“TRON came true,” says one of my geek friends, referencing the early 1980s film about a gamer played by Jeff Bridges who gets zapped into a digital universe inside the memory of a computer network. What my friend means is that today, entire populations are getting zapped into that digital universe. Avatars, auctions, blogs, social networks, and databases storing information about everything from bank accounts to medical records comprise primitive alter-egos that project our personalities and do our bidding — and if we command them to, they’ll do it while we’re walking the dog or drinking a Schlitz at the corner bar. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘One Laptop Per Child’
GameChanger of the Month, May 2008
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008One Laptop Per Child — Competition vs. Collaboration
Friday, November 9th, 2007As many of the entries here will attest, improvisation is a fresh way of looking at familiar business scenarios like the Writers Guild Strike, at Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal taking the package, or at how Southwest Airlines employees are good ambassadors for their brand.
It is also a way of understanding scenarios that might not otherwise make traditional business sense, a way of resolving what seems to be a paradox. (Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said that the ability to resolve paradox is a major factor in the organization’s success.) Here is an example of a paradox that’s easily resolved when seen through the lens of improvisation.
My partner in GameChangers, LLC, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, the Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, pointed me to a recent post on eSchoolNews that contained this information: former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which builds and sells a low-cost ($200) computer called the OX that runs on a proprietary system, competes for customers in developing countries with Intel and Microsoft and their their bare-bones Classmate PC, which can run on Windows or Linux. At the same time, all three companies are collaborating. Intel has a seat on OLPC’s board and has invested money and given technical help to the organization. Microsoft is working to make a version of Windows that can run on the OX box.
What gives? (more…)