Live from ETel-Sustainable IT for the World
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, founder of ndiyo!, is talking about the sustainability of our IT infrastructure.
He says it takes 1/4 ton of fossil fuels to make one PC. If you had a line of cars head to nose from NY to LA, 4 rows thick, and filled up each car with gas - that’s about how much it takes just to make one PC, not including how much it costs to run or recycle them. The first billion of the world has this technology, but that last 5 billion of the world are still waiting.
For half of the world, a PC costs more than a person’s annual salary, more than a house. There is a problem in affordability — if this were the case, how long would you need to work to afford a PC, and how would it affect if you were setting up a business and needed to provide each employee with a PC?
We need to change this situation if we want to provide IT to the world, and we need to provide IT to the world, so they have access to our world, to artistic, creative and informational data.
He founded ndiyo, a company working toward this goal. The word comes from the Swahili, for Yes.
In Suweto, S. Africa, the mobile phone’s emerging. Small businesses connect pay phones connecting to mobile networks. Ndiyo is employing trial systems on the outskirts of Victoria, to see whether a mobile network can also be a good way to rpovide internet. Providing PCs would be prohibitively expensive. NIVO (Network In Video Out), robust mobile devices, provide connections for keyboard, mouse, and PC, and run linux. The PCs connect through NIVO a mobile phone to connect to the internet, as an affordable solution.
The solution requires custom silicon which requires millions of dollars. Stafford-Fraser says he was a virgin when it came to venture capitalism, but lost his innocence quickly. The venture capitalists weren’t really interested in the venture, or the developing world.
They created a separate company called DisplayLink, a company that did receive vc support, and which produces the technology which supports ndiyo, along with other stuff.
The Nivo has been designed to work at the pixel level without higher level semantics. They can be driven from Linux machines or mobile phones. The Internet cafe may be a place in the future where you can plug your phone in and run software on the phone from a computer.
By the end of the year, half the world will have a mobile phone. Of the next 2-3 billion people that come online, the majority will be through a mobile phone network. In planning Web 3.0 architectures, if we plan that most people will have broadband, we’ll cut out the majority of the worldwide mobile customer base.