$100 PC Pledges Fail To Meet Minimum

bobthemuse writes, "Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop PC was demonstrated back in May, and a PledgeBank was set up: the goal was to get 100,000 people to purchase an OLPC for $300, allowing the project to send two of the devices to the proposed users. Today the pledge ended and only 3,678 people had signed up." It looks like a mention in Slashback a few weeks ago gave a boost to the effort, but not a big enough one.

Pledging?

[ronanbear]

Pledging really isn't something that most people like doing. Outside of the wider public this project has been remarkably quiet. I don't even remember seeing the Pledgebank.

Sign up to buy a computer and then a few months later find out later whether you'll be able to buy one. It's really inconvenient. Such a project requires wider grassroots adoption and the support of a lot of people. The amount of money pledged was huge.

100,000 computers at $300 a pop is $30m. Making the effort part of telethon's and charity drives might have been much more effective than just having a website where you can't even buy one.

It's a cheap simple computer. It might have found a good audience in non geeks interested in trading up from old Windows 98 boxes. It's the one laptop per child project. For selling it in the 1st world it was marketed wrong. It might have done very well if sold as something to get your kid for Christmas instead of an Xbox 360 or an iPod where most of the money goes to charity. Meanwhile the iPod nano Red will sell in huge numbers with a lower (but very decent) amount going to charity.

Re:Not an indicator of the project's merits

[colmore]

Ahhh, wait a minute, before everyone starts harping on this, notice:

This pledgebank wasn't started by the project and isn't connected to them at all. This is nothing more than a well-intentioned and failed internet petition.

Really, nothing to see here.

Re:100,000? how about 1.2 million.

[RichMeatyTaste]

Yes, at $100 each. This was a charity drive to get them to people whose governments *weren't* buying them.

New and experimental Pledge

[TomSteinberg]

I'm part of the team that runs PledgeBank. You might be interested in this experimental Pledge I just put up for people who still want to be involved with OLPC, but on a more realistic and local level. http://www.pledgebank.com/olpchackers [pledgebank.com] The Pledge is unique because it uses a new feature that isn't in general circulation on PledgeBank yet, cascading Pledges. These are global pledges which you sign up to locally, making a mini version of each pledge with a group of other people who live near you. Take a look, even if you don't sign up, and please give us feedback. This is very much an alpha feature, although the pledge is real.

Re:Don't overblow it...

[juanfe]

Let's see:

• Why do people in the developing world need bicycles? Because they can be used not only for transportation put to pump water [fssca.net].
• Why do people in the developing world need radios? Because they are important educational [athabascau.ca] tools.
• Why could they possibly want video cameras? Because they are tools for encouraging self-representation in broadcast media [unesco.org].
• Why could those poor starving people in Africa need cell phones? Because they are tools for monitoring water safety, obtaining credit and making payments, determining where fishing happens, or simply communicating across distances without drums and smoke signals [textually.org] let alone to demand accountability from those unstable democracies [personaldemocracy.com] you seem to assume exist everywhere

So why could they possibly need computers? Because, you numbskull, it is exactly one of the ways of addressing the problem of democratic instability, unstable food supplies, unstable housing, and poor educational systems [isoc.org]. These mobile, networked computers can help redistribute access to information and reduce the control over such things as distribution of resources from authoritarian regimes that thrive on chaos, can put intelligence at the ends of the social network rather than at the center, and generally enable people to have access to information, tools, communities that can help them get the necessary lift and resource to stand up and Make Things Happen.