in Linux in the Philippines, which is steadily growing.