You have just a few more days to give a laptop computer to a needy Third World child and get one in return for your nerdy New World child. It’s part of the One Laptop Per Child organization’s Give One Get One program, and the offer expires Dec. 31.

The unique XO laptop

For your $399 donation, OLPC will send one of its specially designed XO laptops to a needy child in a developing country. The XO is not an ordinary laptop. It uses a Linux operating system, it has a small monitor, its hard drive is dinky and it doesn’t run many typical programs. But its screen can be viewed in the brightest daylight, it’s compact, it uses innovative wireless networking and it can browse the Internet. In other words, its optimized to be cheap to produce and to be highly useful to, say, a kid in a poor African village. (The New York Times’ David Pogue wrote an excellent column recently on what the XO does and why it was designed that way. Read it here.)  An American child expects more from a laptop, which is why the XO is not normally available stateside. But as an incentive to American givers, OLPC is making the XO – which is certainly a trendy talker of an item, if not the latest computer wonder — available to Americans as part of the Give One Get One campaign. Show it off to your friends as you tell them how your donation might change the life of a child half a world away.

Of course, if you just want to make a donation to OLPC to get a tax break before the end of the year, the organization will gladly take that, too.

Which reminds me: If you’re looking for a tax break, Yahoo!’s The Spark has posted a guide offering ideas on ways to make last-minute end-of-the-year donations online. A charity gets much-needed funds, and you get a tax break — win, win.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.