Negroponte

The 4th International Conference on Broadband took place in Athens the 20 and 21 May 2009. Among the speakers was Nicholas Negroponte,who is the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association. But what I would like more to emphasize on, is his speech that was so playful and wise, multicasting millions of bits to the audience. All of his netbooks that are sent and operate in the 3rd world countries are adjusted into the local dialects, each containing a capacity of 100 e-books, making even Microsoft to blush. In that way a small online library is created in the class, supporting different books exchange, ending up into an online innovative source of knowledge. But the most impressive, was his comment on Gb/sec broadaband speed compared to a book. 'A whole book transfers 10 million bits per hour, where the HD TV 10 million bits/sec'. Now, imagine, those two different scales and how much we can handle and where are we heading to in the future. Ofcourse there is no correlation, but how about being blown to 1 billion bits per sec in the near future which is the Gb speed? Its called the Ultrabroadband evolution. The online evolution is a fact, and we are at the point of no return, vast amount of information; more storage rooms, data centers and server farms will be demanded in the future, as the traditional books and newspapers will soon disappear. Anyways, I really enjoyed his speech, very active and intelligent speaker, with a high-tech attitude and philosophy. Definetely, one of the best speakers, I ever shaked hand and I recommend all of you to follow his project and the important humanitarian work he is accomplishing during the last years.