Re: [school-discuss] [Fwd: How could we be part of this]

[tom poe <tompoe@renonevada.net>]

Hi:  A little background on Grameen and the kiosk project:

yunus@grameen.net

Professor Yunus started a microcredit program in the early '90's, maybe.  He 
built that into an infrastructure that now has electrical, communications, 
and financial resources for Bangladesh in place.  When approached about 
figuring out how to scale up the donated computers for developing countries, 
we discussed the possibility of his end handling everything from the point of 
shipping onward.  That broke down to roughly $700/computer/village/year for 
the entire country.  On this end, we then find a corporate sponsor that funds 
the collection and preparation of 68,000 donated computers.  In return for 
sponsorship, the corporate funding partners purchase the marketing rights for 
the kiosks.  The idea, then, is a village kiosk, owned and controlled by the 
village, and the marketing rights owned by the corporate sponsor, and 
everyone running Open Source.

At this time, we're still looking for some marketing professional that can 
sell the marketing rights to a corporate sponsor.  That seems to be a big 
obstacle, for whatever reason.  Not sure why.  Seems to me, opening up a 
250,000,000 market population online in a matter of weeks, would be a good 
thing, regardless of its' purchasing power at the time.

I would, however, suggest and encourage anyone that wants to discover and 
work with Professor Yunus to contact him at the email above, and introduce 
yourself and see what happens.

Thanks,
Tom Poe
Reno, NV
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/
http://renotahoe.pm.org/