14 DAY TRIAL // One Laptop Per Child Chief Technical Officer Mary-Lou Jepsen announced back in December that she will no longer work together with Nicholas Negroponte's foundation as of 2008. Instead, she opened her own business, called Pixel Qi that seems to be a true rival for the OLPC foundation.
Mary-Low Jepsen was one of the persons who have been actively involved with designing and building the XO notebooks, priced at that time around $100. However, additional costs lifted up the price tag to an (almost) prohibitive $188 per unit, way beyond what developing countries' governments can pay for the notebooks. The foundation's efforts of bringing a sub-$100 notebook to the market have failed, but, while working for OLPC, Jepsen alone invented a low-cost, low-power sun-readable screen. Moreover, she was the co-inventor of the Xo's power management system.
The ex-OLPC Chief Technical Officer set the basis of Pixel Qi in order to sell the necessary technology to build a $75 portable PC. In order to accomplish this, Jepsen will be using some technologies used on the $188 XO laptop, including the low-power display and some other technological advancements that will allow the notebook become more energy-efficient.
The high resolution display invented by Mary-Lou Jepsen allows the users to switch from color to black-and-white when it is in direct sun, which dramatically improves its readability. Her company will sell the screen technology, offering it to notebook computers, digital cameras, cell phones and other mobile devices builders.
If Jepsen's plan of building the ultra-low-cost notebook succeeds, this would be the end for the One Lapptop Per Child foundation, that has suffered repeated attacks from Intel, Microsoft and LANCOR. Intel has left the foundation and is now focusing on its own sub-notebook, called the Classmate PC. Just out of curiosity, we wonder whether Mary-Lou Jepsen's sub-notebook will be powered by AMD's Geode processor, just like the XO notebook or will be built around Intel's recent breakthrough in mobile devices, the Silverthorne CPU. Time shall tell.