The XO is the laptop designed by One Laptop Per Child to be distributed to children around the world  to “explore, experiment, and express themselves.” The XO currently sells for $200 and starting this fall, they will be rerunning their G1G1 promotion, where if you spend $400 and buy two, one is sent to you, and one is sent to the kids.

Concept designs have recently been released for the XO-2: the price point will hopefully be about $188, and instead of the traditional look of the laptop, they are looking at one touch-sensitive display with a fold in the middle. It’s really getting exciting.

Recently Microsoft paired up with OLPC to offer XP on the XOs instead/in addition to the Linux distro “Sugar”…and they’re getting some mixed feedback. What do you think?

[T]he interest of the Mac world this week swung from 3G iPhone rumor-mongering to South Florida, where a company called Psystar has put up a Web site selling a product called an Open Computer. The product is essentially a white-box Mac with Mac OS X Leopard preinstalled, and a violation of Apple’s licensing agreement for Mac OS X.

CNET News’ Tom Krazit today nicely summed up the latest controversy in the consumer tech world: The Psystar “Open Computer,” which is being called a (possibly unethical) clone of the Mac.

In digging into the background of Psystar, the company behind the new computer, Mr. Krazit claims that the company has been repeatedly changing its address to evade investigation. From the article:

I tried to call Psystar executives Wednesday morning and was directed to submit any questions to an e-mail address at Psystar. The company doesn’t appear to have been prepared for the onslaught of attention following the discovery of the Open Computer on its Web site, as its online store was briefly down Wednesday morning. It’s now back up and taking orders.

Perhaps foolishly, once the Web store came back online I placed an order for an Open Computer with Leopard preinstalled. I got the basic model for $554.99, although they kill you on shipping with a $93.41 shipping and handling fee for UPS Three-Day Select.

A gentleman who answered the “sales” extension at Psystar’s toll-free number told me there is a 7- to 8-day build time right now for the Open Computer. When I asked him what accounted for the delay, he said the company had received many orders in the past few days. He also said he had only started at the company a few days ago.

In other Psystar news, the developer who created the firmware emulator that allows the Open Computer to bypass Apple’s restrictions on Mac OS X is peeved that the company is using his technology without his permission.

Netkas, who created the EFI v8 emulator, says he released the software under a strict noncommercial license. For a while, Psystar had not even acknowledged his contribution, but the company has added an “open source” section to its site noting his authorship of the EFI v8 emulator and saying, “Psystar will promote Open Source projects in every way possible.”

Computerworld adds to the story:

PsyStar also tried today to explain its shifting mailing address in the Web site statement. The company now lists its location as 10475 NW 28th St., Doral, Fla.; that address is the fourth used on the site since Monday.

“We’re in the process of moving to a new location,” said the company. “The first new address posted (10481) was in error and our correct address is 10475 NW 28th Street.”

PsyStar has listed, in chronological order, a residential address, 10645 SW 112 St., and two commercial addresses, 10481 NW 28th St. and 10471 NW 28th St., so far this week.

According to a reverse look-up using WhitePages.com, two businesses are at PsyStar’s newest address: Vipal Rubber Corp. and a firm called Stop Mold Dry. When contacted, Vipal said it had moved to another location — an additional search found it at a new locale — but the phone number for Stop Mold Dry gave only a rapid-busy signal.

For its part, PsyStar claimed it has simply been overwhelmed. “[We were] not ready to handle the enormous production capacity demanded by the online community,” the company said on its site. “Due to the incredible response, we have now expanded to a larger commercial unit to handle the supplies and assembly of Open Computers.”

PsyStar’s toll number, which was disconnected Wednesday, was back in operation today.

Although written for a European audience, we found a recent CNBC Business Report entitled “Top Ten Tech Trends” very much applicable to the United States as well, if not for the whole modern world.

And that’s not just because it’s based in large part on American technology giants like Microsoft, Intel and Google. It’s also because Europe has shown itself adept at applying innovations on a large scale in a way that often wins enthusiastic response from the consumer and business markets.

CNBC’s Tony Glover is confident that several of the new innovations we’ve seen lately are just the beginning of larger trends that will revolutionize the telecom and IT industries over the next few years. Looking at some of the examples he sites, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions.

Best of all, he feels that these consumer tech breakthroughs will result in “unprecedented opportunities for small and medium-sized players” — great news for small business owners looking for new ways to compete with the big guys.

