Development Team Leaders

An eight-person team is directing OLPC’s development of the $100 Laptop. They are:

• Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, a recognized authority on information technology and author of Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages, whose family name is familiar to those outside technology fields because his brother is the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
• Joseph Jacobson, a physicist and professor at the MIT Media Lab, as well as inventor of low cost "electronic ink" displays which is one of the display technologies being considered for the $100 laptop
• Seymour Papert, professor emeritus at the MIT Media Lab, who is an early pioneer of artificial intelligence and one of the world's leading theorists on child learning
• Alan Kay, creator of the Smalltalk language at Xerox PARC and credited as the "father of personal computing," who conceived basic definitions of the laptop and tablet computer platforms, and was a key architect of the windowing GUI, and whose pioneering work in computers has often been influenced by his interest in children and education
• Mary Lou Jepsen, a leader in display technology, former CTO in Intel’s display division and now CTO of OLPC
• V. Michael Bove, Jr., a principal research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, who developed groundbreaking research in video compression
• Mitchel Resnick, professor of learning research at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of the worldwide network of Computer Clubhouses for children
• Ted Selker, MIT Media Lab professor and inventor of numerous patents for products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems
  

Corporate sponsors

Five corporations have joined the development project and also provided a first round of funding for project development: AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corp, and Red Hat. Three other corporate partnerships are “lurking.”

AMD makes microprocessors and is the leading competitor to Intel. In October 2004 it announced a corporate initiative, 50x15, to foster wide adoption of technology by providing 50 percent of the world’s population with Internet connectivity and computing capabilities by 2015. Brightstar provides supply chain management and wireless products to the wireless telecommunications industry in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in the United States. The search engine company Google, whose motto is “Do No Evil,” is building a stable of products providing information over the internet. Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager, likes the idea of thin-client office programs. At the end of September Google also offered to provide free Wi-Fi to San Francisco and is rumored to have much wider interests. News Corp provides satellite TV service in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Red Hat is a leading developer of the Linux operating system and software.