The revolutionary who aims to free the poor with laptops

Nicholas Negroponte brilliant mind, networker extraordinaire, digital prophet is used to having people take notice of what he says. So when he unveiled a strange, tent-like object at Davos in 2005, proclaiming it would change the world for just $100, he expected action. The device was a solar-powered laptop, which Negroponte aimed to distribute to millions of children in the developing world. "The great, the good, the rich and the technocrats nodded in approval," says Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times Magazine. "And then some of them tried to kill it."

The two biggest culprits were Microsoft and Intel, the PC industry giants whose interests were threatened by a cheap machine, using chips made by Intel's rival AMD and an open-source (ie, free) operating system called Sugar. Microsoft "tried to kill it with words", claims Appleyard; Intel, he alleges, "with dirty tricks". Having joined the board of Negroponte's non-profit company, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), it performed an about-turn and launched a spoiler of its own. Three years on, Negroponte's laptop, the XO, no longer resembles a tent, although it costs nearly twice as much and a mere 600,000 are in use, or on order. But it is still clinging to life (see below). "I had wildly underestimated the degree to which commercial entities will go to disrupt a humanitarian project," says Negroponte.

He may also have overestimated his powers of persuasion. As Emeritus Professor of MIT's prestigious Media Lab, which he founded in 1985 with the aim of "inventing a better future", he had spent 20 years travelling the world, successfully raising funds for the think-tank.

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Negroponte had all the right credentials. Born into a wealthy Greek shipping family, he grew up in Switzerland, London and New York. After arriving at MIT in 1961 to study architecture, he emerged as one the great brains of the era, says the Globe & Mail (Canada). When he published his bestseller,

Being Digital

, in 1995, he got Rupert Murdoch to write the cover blurb. Many of the outlandish changes he predicted are now taken for granted.

A more irreverent publication has had more lasting fame: the "hip and punkish" journal of cyberspace, Wired magazine, which he began backing in 1993. He was astonished (and annoyed) when friends like financier Henry Kravis and media mogul Ted Turner refused to invest, says The Boston Globe. He had the last laugh the title is still going strong. But the episode illustrated an aspect of his character that some found infuriating. "He has a snippy tone Wise up, wake up, you need a kick in the pants'," said one MIT colleague. "It doesn't always play well."

Hard-core techies say Negroponte, while strong on vision, is weak on the nitty-gritty of computing. With hindsight, he was also over-idealistic about what the digital revolution could achieve, says the New Yorker. He saw it as a democratic force the chief means of vanquishing Big Brother. "There will be no more room for nationalism than there is for smallpox," he predicted. Events have proved him wrong, but Negroponte is still crusading. "Computing is not about computers," he says. "It's about life." His supporters claim he may yet change the world. "His sense that anything is possible is amazing and infectious."

Nicholas Negroponte: will his techno-utopia work?

Negroponte's "techno-utopian" idea of liberating the developing world with laptops was born in 1999 when he founded a school in a remote Cambodian village and sent his own son there, says The Sunday Times. He set up a cheap communications system, using satellite links and the internet. The weak link was the cost and over-featured, energy-intensive nature of existing laptops. By 2004, he had hooked "a spectacular range of backers", including Google, NewsCorp and Linux open-source specialist, Red Hat.

The resulting XO is a stripped-down laptop, which has taken some flak from tech-heads, says The St Petersburg Times. But critics miss the point: the XO is the best tool for the job. It "sips" energy and can be charged with a hand crank. Its WiFi links allow users to "talk to each other without having to go through the government or a central computer". Its impact on emerging economies could be as dramatic as the cell-phone's.

But it isn't just intervention from rivals that has impeded the XO's spread, says BusinessWeek. The project has been hampered by Negroponte's ideology. As a follower of the Constructionist school of education (which posits that children learn best by doing, rather than by being lectured to), he has clashed with educationalists in many target countries, who accuse him of "cultural imperialism". But that shouldn't detract from his greater achievement, says The Guardian. "No corporation thought there was a profitable market for cheap computers for poorer people." Now they're all piling in.