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Interview with OLPC's Founding CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, by Sean Daly - Updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

Mary Lou Jepsen will go down in history as the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child. She has recently announced that she is starting her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC while extending them. She calls it "a spin-out from One Laptop per Child." And so naturally we had questions. Does this mean we will all soon be able to get an XO-like laptop for adults, no matter where we live? Sean Daly had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Jepsen, and so we were able to get some answers to that and many other questions.

I'm thrilled to discover that she reads Groklaw, too. And she has a question she'd like to ask you, Pick Your Brains style: "What would an open hardware project look like?" If you have ideas, please leave a comment for her.

I'd like to highlight one of her answers, because to me it sums up very nicely why any school, any government should choose an XO laptop over any other competitor. Sean asked her why she was leaving OLPC. Her answer:

My job is simply done. When I started in January 2005, many people thought was a joke, including Craig Barrett and Bill Gates. I took it from that stage -- just an idea of a $100 laptop -- through invention, design and partnering and to delivery. The laptop is in high volume mass production, it's the lowest cost laptop ever made, the lowest power laptop ever made, it's the greenest laptop ever made, it's the only sunlight-readable laptop on the market, it's more rugged than a Toughbook, it's in the Museum of Modern Art for it's look -- and countries are buying them en masse. For example, 260,000 are going to children in one-room classrooms off-the-grid in rural Peru. The XO laptop requires less infrastructure: it's about 15 times lower in power consumption than Energy Star mandates, and 15 times lower than any other laptop on the market. The Mesh networking extends the reach of a single access point as the wifi signals can hop from laptop to laptop to reach the children living the farthest from the school.

They simply can't beat that. Not Intel. Not Microsoft. They have nothing like it, not even close. I own an XO, and I can tell you, it's also an endearing, charming laptop, one that is enjoyable to use and play with. Everyone I show mine to falls in love with it, children especially. If her new company means we will all be able to get something like the XO, and it appears that is the goal, or part of the goal, this is fabulous news. All of you who were whining that you couldn't buy an XO because you live in Europe, her stated goal for the new company is a 50 Euro laptop.

Full post as published by Groklaw on January 07, 2008 (boomark / email).