Last week some of us at OpenConcept were fortunate enough to play with a prototype from the One Laptop Per Child Project at an after hours gathering. Like many other people who have had a chance to look at it, there are pictures tagged with olpc that we've posted to Flickr. We couldn't help but check out how future compatible our new standards compliant design is, and indeed it looks great in a cutting edge browser, even in portrait mode.

Andrew Clunis, one of our developers, volunteers with the OLPC project and has been a keen advocate for many of the principals being advanced by this revolutionary little computer. There is quite a lot of debate around this project, a reasonable summary of it can be found on Radio Open Source. However, the most compelling piece for me is simply the ability to transmit electronic copies of thousands of books to students around the world.

Now I know a lot of folks don't like to read from the monitor, but the technology behind this project will allow you to go out on a sunny day and more comfortably read content than I am able to do with my expensive Mac Powerbook. I'm looking forward to seeing the first releases for sale, possibly as early as this fall.