NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

One of the critical ingredients for the $100 computer is probably in your garage.

In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard “thin clients” of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices. Adding a monitor doubles the price to $150, but the company will offer used displays to keep the cost down.

“If you want to reach the $100 to $120 price point, you need to use old monitors,” said Novatium founder and board member Rajesh Jain, a local entrepreneur who sold the IndiaWorld portal for $115 million in cash in 2000 and has started a host of companies since. “Monitors have a lifetime of seven to eight years.”
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It is this kind of entrepreneurial thinking that has made Jain the latest visionary to seek out today’s Holy Grail of home computing: a desktop that will start to bring the Internet to the more than 5 billion people around the world who aren’t on it yet.
Story found here.