JabatoNet

Meeting with Negroponte, the promoter and charismatic leader of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and prominent member of the MIT (Massachussets Institute of Technology), is already something that someone would hardly everforget… but doing it in a private JET with Martin Varsavsky (and the beautyful German Christiane zu Salm) is just unbelivable.

Martin, appart from him business life, is a very enthusiastic man and is very keen on culture, design, music, art, politics etc. Negroponte is an authority in his fields as well as a very well educated american man, and Christiane is simply so intelligent and has such a delightful conversation; shee always seems to have something interesting to ask or offer.

He was waiting for us at Johan Strauss airport in Munich. He was sitting in the lobby with an IBM laptop and trying to unsuccessfuly connect to a WiFi signal: “They are all locked” he said when he spotted us, “I hope FON can change this someday!”. That got us.

The flight was so interesting: I really felt sorry to be a little out of my place because the conversation was about big business, the Davos conference, the UNO… international politics, humanness and business. But I was delighted.

Martin and I were very interested both in a professional but even more in a personal way on the olpc project. The project is all about producing fully functional and featured laptops (with WiFi, hard drive, meshing, imaging soft, etc.) for 100$:

• Isn’t 100$ way to low? Is it really possible?

That’s a question a lot of people make. It’s a simbolic number: what’s the difference between 100$ and 130$ for example? The price will vary. The thing is to be on that frame and to have a very cheap yet useful laptop.

• Why did you start all this?

Because I love Internet. And I think Internet can REALLY (I really believe this) help the so called Third World to develop.

This is some of the hundreds of thinks we talked about. He later that day, after a meeting (this time at ground level :-D), showed us a model of the OLPC laptop.

We also talked about FON; we wanted to know about his impressions regarding our project. We were happy because he knew about us before Martin and him could arrange the meeting. Actually his knowing about FON was what really triggered this meeting that, in their words, had been uncomprehensively delayed for years.

“I think FON is gonna do it”

or

“You guys really have it in your hands”

are just some of the remarkable elogiums he gave us.

The impression I got from him is that he was an intellectual, coming from a good and stablished american family who had had a very good education and made an impecable career and undoubtfuly made the most of what he had in it’s hands everytime.

The fancy thing? I was often distracted with his joker-like smile. I have this trend to usually pay attention at little unimportant details

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 1:43 am and is filed under FON, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.