The basis for his review is the big 3GSM Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile technology industry. The GSM is a worldwide mobile communications network that originated in Europe and is now used by over two billion people in 212 countries, according to the article.

Once again Bill Gates and Steve Jobs will be going toe-to-toe to decide who will dominate the next generation of computing. But the fact that the US computing industry’s major battleground in 2007 will be high-end wireless handhelds is testimony to the global success of the GSM network, the European Commission’s mobile communications standard. The number of people using GSM has mushroomed from around one million in 1993 to over two billion today, operating across 212 countries.

And the top ten trends are:

1. If there is one trend that will dominate in 2007, it is the globalisation of mobile communications. The mobile phone industry estimates that around 1.3 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2007, with the rapidly developing economies of India and China being the main engines for growth. Mobile operators in India, for example, are signing new mobile phone owners at the staggering rate of about a million a week. …

2. The second trend … is the way in which mobile communications are becoming more sophisticated and relying less on basic voice services. Mobile operator O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, predicts that all phones will be email-enabled by 2010. This will effectively leapfrog consumers in markets like India and China from the 19th to the 21st century. They will be able to move from being without a phone or PC straight to the world of always-connected email and internet services simply by signing up for a mobile phone. Way before this happens, devices such as Apple’s new iPhone will have introduced users to high-definition mobile audio and video. Electronic gaming, music and even TV programmes will become available to millions almost overnight. …

3. The third major trend … is the continued convergence of IT and telecoms. Not only will mobile phones behave increasingly like computers, but telecoms operators … will also use their broadband services to supply services such as internet TV (IPTV) to customers. … BT (British Telecom) has recently struck a string of deals with content providers including Universal Music and Time Warner in order to be able to provide an ever-wider choice of on-demand entertainment. …

4. The fourth trend will see the rise of increasingly sophisticated forms of internet-based advertising as IPTV takes off. Microsoft is now determined to take Google’s ball away and run with it. It has, for instance, developed its own form of Google-style paid-for search that uses Microsoft’s vast database of personal information to allow advertisers to target specific demographic groups.

“Advertisers can see the age and sex of web surfers clicking on their ads as a result of information gathered by Microsoft properties such as MSN Hotmail, which requires those registering to submit their age bracket and gender,” says James Colborn, product manager at Microsoft’s adCenter research labs. He adds that advertisers do not have access to the names of those visiting their sites, merely a demographic overview of their age and sex.

According to Colborn, the adCenter labs on the Microsoft campus outside Seattle are about to release even more precise online advertising tools. Microsoft is launching a trial IPTV advertising service with an as-yet-unnamed major US retailer that will make a technological prediction made by Bill Gates last year a reality. …

5. The fifth major trend [is] the way in which all consumer IT devices, mobile and fixed, will become content guzzlers. The competition to acquire quality content will become intense, but ironically, the very technology providing consumers with the ability to access such a wide range of content will also make it increasingly difficult for major content owners to derive any revenue from their products.

6. This is a result of the sixth trend, which will be the proliferation of free services. The early years of the internet trained users to expect internet-based services to be largely free, and this has become a well-established trend. It will benefit small and nimble players with low overheads offering the kind of services capable of generating advertising.

Traditional entertainment giants like the Hollywood film studios will become increasingly vulnerable. Having been weaned on free music download sites such as Kazaa, many younger consumers now see nothing inherently wrong in using file-swapping services based outside the US to download copyrighted film and TV content for free.

7. The seventh trend will be the growing familiarity of the letters DRM – short for digital rights management – as traditional content providers such as the major Hollywood studios fight tooth and nail to protect their investments. New US laws designed to give long prison sentences to movie pirates are just the start.

8. The eighth trend [is] mobile operators such as Vodafone finally starting to accept that consumers will never use their handsets to access high-priced data services in the way these companies anticipated when they started to build their 3G networks at an estimated cost of €200bn. Instead, these operators will turn to business customers. Companies like Vodafone are already seeing business revenues rise as corporate users install 3G cards on their laptops.

9. This move to increased business mobility will be accelerated by trend number nine, as new types of mobile device from companies like Intel bridge the gap between mobile phones and laptops. Ultra-mobile laptops are shrinking, as evidenced by OQO’s Vista handheld computer. The key element to this trend is that the computing industry will finally abandon its one-size-fits-all philosophy. This will offer new opportunities for small and nimble companies to deploy mobile workforces and save money on the cost of centralised offices.

