Surf City Cidade de Deus: Sarcastic Brazilian tadinhos have been impatient with the stalled progress of digital inclusion (above), but now that São Jorge de Luladocio has slain the Wintel-AMD duopoly, will it prove to have been worth the wait?
Renato Cruz | Laptops para o governo: The Estado de S. Paulo blogger reports that the Brazilian government is opening a competitive bidding process to supply it with 150,000 “one laptop per child” machines for a pilot project for Brazilian schools.
The MIT “$100 laptop” will compete with an Indian project and the Classmate — which both Intel and AMD will produce a model of, as I understand, unlike what Mr. Cruz reports. Let me check. And see also The Positivo Choice: Wintel or Lintel — there are homegrown alternatives in the other bracket of this single-elimination tournament, I think.
My bet: Given recent statements by the Brazilian government — “Brazil ought to do more business with India, says Lula” — I would say the Indian machine has an inside edge, but whichever machine makes the most intensive use ofthe domestic supply chain is going to win. Just a guess. Economic nationalism and Mercosul regional integration rears its ugly head, and David Sasaki is there to sneer at it.
In fact, if you read the Brazil coverage in Global Voices Online, the blogging project of the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside society, on this topic, you will see why I refer to it as the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society.
According to Mr. Murilo, the Brazilian government faced a stark choice between (1) ordering several million MIT “$100 laptop” machines and (2) dooming itself to the dark ages forever.
Which was utter nonsense, of course. Just ask the Indians, who politely declined the Kermit-green gizmo for tiny fingers and built a competing gizmo. And there was plenty of news in the Brazilian tech press at the time on competing initiatives banked by the Brazilian government.
See The Brazilian Digital Inclusion Wars: Monopoly is Not a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
On editing the very existence of one’s competition out of the business news as a banana-republican marketing tactic — at Harvard, they call it “innovation journalism” — see also my Initiating Coverage: Infomedia TV.
InfomediaTV of Porto Alegre wangled a contract as the official “media sponsor” and official “news service” of the Free Software Forum (FISL) in Rio de Janeiro last year.
At the same time, it had an (undisclosed) public relations contract with Microsoft. See Terminology Watch: ‘Rasteira’ for an account of how that worked out and Brazilian Indies Protest Exclusion, CC-M$FT Partnership for another little Redmond-funded media-hacking project along those same lines.
So which is it? A “news service” or a PR agency? It’s both! It’s neither! It is, like Global Voices Online, an “innovation in journalism!” Disclosing conflicts of interest is for Luddites who don’t “get the Internet”!
O governo federal planeja abrir uma licitação internacional, no segundo semestre, para a compra de 150 mil computadores portáteis de baixo custo, que serão distribuídos para alunos de escolas públicas. “A idéia é que as crianças já estejam com os laptops em março do ano que vem”, disse ontem (1/6) Cezar Alvarez, assessor especial do presidente da República e coordenador-geral dos Programas de Inclusão Digital do governo, durante o 51.º Painel Telebrasil, na Costa do Sauípe (BA).
The federal government plans to open an international competion, in the second half of 2007, for the purchase of 150,000 low-cost portable computers to be distributed to students at public schools. “The idea is that children should have laptops by March of 2008,” said Cezar Alvarez, special advisor to the president and coordinator of Digital Inclusion Programs, during the 51st Telebrasil Conference in Costa do Sauípe, Bahia.
Beautiful, beautiful place, Costa do Sauípe. Been there. Heard the fierce cries of the carcará over the pantanal. Body-surfed naked on deserted white beaches. Not a pretty sight.
The Squid government has worked systematically to help get technology centers going in the Northeast.
The three finalists (l. to r.) include the MIT $100 laptop (up to $175, last I heard, and runs Windows rather than Linux now), an (even weirder-looking) Indian machine from Encore, and the (Brazilian-made, as I understand it) Classmate, which we have suggested rebranding as the Marmita do Conhecimento, for obvious reasons.
O nome do projeto é Um Computador por Aluno (UCA), muito parecido com Um Laptop por Criança (OLPC, na sigla em inglês), nome da organização sem fins lucrativos criada pelo professor Nicholas Negroponte, fundador do Media Lab, do Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The name of the project is One Computer Per Student (UCA), very similar to the One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, from its English acronym), the name of a nonprofit created by MIT prof Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab.
A máquina desenvolvida pela OLPC, chamada XO e mais conhecida como Laptop de US$ 100, é um dos concorrentes na licitação. Também estão no páreo o Classmate, da Intel, e o Mobilis, da empresa indiana Encore.
The machine developed by OLPC, called the XO and more popularly known as the $100 Laptop, is one of the competing entries. Also in the competition are the Intel Classmate and the Mobilis, from the Indian firm Encore.
The modest order contrasts markedly with the “e-ducational” crash program Microsoft sold to Mexico, the Enciclomedia program — which ended up sunk in waste, fraud and abuse.
See
- “The Technical and Educational Failure of Enciclomedia”
- Redmond & Televisa: A Match Made in Tijuana?
- The Master and Margarita: A Mexican Mala Educación?
- Enciclomedia’s Shining Example
- E-ducation Projects: “The Caprichos of Vincente Fox”
- BBS: The Beeb 2.0 Touts Enciclomedia
- Enciclomedia: Gordillo Son-in-Law Summoned in Savior Machine Case
- Enciclomedia: The Passion of the Savior Machine
Look for Global Voices Online to provide some “innovation journalism” support — shilling for the house — for the folks that pay its bills. If I am wrong, I buy the beer.
See also What is an Evangelist? Or, How to Change the World With Happy Talk and Jargon Watch: ‘Innovation Journalism’.
The ill-will generated by the iCommons event, by the way, may explain why the president of the iCommons, Mr. Lemos of the FGV, who succeeded Joi Ito, no longer mentions that affiliation when giving quote to the Brazilian press, as I noted recently.
Disclosure: This post authored on an Intel machine, which crunches data with remarkable aplomb. No complaints there (except maybe all that planned obsolescence over the years).
I also have a Brazilian AMD64 machine (a garish Acer Ferrari cross-promotion marked down about 1,000% at FNAC because not even the Brazillionaires could afford it at R$12,000, or 36 minimum salaries). It does the job just as well. The wife is about to get that for her birthday so she can liberate herself from Paraguayan XP.
Lula and Nicky Blackbridge: ” I have only three very fat fingers. Will this dinky little thing work for me?” Negroponte: Maybe if you guys ordered more than a measly 65, with a thousand more for later testing — you promised, dude — we can work out some economies of scale.”
One of these days I am going to buy one of those Sino-Tupi “none of the above” boxes — they get cheaper and and cheaper — and do a serious comparison.
“Without it, life would be hell on earth.” Microtec advertisement, Veja magazine, issue 87. File under “the rhetoric of the technological sublime (RTS) in postmodern technology PR, Velvet Elvis tendency.”
The New Market Machines 