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Researchers at MIT's Media Lab, in conjunction with high-tech heavyweights such as Google, AMD, and Nortel, recently unveiled a prototype of a $100 laptop intended to grant access to the World Wide Web to children in developing countries. The computer is the size of a textbook, features built-in wireless capability that can connect to the web via WiFi and create local area networks, and - since electricity in large swaths of the developing world is expensive, inconsistent, or non-existent - can be powered by a hand crank. Costs are kept down by reliance on open-source software, a radical redesign that focuses on simplicity and durability, and economies of scale -- governments in Brazil, Thailand, Massachusetts and elsewhere have signaled interest in purchasing the machines en masse. The $100 laptop has enormous disruptive potential: it will compete primarily against non-consumption in places where traditional laptops cannot penetrate due to excessive cost and insufficient power and will appeal to overshot consumers on the basis of price and accessibility by cutting out the pricey proprietary software and advanced applications featured on, say, $1000 laptops. Essentially, this new kind of laptop will meet the needs of a massive and massively underserved market. Furthermore, government agencies and international aid organizations (led by the UN) are expected to foot the bill, meaning that tens-of-millions of the laptops may be shepherded into the developing world as soon as the final (though not insignificant) technological hurdles are overcome. The target date is late 2006, with full rollout in 2007. Like many disruptive innovations before it, the $100 laptop is being derided by industry incumbents as nothing more than a gadget (specifically, "a $100 gadget," in the words of Intel Chairman Craig Barrett, quoted by Reuters, 12/9/05). Will the well-established and thriving laptop computer industry be swept away by a hand-cranked "gadget?" And of infinitely greater significance, can said "gadget" revolutionize the global computing and communications landscape and facilitate the education of millions, hundreds-of-millions, even billions of the world's poor and underserved? Affordable wireless telephony has already begun to reshape the world; cheap and effective wireless computing, run on wireless power, cranks up the disruptive and transformative potential even higher. See: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002628425_laptop17.html http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/12/intel_chairman.php http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=SP263515