Dogi reports his public music player was a big success in Berlin over the holidays… reported by bloggers who were there. Other XOphiles making an appearance included /tmplab from Paris, Mako & Mika from the Acetaria, a posse from OLPC Deutschland, and Aaron + Christoph from OLPC Austria.
This year’s Give One, Get One program will be ending (in the US and globally) on midnight, December 31st (PST). Our Simply Give and Give a School programs will continue unchanged, via Amazon and the OLPC website, respectively.
If you have been waiting to sort out matching programs or other details, you can send any last-minute questions to us at giving <at> laptop.org
UPDATE for blog fans only: G1G1 has officially ended, and we changed most links to point to the “Simply Give” page on Amazon at the turn of the year, but the product page will remain up so that those who have already donated can track their orders. If you meant to take part in G1G1, or tried to unsuccessfully, you can still place a new order via the product detail page for a short while longer.
The OLPC group on dailymotion recently crossed 400 child-friendly videos formatted for the XO. This is something neat you can contribute to easily, and pass on links to your XO-laden friends, so pay attention:
Meanwhile, the OLPC video presence online has been growing rapidly elsewhere. The Lennon piece hit 1200,000 views on Youtube (for an ogg version, see Lennon on Dailymotion)– nothing compared to a catchy pop song or a thumbnail with bared skin, but it put us in the top 10 for the day, and has almost doubled the number of subscribers to our channel in 2 days. Nice! A good foundation for amplifying great OLPC videos in the future. Leave a comment if you have a video you would like us to post.
At last we’ve posted something more popular than the video Shenki made eons ago of an 8- and 10- year old repairing an XO! I still remember tracking down the freely-licensed Jamendo soundtrack at 3am. (90percentofeverything’s original Sugar demo is still the reigning popularity champ.)
The video is being slammed by devoted Lennon fans in the comments and ratings (I can’t remember the last time I saw a front-page video with only two stars), though we are received many enthusiastic private messages. Please rate and comment, however you feel about it.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!
This has been a long and amazing year. Thanks to support from Yoko Ono, a little digital magic, and some more beautiful animation from TAXI, we have a video message from John Lennon about the power of education to change the world. See for yourself.
And I feel obligated to remind you of these two great videos:
UPDATE: Lennon is now a top-2010 video on Youtube, and the top in many countries… with a lot of media interest in South America and Europe. It is quite a polarizing spot.
UPDATE: Lennon is now, after less than a week, the most popular OLPC video online, eclipsing the Sugar demo and TED clips in total viewership, with almost 1100 comments.
Postscript: I have the full cut of the final G1G1 thank-you video montage, now posted on Dailymotion. Simply beautiful. Thank you to Jason and Michelle for pulling that together.
The first round of international Give One, Get One orders have been shipped out — every order placed before December 16 should have arrived by now, in time for Christmas. Some were sent from Miami, and the European orders went out from Brussels with EU adapters and a special G1G1 Europe thank-you note.
Orders between now and December 31 should ship out by mid-January. We are able to ship to all of the 45 countries mentioned in the original announcement, and are investigating and adding more countries as there is specific interest. If you want to send laptops to a country not currently on our list, leave a comment here, and I will see what we can do.
Barring an extension, International G1G1 will end on December 31st. Be sure to place your orders now if you are interested.
It currently still appears that one is preordering on Amazon, and that the XO is “available January 15″ — that means that orders made now will be shipped by Jan 15 or else refunded. This is the way information is sent to us for fulfillment – a compromise we have made to cover countries everywhere, since AMZN was only able to handle shipping within the US. Donors in a few specific countries (Australia, Hong Kong, France) can choose to take part in G1G1 directly through a local site, as a tax-deductable donation.
Bryan Berry of OLE Nepal published a retrospective on their two-school pilot after seven months. Bashuki and Bishwamitra has been a model example of how to publish feedback and results from a school, from collaboration across multiple mailing lists to publishing photos, customized build images, and new software tools. They are one of the most innovative small pilots, working toward ambitious short-term goals. They developed an entire suite of localized tools, programs and interfaces in a non-trivial new language, invited experts to visit them for weeks and months to advise them, built a local NGO and volunteer internship program to help maintain momentum, and handled in-field customization, school-server setup, and public feedback and reflection, all without significant government support.
Take a quick look at their overview of the past seven months, and read through their blog; it is well worth the time spent.
Dailymotion’s G1G1 video contest to find the best 30-second community spot about G1G1 has ended, with over a dozen vetted submissions, some vying for surrealist or spoken poetry awards as well… In addition to air time for the winning video, we are pleased to be able to offer prizes for the three best videos, including swag from the WB.
Among my personal favorites are The Best Things in Life Come In Twos, done in the new OLPC animation style, and two that weren’t normal contest entries – Carl’s carrotlike contest introduction and “Out the Other Side“, by one of the award sponsors.
But none of these were the overall winner, which will be announced once it is formatted for TV. Stay tuned! 
This is a great video about the pilot in Rwamagana, Rwanda by Worldfocus correspondent Martin Seemungal.
Other reminders :
Fernando da Rosa just published a lovely blog post about the 160,000 children in CEIBAL using Sugar on Linux, and what this means for their community. A must-read; with a 3-minute video pastiche that says it all without needing any words: Permalink Comments
For the past year, we have been running a Give Many large-scale donation program with little fanfare, for groups that wish to buy XOs in hundreds and thousands for their own school or regional projects.
This week we rolled out a more detailed program for targeted donations, tentatively called Change the World — so now you have a choice : Give a laptop, Get a laptop, Change the World. (A bit anticlimactic for the Simply Give donors, but they don’t seem to mind.)
We have a sense of what it takes to support these independent projects, and are working to remove barriers to entry. The cost of starting a 100-laptop project in the neediest parts of the world is now under $220 per laptop, including shipping to an international airport, a spare parts kit, and explicit invitations for organizers to the learning and deployment workshops that we organize a few times each year.
We have dropped price tiering by quantity — so 100 laptops cost the same per machine as 1000 — and we are offering a discount for projects targeting the 50 Least Developed Countries and OLPC’s partner countries (the cost for projects in other parts of the world is $259 per laptop) .
There is a growing FAQ on our Wiki with more information; other thoughts after the jump.
C. Scott Ananian just posted a bunch of videos from Peru’s MiniEd on his exciting, sporadic blog.
My favorite is the Children’s Song (ogg), which sings about the joy of learning with an XO. The first Peru program (ogg) contains the song subtitled in English, which some of you may enjoy more:
Check out the original post for more videolarity. Further updates in English and Spanish are coming later in the week — the Peruvian and Uruguayan blogospheres have been hopping recently.
