Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, is heading a new project to build $100 laptops for children in developing nations. The project is being run by The 2B1 Foundation [archived version]. The concept is that governments will place an order for at least one million computers to be owned by individual children. They will run a stripped down version of Linux and be designed for the longest possible battery life. The computers will use ad-hoc wireless networking to communicate with each other and the world. This would be a perfect project for delay tolerant networks. The problem is what are the children going to do with these laptops? I think the applications problem is huge and is not discussed at all in the article. Still, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. [Update 2005-04-07: Some more details are available in a brief overview by Joseph Jacobson, one of the MIT professors involved in the project.]