According to Intel, this revolution in portable computing will not merely be a question of physical dimensions. Portable computers will also be manufactured for specific environments such as schools and hospitals.

10. The tenth trend will be an extension of this kind of dedicated computing as machine-to-machine wireless communication becomes increasingly important. Machines ranging from in-car computers to heart monitors and other medical devices will be able to communicate with one another. It is estimated that by 2011 there will be over 100 million wirelessly connected devices.

Check out the original article in its entirety here.

According to today’s New York Times, Intel plans to announce tomorrow its plans to bring the world the next stage of the World Wide Web: the “Internet in your pocket.”

At a developer event in China, the company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will display a range of wireless Internet devices that Intel believes will fill a gap between smartphones and laptops. The company is hoping to capitalize on the success that Apple has had with its iPhone, which is one of the most popular mobile Web smartphones.

Intel is calling the new computers Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, and claims that it will have a significant advantage over makers of chips for cellphones because the Intel version will be highly compatible with the company’s laptop and desktop processors for which most Web software is written today.

The first generation of Intel’s MID technology will be aimed at data, not voice communications, leaving the company out of the market for smartphones. That has not damped the enthusiasm of Intel executives who foresee a proliferation of devices ranging from advanced ultracompact laptops to small, tablet-size devices that will be used for browsing the Web, navigation and Internet chat, rather than voice communications.

“What enables the innovation is the ability to bring over all the existing PC applications,” said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of the company’s Ultra Mobility Group.

… Intel’s strategy is moving the company toward a direct confrontation with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip maker that is also trying to deliver the wireless Internet on hand-held devices. The company, which refers to its strategy as “pocketable computing,” is offering a competing chip that offers lower power consumption and which is aimed for devices that blend voice and Internet data.

“We need to deliver an Internet experience that is like the desktop,” said Sanjay Jha, Qualcomm’s chief operating officer. “People are used to the Internet, and you can’t shortchange them.”

The new Intel mobile Internet strategy takes advantage of the company’s Atom microprocessor, which was announced in early March. The Atom will have performance roughly equivalent to laptop computers introduced four years ago, but will use little more than a half-a-watt to two-and-a-half watts of battery power. That is significantly lower than the 35 watts of power consumed by the company’s state-of-the-art microprocessors in today’s laptops.

Click here to read the original story.

Shortly after the recent news that Apple is revamping its iPhone to make it safer for corporate use comes a story by the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen that sheds some light on why Apple may feel that such a step is necessary.

“Designed with the consumer in mind, the iPhone is less secure than business-oriented smart phones such as those from Nokia Corp. or Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, according to IT professionals,” the article states. “But that isn’t stopping people from using the device for work-related tasks such as checking email, managing sales contacts and getting information about prospective clients.”

Many IT groups have banned the iPhone from their workplaces, complaining that there is no way to force employees to protect their iPhones with passwords and that they can’t erase sensitive corporate data from remote locations if the device is stolen or lost. Additionally, they say the iPhone doesn’t support the software many businesses use and that it only works on one cellular carrier’s network.

However, the article makes it clear that, in the end, the preference of the workers is likely to win out over the preference of America’s corporate IT administrators:

Whereas software vendors and other tech suppliers traditionally pitched their products to high-ranking executives and IT managers, some are now paying closer attention to the technologies workers actually use. Some vendors say that if employees make clear that they are going to embrace a particular device — with or without their IT department’s approval — then they will develop compatible products for it. Otherwise, they risk losing business to rivals.

“It’s clear to us that power is shifting to the users” and away from IT departments, says Mike de la Cruz, a vice president at business-software maker SAP AG. “So we’ve changed our strategy to focus on the users.”

Still, Apple is certainly smart enough to know that it’s in its best interests to alleviate the concerns of IT professionals.

Apple and its iPhone partner, AT&T Inc., are trying to make the iPhone more business-friendly, too. In January, AT&T began to allow iPhone purchases by corporate-account holders. Previously, the telephone company would bill iPhone charges only to individuals, and they would have to seek reimbursement from their companies. “We saw business customers clamoring for the iPhone” and wanted to make it easier for them to use the device, says an AT&T spokesperson.

What do you think? Will the explosive popularity of the iPhone translate into the business world? Should it? Do you have one, and if so, do you find yourself using it for work-related tasks? Sound off in the comments and let us know your thoughts.