Intel is doing it smart

At the last WTPF meeting I learned about the Magellan laptop project of the Portuguese government.  Every participant was provided with such a laptop for the duration of the forum, at the end of which the laptops were supposed to be donated “to children in a developing country.”  I am not sure where exactly they went, but many of the participants got to keep their laptops and were provided with a lot of information about the project.

The Magellan initiative, named after the 16th century explorer, is a collaboration between Intel and the Portuguese government.  According to Mr. Mario Lino, Minister of Public Works, Transport and Communications, it is part of the government’s commitment to development of the “information society” in Portugal.  The aim is to deliver those laptops to 1.1 million students registered in their e-school program and supposedly 800K have been already deployed.  Moreover, the initiative is looking to expand beyond the Portuguese borders.  A number of times during the forums it was mentioned that a really large shipment of Magellan laptops (if I remember correctly about 200K) went to Columbia and shipments to other corners of the world are on their way.

The project representatives I talked to at the forum were not ready to say how much it would cost if someone wanted to by a batch of these machines.  They sold them on spot for 250 Euro a piece, but told me that the price will be negotiated per project depending on the quantities and the educational needs of the client.  From my neighbor on the flights back to the US, whose kid participates in the program, I learned that in Portugal those laptops are distributed for 50 Euro maximum (if the family is not eligible for any additional subsidies).  If the family falls in certain category, it would get not only the laptop for free, but also an internet connection as long as there are children aged 8-10 in the household and their participate in the program.

Indeed, the program is very well known in Portugal.  I was lucky enough to receive one of those laptops and carrying it around and taking it on the plane attracted both attention and comments of the locals who were really proud about their local laptop traveling to the US.

Digging into it, Magellan laptop is the Classmate PC in a different cover.  I think Intel have handled it really smart with this project.  They gave the Portuguese government the ability to repackage their Classmate PC so that it could be presented to the world as a Portuguese laptop and the Portuguese government could take the credit.  In other words, the Portuguese government rips political dividend while helping Intel disseminating their technology.  Sort of a win-win situation.

The laptops are indeed assembled in Portugal (from parts made in China), which makes it the first European laptop.  My version came with Windows XP in English, but from my neighbor on the flights back I learned that machines distributed in Portugal come with dual boot of XP and Ubuntu.  Moreover, they come with an educational software, which according to my neighbor was rather buggy and not very useful.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the software.

The size, the design, and most importantly the purpose of the laptop (and the entire program), raised an immediate comparison to OLPC and XO, but on that (and more on the specs of the laptop) in a latter post.  In the meantime, here are few more pictures of the machine with some comments.

The words of WTPF 2009

If you happen to follow this blog, you have probably noticed the relative silence in the last month or so.  I was, and still am, extremely busy primarily with working on my A-exams and moving on with shaping my dissertation ideas.  One of the upcoming highlights is me going to the World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF) to observe how international telecom policy agenda is being shaped in real time and to conduct some preliminary interviews with people who steer this process.

As many other similar events (such as the IGF) the forum is not aimed at producing binding resolutions.  Instead, its explicit aim is to set the agenda for the global telecom policy making.  Here is how it is described on its website:

It (WTPF-DE) is not designed to produce prescriptive outcomes with the binding force of an international treaty; rather, it strives to foster productive debate and build multi-stakeholder consensus on constructive ways forward.

This is why I think it is particularly fascinating event and this is why it will be interesting to look at how its outcomes describe MICT, priorities of related industries, and the associated regulatory principles.  Preparing for the trip I was pleasantly surprised to discover a wealth of information that the ITU made available online.  For example, there is a repository of all the iteration of the “Report by the Secretary General of ITU”, which is the pivotal document of this meeting.  In its preamble, the report states:

Decision 9 of the Antalya Plenipotentiary Conference states that arrangements for the fourth WTPF shall be in accordance with applicable Council decisions. In accordance with Decision 498 of the 2000 session of the ITU Council, discussions at the WTPF shall be based on a Report from the Secretary-General, incorporating the contributions and comments of ITU Member States and Sector Members (available at: http://www.itu.int/osg/csd/wtpf/wtpf2009/report.html) which will serve as the sole working Report of the Forum.

Since I am interested in words and in discourse, I thought to play a little bit with what was available.  Together with Veronica, and with the help of the Many Eyes project, we created the following visualization of the current Report by the Secretary General of ITU – the report that is at the basis of the upcoming discussion.  Here is what we got:

This image shows the 150 most common words in this 53 pages long document and the relative size of the word signifies its popularity.  As we can see from a quick glimpse, this forum is going to be about ITU, Internet, networks, services, issues, international, ICTs, countries, use, resolutions…

The decision in 2006 called for convergence to be the main topic of this forum, yet, as we can see in terms of popularity, the word “convergence” is loosing to many other concepts.  This is not to say that the discussion cannot focus on convergence using different terms, but I find this detail interesting.  it is particularly interesting, because if you look at visualization of the first draft of this report (before numerous comments by stakeholders were absorbed in it) the word “convergence” was much more dominant (you can see visualizations of drafts 2 and 3 in the links).

These visualizations do not tell us much about the substantive content of these documents, but I think they are a nice way to have a brief glance at the terminology that is dominating this debate.  I hope to continue following and blogging more on this subject.

Your comments will be highly appreciated!