Hello Taran, I am very happy you sent the report from Slashdot, plus your response to it. I am not a software person, but I agreed with you that the NGOs community, perhaps, should give more thoughts into using Simputer. I remembered distinctly a DDN member from India wrote a detailed posting few weeks ago regarding why Simputer is useful for certain communities in India. Quoting the report from UN ICT Policy Task Force Satish Jha: "Unfortunately, productising anything like simputer is something that requires a lot more than very fine minds. It requires the experience of dealing with markets, product creation capability and manufacturing prowess at the cutting edge of productivity" --- well, how about shipping cost from USA to India ( re: the MIT's $100 Laptop) would that not add cost to the product? Just a simple example. What about customer support where there would be language barrier? Would that not be another cost if we look at time (costing from both customer and customer support) = money? What nagging me as well, could the issue of most NGOs not 'originated' from India be another barrier? Can they be convinced to support 'local' product? Provinding employment for local people? Furthermore we sometime seems to forget there are people who can only manage simple tool (not because they are dumb but they never had the chance to catch up with technologies). In our rash to close the digital gap, we think everyone should have the best available without really understand the conditions of what the audience need. Providing a 1st world lap-top to someone who might only need the tool for simple tracking of income, contact info etc. would be like giving a Catepillar harveseter to someone who has only a pocket-size plot of land??? I hope more people from this community would speak up and support your concerns. Cindy
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