I got a chance yesterday to visit the OLPC (one laptop per child) pilot in Khairat, a rural village close to Mumbai. The pilot started last October with 20 XO laptops.

It was great to see the students playing/working with their laptops: they impressed me by how confident/comfortable they were with their laptops. The teacher is incredibly dedicated to the project and the kids. He demoed us a shared chat, where he would ask problems (like 2+2=?) and the students sharing the chat session could cast their answers. All this over mesh networking, with a dead-simple way to create/join a session. One girl showed me proudly her Etoys project (drawing shapes, connections, text, animations, simple scripting), and we managed to find out how to animate the objects, which they (and I) found very cool.

I felt they were very comfortable with the interface (Sugar). The biggest shortcoming at the moment is that it is not yet localized in their own language (Marathi), so text-only commands/menus are quite hard for them, since they don’t know much English yet. Still, they are trying all possible menus, and share their discoveries with their mates. And anyway, the software will soon be localized. The team is also looking into alternative energy sources (solar, human powered generator) to deal with frequent power cuts.

Kudos to the OLPC and Reliance teams for this great pilot, which will soon be followed with more pilots all over India. Also, thanks to Carla and Venkatesh for connecting me with the team.

Yahoo announced it is running the world’s largest Hadoop application, a 10,000 core Linux cluster producing data used by the Yahoo! Search Webmap.”. the numbers are really impressive:

• number of links between pages in the index: roughly 1 trillion links
• size of output: over 300 TB, compressed!
• number of cores used to run a single map-reduce job: over 10,000
• raw disk used in the production cluster: over 5 petabytes

today at the Indian embassy in Bangkok, i met this desperate US guy that was short on 2200 bahts (~$67) to get his visa for India, so i lent him the money. then followed a nice conversation, and after chatting about the elections, i said: “you know what would make me more happy than you paying me back, is if you would donate the money to Obama” (note: non-US citizens cannot officialy donate for US campaigns). the guy took a few secs to think, then said he didn’t think Obama needed more money, but that he would do it if i wanted it.

i don’t know all that much about Obama and his program, but for me a major strength is that “[he] knows what it means not to be an American”.

Update from the NYT (June 11th 08):

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad — an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush’s invocation of a post-9/11 “crusade,” Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors — than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.”

Acer just announced that they would develop a low-price sub-laptop. some might see it as a competitor to the OLPC laptop. i prefer to argue that the OLPC laptop is such a good concept that other companies (like Intel, Asus, and now Acer) are now doing the same.

i have been traveling with my Asus eee for now one month (i missed the opportunity to get an OLPC laptop), and i must say i really like it. it’s very compact, quite fast, extremely stable, has a good wifi, can run Skype, and is quite cheap (~350$).

just like it is very common nowadays to travel with a memory stick, in the future i can imagine that people might travel with a mini-laptop. this is very convenient, especially as wifi becomes more and more available.

it’s now been 4 months that i travel through Southeast Asia. i stayed mostly in rural areas, or small cities. so many faces, so many smiles… people always starting a conversation — sometimes in the hope of making a few ruppes, sometimes just to share a smile, or talk about our different ways of living. in very remote areas, i always wonder how long it will take for them to be online. it will probably happen much faster than it took/will take them to get electricity, phones. it’s actually already happening big time… and i think i want to be part of that. not sure how, and where, but it seems to me that the internet can be a good tool for development. to facilitate the clash of our civilizations.