With the holiday season approaching, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child is looking to use advertising and an alliance with Amazon to provide more low-cost laptops for children in developing countries.
To promote this year’s version of its Give One/Get One (G1G1) program, the Cambridge, Mass.-based OLPC has arranged for donations of television time, billboards and magazine ads by such major media companies as the News Corporation, CBS and Time Warner, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times.
Amazon Fulfillment
The TV ads running in donated airtime feature children who benefit from the technology. One shows a young girl sitting in front of a glowing screen in a dark room in a South African township. Another says children will learn the tools they need to survive, whether a semiautomatic weapon or an XO, as the laptop is called.
The media donations will be used to raise the visibility of G1G1. A customer in a developed country pays $399, and gets two XOs. One machine is for the customer, and one is donated to a child in a target country. Alternatively, the customer can just donate the $199 needed to give the XO to a child.
Last year, the G1G1 program resulted in orders for more than 160,000 units in less than two months, but there were reports of issues with delivery. OLPC has said the problems arose because fulfillment was being handled by different vendors.
To solve that problem, OLPC this year will work with Amazon in the U.S. and United Kingdom to provide fulfillment at cost. U.S. customers who order this holiday season can get their machines in 2008, although U.K. customers will receive their machines next year. Amazon said it would begin taking orders Monday.
Half-Million XOs
Having created a highly innovative, rugged laptop that could be used in remote villages and elsewhere, OLPC…