Don’t have a digital camera? Why not grab your Internet connected XO-1 to hock your wares? I belive these are the first still picture taken directly by the XO-1 and used for something other than just testing out functionality.
Now imagine what this means in the hands of an enterprising individual in a developing nation. Hypothetically, let’s think of a person who has goods but is remotely located where they can only get into a large trading zone about once a month. When they get there sometimes they sell well and sometimes they come home with what they left with. Now imagine if they can hook up with potential buyers before they get to market through the magic of a mesh network, repeaters and the Internet. Sellers can be more efficient in selling their goods by setting up times and places to meet. Buyers get exposed to a greater range of goods and can even special order for their needs.
One might ask, if this is such a good economic tool, then why are we developing these machines for children? The answer lies in the fact that it will be the children who learn how to best utilize these machines. They are the entrepreneurs of the future in which we need to invest in. When my father bought an Apple IIe when I was seven or eight, to him it was a neat gadget but to me it eventually became my livelihood. I for one can’t wait to see what develops once we have these machines in children’s hands.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
“Hypothetically, let’s think of a person who has goods but is remotely located where they can only get into a large trading zone about once a month.”
That’s not hypothetical. Where I come from, it’s reality for millions of people.
“One might ask, if this is such a good economic tool, then why are we developing these machines for children?”
Why, indeed? There’s no good reason. I mean, it’s great to be doing it for the kids, but decreeing that it is to be used only by kids? That’s not remotely workable. It should be fun to see what Nickneg and Co are going to come up with to stop the black market for these things.
Comment by nutbearer — January 2, 2007 @ 10:15 pm
And for those who are curious how to accomplish similar, this is the line used to take those snapshots:
gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src num-buffers=1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! jpegenc ! filesink location=foo.jpg
Positioning/lining up the machine in order to take decent photos is a bit of a pain, but I figure that will become easier w/ practice.
Comment by Andres Salomon — January 3, 2007 @ 12:40 am
I expect a lot of those people might be likely to buy a cell phone with a camera, unless it’s an enterprising individual under the age of 12.
There was a really cool story about how cell phones have impacted commerce in India (NY Times?) a while back.
Comment by Donnie Berkholz — January 3, 2007 @ 5:11 am
Donnie, I’m not talking about just the end user functionality. I am also talking about creating the services associated with it. Buying and selling is just an example I use as it is the most obvious but it will be the children, as they grow up with these devices, who will learn how to utilize them and bring unique services to the remote villages. Of course cell phones will also be part of the equation but even western phones can’t do live video confrencing or are efficent for reading large blocks of text.
Comment by J5 — January 3, 2007 @ 10:26 am