this by integrating it into the class in a "synergistic" way. "It doesn't have to be scary, but that's where our Teach to the Future program was meant to say 'let's show you how you can incorporate this and make it a big part of your class. You don't have to be scared of it, but you need to use it and it needs to be part of the curriculum'," he said.
The notion of developing a $100 device or subsidizing or giving away a $100 device was just one element of the problem, but not a solution to the problem in its entirety, he said, adding that Intel could envisage such devices now costing around twice that price, or slightly more.
He was speaking in advance of Intel's announcement made last week at Computex to build inexpensive notebook PCs with Asustek Computer, but he did outline some of the likely specifications of these devices.
"We do see our way toward, probably, $200 devices... $250 down to $200 devices, which we think will get adolescent kids onto the Internet in a meaningful way. At that cost level, where you start making trade-offs is in the size of the screen, the size of the keyboard, and the type of memory you have in there," he explained.
"So, at those price levels, it's a seven-inch screen...A seven-inch screen is pretty small for anyone whose been out there, but for a kid who's never been anywhere, it's a good starting device. A device that doesn't have a hard disk--you'd throw it out the window in about 10 minutes--but for a kid who's never been out there, it's a good place to start. These are some of the trade-offs that you have to make to get down to those cost levels," he said, while also noting that the corollary of Moore's Law was that every year hardware got cheaper.
"When you and I think of the next billion people, we think of it sort of as a number on a spreadsheet, but that kid on that next village doesn't relate to himself as being part of the next billion. He just sees himself as being the next village that isn't quite connected yet and he just wants to know when someone's going to get around to helping him out.
"So it's less about a billion and more about tens of millions of villages, one village at a time, that need to be enfranchised," he said, adding that the device itself was probably the easiest of all of those elements to get right because Moore's Law was going to take care of that over time.
Intel believes that WiMax could help speed up network deployment because the technology would be that much more affordable to deploy step-by-step. "It's how many next villages can we get to next week. And it's more and more next villages every week," Antone said.
"There's definitely a feel-good element about, if you think about a horizon or a frontier, seeing that frontier slowly push open and doing things to move it open faster...it's a good problem to work on," he said.
Intel was in the center of Moore's Law to bring the costs down and the company was taking the influence it had and "turning that into government relationships and telecommunications relationships. And then taking those over time sort of to herd people in a common direction. That's the other thing that we do really well, I think," he explained.
"As we picked Wi-Fi four years ago, we can corral people in the same direction and make a substantial change in the world. WiMAX, we're going to do the same thing. Our World Ahead program and getting people to think beyond the device and talk about the whole solution. I think we're going to make good progress there," Antone added.
Another area was taking the PC and embedding it in cars, phones and televisions, he said, noting that Intel had driven all kinds of work to get standards and to make devices interoperate, which he likened to plumbing, and which was hard work.
"There's a lot of the next billion (computer users) in Thailand, especially in the Northeast," he observed, noting that "the one final thing that does become a bit of a challenge to really grow broad" was language. With the basic Internet, "kids would get on and they would probably learn English because of it, but to get the existing population in, to get the culture, we need local content," he said.
"That's the final piece in making the Internet robust. It's got to get integrated into the local culture, the local language," he said. Local language content would be critical to making the Internet "the central part of a village society up in the Northeast, or way out on the west coast of Vietnam, or up in Laos, or in Sri Lanka".
"To get kids on, you need the network, you need the low-cost device, you need the education system and a government that's willing to integrate it. And so, when we're talking about the next thing, we want to talk about all these elements."
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