For years I've looked forward to something like OLPC, but its really slow in coming. The $100 is now $175. We have developers in SA, here's a link with some of the latest news:
http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1593
I work in the academic textbook/reference/research market and every day I am amazed at how indispensible the PC is becoming.I have lecturers listening to our marketing podcasts,online testing,lecture notes and powerpoints and Chime tutorials being downloaded, professors skyping me.
But it seems that (at least in SA), we are not always clear about why we want OLPC. Teachers (and esp politicians) say it will be wonderful for every child to have a laptop.....but can't tell me why.
Should we not be looking at what the child needs, and then deciding if a laptop will provide it? All I see and hear is the glitz of OLPC, but little of what it will bring.
I hope I'm simply misinformed.

Cory - the educational proposition behind the project is explained on the OLPC website. Put simply, OLPC believe that the XO laptop will provide a way of bridging the 'digital divide' because it will change the way that chidren in developing countries learn. It can act as a library, a notebook, a workbook, a vehicle from which to access the Internet and a creative tool for collaborating with peers and teachers. Whether or not this is a good thing is to be debated, but my impression is that the OLPC team do have a very clear vision of what they wish to achieve.

I couldn't agree more about the current focus on technology and the need for good quality and relevant content - which is why we as a publisher want to be involved with the OLPC project. However, I also think that there is a learning process that new users of technology need to go through to explore the capabilities of the hardware and software that they are exploring for the first time. The OLPC project is currently at a very early stage. The next development will be that the teachers/learners will want to create and share their own content, and then finally, in about two years, there will be a realisation that certain types of content are best delivered by publishers after all...

Incidentally, there is an update on the BBC site today claiming that OLPC are now ready to go 'into production':
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6908946.stm.
As OLPC state publicly that "manufacturing will begin when 5 to 10 million machines have been ordered and paid for in advance", this is indicative of some serious interest in the market!

It's interesting how UK policy makers devised something they called with an engineer’s precision, a “digital” content strategy. The privileging of the epithet over the noun in this case seems to me especially revealing. Nineteen years spent day after day delivering content, digital or otherwise, does not I think, do justice to my own experience of what it meant to be a teacher. So I am as sceptical as CORY about what OLPC might eventually achieve educationally merely by supplying laptops. Although I think in the UK we have funded a whole raft of school-based hardware and other initiatives that ought to have supported a digital content market, I suspect most publishers aren't that thrilled with the potential of that market as it stands. Some difficult questions about what skilled teachers actually do: how they regard "content" needed to be asked. On a different note Richard, the Flogging video did indeed bring a smile to my face. My own response to the difficult customer issues I faced when I launched my own corporate blogging experiment was to create a whole section visible only to colleagues with passwords. Even in a technology savvy company like RM, passwords are still a tremendous barrier to usage for many people.