- You will see plenty of smartphones in the developing world and you'll see plenty of TVs; but you're unlikely to see desktop computers in remote areas.
Poor internet
connectivity, uncertain power supply and a simple lack of money have
meant that billions have been locked out of the knowledge economy.
Matt
Dalio, CEO of Endless Computers, wants to change all of that with the
first simplified, robust and affordable desktop aimed at emerging market
consumers.
Dalio told CNN he got the
idea to create a $169 computer while he was traveling and noticed that,
while most homes did not have a desktop computer, they often had an HD
screen.
"It was one of those
micro-epiphanies," he said. "I was in India and I looked over at a
television and then I looked at my hand and there was a phone in it and I
thought why not connect the two?
"While
smartphones may be sweeping through emerging markets, a computer is
still the thing that you and I sit down to every day to access the
knowledge economy," he said. "The only difference between a smartphone
and a computer is the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse and the operating
system."
Reinventing the wheel
Despite the best efforts to bring affordable technology to the developing world, from radios powered by clockwork to water pumps with few moving part, designing new systems from scratch is like reinventing the wheel.
And like most designs for new wheels, they often end up being round.
"If
I'd known then what I know now," Dalio said of the three-year journey
to develop possibly the world's most pared back desktop.
"Initially
I thought we're going to take Android, put it on a smartphone processor
and how hard could it be?" he said. "And when we went into hardware how
hard could that be? We're basically taking an off-the-shelf board and
slapping two pieces of plastic around it.
"The real challenge we found was that no existing operating system worked."
Software a hard problem to solve
Windows,
he said, was too expensive and doesn't run on cheap processors, Android
is fundamentally a mobile system, Chrome requires connectivity, and
Linux is too hard to use.
"We realized we had to build an operating system, but ignorance is a powerful tool."
After
searching for the right development team (Endless eventually came up
with a Linux-based operating system equipped with a new and
easier-to-use interface) and launching a Kickstarter campaign that
raised more than its $100,000 target in record time, Endless plans to go
on sale in Mexico in May.
Equipped
with app-based software and hardware that can cope with an uncertain
power supply, Endless comes in a 32G and 500GB version both powered by
2GB of RAM.
The idea is to effectively
encapsulate the internet for consumers beyond the range of the net.
Each unit comes pre-loaded with a full encyclopedia, recipes,
educational lectures and health information.
"The
single most popular application is Wikipedia," he said. "We are
planning on adding software with a focus on farming; in many places
people are cash poor but that doesn't mean they don't have assets.
"When
a cow, for instance, gets sick it's a real problem. That cow's health
can sometimes be more important than their own child's because the
fortune of the whole family rests on that cow.
"Information
is so powerful ... what we want to do is to fill this product with the
information that's relevant to their lives," Dalio said. "No one in San
Francisco is building a how-to-manage-your-cattle app, that's for sure."
Computer access for billions?
With
an estimated 5 billion people without access to computers, Endless say
the potential for their computers is enormous and, while it may not be
the cheapest on the market, Dalio says it is the best that money can
buy.
Consumers in the developing world,
he says, are no different to consumers anywhere else in the world and
want something functional but also slick.
"People
are like you and I, they want the best that they can afford," he said.
"They want something unique and beautiful and exciting and different.
"People
here in the West will say they want a flat top on their desktops so
they can stack their books on top of it, it's just a commodity, but
there it's an object of art, of luxury, of pride.
"They want the round top that we produce specifically so their kids can't stack their books on top of it."
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