Dear GKD Members, Below is my response to a point in the 'Bytes for All' newsgroup. I have been meaning to alert all GKD members to these ideas so please accept this as an initial foray.
Simon Batchelor [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------------------- We have been working on this approach. In fact in China you can get the VCD portable players for 36 dollars trade. We started with the idea of Playstations. Playstation (0) the original, is robust, has connectivity, and second hand goes for about 20 dollars. But it cannot play standard CDs or browse html pages. Playstation next version (PS1) lost it connectivity, but PS2 has connectivity and can play DVD etc, retailing at 200 plus. I am not advocating Playstations just sharing our thought process. We then looked around further and found these portables that Roberto mentioned. We have been building local capacity to make videos and found that VCDs can be carried by health workers to deliver useful mother and child health content to slum communities in India, Bangladesh, Moldova and Cambodia. Happy to discuss this more but am aware that this is a discussion group so trying to keep it short. VCD players cannot read html. BUT we are now exploring using a screen recorder to record someone using the Internet to investigate a subject (e.g. how to vaccinate your cow). The resulting AVI can then be delivered on VCD and the pause button can be used to read the pages. This is of course still in the major languages, that it a fundamental problem with the Internet. For local language creation we are going for actual videos delivered by VCD portables. More info available. Searching for partners and funding at the moment to expand. try www.big-world.org Simon Simon Batchelor [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Roberto Verzola [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 21 March 2002 13:25 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [bytesforall_readers] NEWS: First set of Simputers deployed in Chhattishgarh May I suggest another option. I have seen on the Philippine market Taiwan-made VCD players selling at 50 USD retail. Their production cost must be somewhere $40 or lower. This is somewhat more affordable for the truly poor than a $200 appliance. My suggestion is to use these players as starting point, but to modify them with the addition of a mouse and software, so that they can also browse CD-ROMs with files in the html format, in addition to their usual VCD (and sometimes MP3) player capability. A CD-ROM can now be produced for less than 1 dollar. This approach will not enrich rentiers as reliance on the Internet does. You must have heard of the Human Dev't Library effort. If this library is translated to the local language, that would make a nice partner for this VCD/HTML reader. Roberto Verzola Philippines ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
