Tech & Biz

'One Laptop per Child' Developer To Create $75 Version

by Jarrett Martineau | January 10, 2008 at 03:08 pm

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Not to be undersold, Mary Lou Jepsen, the former CTO of the One Laptop per Child project (which intended to make a $100 laptop available to children in the developing world) is starting up a new company, Pixel Qi, that will attempt to produce an even lower-cost $75 computer that could be sold back to the OLPC project at cost.

The woman behind One Laptop per Child's low-cost XO computer has founded her own company.

Mary Lou Jepsen officially launched her new company, Pixel Qi, on Thursday and on the new company's website described it as a "spin-out" of the One Laptop per Child project, which was created in 2005 to provide affordable laptop computers to children in the developing world.

"The key is a new generation of low-cost, low-power, durable, networked computers, leveraging open-design principles," she wrote.

One of her goals is to create a $75 laptop, she added.

Earlier this month, Jepsen announced that she was stepping down from her CTO position at OLPC.

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technology officer of the One Laptop Per Child program has stepped down to pursue commercial interests.

Jepsen's key role was to develop the laptop's power-efficient display and to ensure the computer was able to withstand the rigours of being used in difficult environments.

Her departure, coming at the end of the Give One Get One (G1G1) scheme which sold the laptop commercially to users in the US, will be seen by many observers as another piece of bad news for a project which has proved difficult to get off the ground.