The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this little machine made it from Taiwan to the US yesterday. It's a nifty green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.
The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.
Apparently a bunch of central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.
Friday, November 17, 2006
American Marketers 2006: Web 2.huh?
Zoomerang will be publishing a study next week which reveals that even though Web 2.0 has hogged the business headlines (for what, a couple of years now?) 8 out of 10 marketing professionals still are not even familiar with the term. At the other extreme, one third of those who have latched onto what is going on are using web 2.0 approaches in their marketing, and most of those (70%) are having success.
Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.
Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.
Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.
Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.
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