Asso­ci­ated Press:  Google to aban­don online answer service

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NY Times: For $150, Third-World Lap­top Stirs Big Debate. (NYT photo of MIT’s
Wal­ter Ben­der, left, and Nicholas Negro­ponte) Excerpt:

The non­profit project, One Lap­top Per Child, [has won] over many
skep­tics over the last two and a half years. Five coun­tries —
Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nige­ria and Thai­land — have made ten­ta­tive
com­mit­ments to put the com­put­ers into the hands of mil­lions of
stu­dents, with pro­duc­tion in Tai­wan expected to begin by mid-2007.

The lap­top does not come with a  Microsoft
Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem or even a hard drive, and the screen is small.
And the cost is now closer to $150 than $100. But the price tag, even
com­pared with low-end $500 lap­tops now widely avail­able, trans­forms the
eco­nomic equa­tion for devel­op­ing countries. …

The idea is also that chil­dren can take on much of the
respon­si­bil­ity for main­tain­ing the sys­tems, rather than rely­ing on or
cre­at­ing bureau­cra­cies to do so.

“We believe you have to
lever­age the kids them­selves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learn­ing
machines.” As an exam­ple, she pointed to the back­light used by the
lap­top. Although it is designed to last five years, if it fails it can
be replaced as sim­ply as bat­ter­ies are replaced in a flash­light. It is
some­thing a child can do, she said. …

Mr. Negro­ponte said the man­u­fac­tur­ing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

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Infor­ma­tion Week: Yahoo Qui­etly Launches Mobile Social-Networking Service

Yahoo is
qui­etly launch­ing an exper­i­men­tal site, called Mixd, that allows
mobile-phone users to send text mes­sages and share videos and pic­tures
with friends. Yahoo plans to mar­ket Mixd on U.S. col­lege cam­puses. News
Corp.‘s MySpace is devel­op­ing mobile ser­vices for its users.

Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointer.

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Tech­Ef­fect: Om Malik to launch two new blogs.

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Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor: Do you need a Web pub­li­cist? ‘Iden­tity man­agers’ act as agents, lawyers, enablers – and enforcers – for lives lived increas­ingly online. Thanks to IWant­Media for the pointer.

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USA Today: What Would Techies Do with a Newspaper?

Inter­net entre­pre­neurs are asked: If you owned a news­pa­per, what would you do with it?

Other than get­ting out of paper, the techies almost uni­ver­sally came up with two main sug­ges­tions: turn news­pa­pers into mod­els of Web 2.0-style open media, and go super local, essen­tially becom­ing the town Yahoo.

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San Jose Mer­cury News: Bit­Tor­rent cuts online video deals

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Hol­ly­wood Reporter: User-created Web con­tent soars. Increas­ing num­bers of Amer­i­cans are post­ing their own con­tent online, says a new USC-Annenberg Dig­i­tal Future Project survey.

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Sun Microsys­tems today launched a site called The Big Mashup: How the net­work is chang­ing enter­tain­ment and news gath­er­ing in the Par­tic­i­pa­tion Age. Par­tic­pants include Andrew Baron, Dou­glas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky and others.

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Fab­rice Florin, the founder, announced that New­sTrust just launched its beta web­site today. It’s a community-driven guide to good jour­nal­ism. The site now has more than 1,600 mem­bers. Worth a look. 

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