Graphic source: NComputing Inc.
Readers of this blog should be familiar with the OLPC since I've discussed it enough; however, NComputing Incorporated deserves a look.
NComputing is a 30-children-per-desktop solution.
In the past 21 months, the start-up provided low-cost computing to half a million students in 70 countries.
Cost-conscious American schools are NComputing's largest market but more than 60% of its customers are in overseas developing countries such as Brazil, China, India, Thailand and the Philippines.
Macedonia announced plans to provide every one of its 420,000 K-12 students using a combination of PCs running Ubuntu Linux and NComputing's PC-sharing devices.
PCs remain at about the same price as ever but today's desktops are yesterday's mainframes in the NComputing business model.
NComputing provides computer access, or at least it claims to, Windows XP, Linux or Mac boxes for as little as $70 per student. The price of the OLPC has crept up to about $200 in its latest incarnation.
Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of NComputing, failed at several ventures as most start-up founders tend to do while paying their dues. Coincidently, and Dukker is not paying me to say this, but one of his previous ventures, as the co-founder and CEO of eMachines Incorporated, put out a great little project, the first sub-$400 PC. I know from personal experience because I have one of those inexpensive but reliable PCs.
At one time eMachines became the third-largest seller of PCs in U.S. stores but the business model did not sustain itself and the company was sold to Gateway Incorporated in 2004.
NComputing was co-founded by a former eMachines colleague of Dukker's.
The trick behind the firm's product is to combine ports for mice and keyboards, as well as installing some NComputing-written management software, and the company produced a device that could take advantage of all the unused processing power in a desktop PC and divvy it up among as many as 30 users.
The NComputing device is inexpensive; it can be manufactured for just $11 for its X300 model, which can support up to seven users, and $35 for the L200 model that can support up to 30 users.
The low-cost allows NComputing to mark up its devices while still keeping prices low and still offering generous margins to distributors and resellers.
NComputing's PC-sharing box is really a thin client or a PC blade device but these items are ordinarily associated with expensive, hard-to-manage devices such as those sold by Wyse Technology Inc., ClearCube Inc., Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.
NComputing sells two basic types of devices. The L series uses Ethernet to support up to 10 users connected to a Windows XP PC, and up to 30 users connected to a PC running Linux or Windows Server 2003. The more popular X series device can connect between four to seven users to the host PC.
The drawback is that in practice the more users are connected, the slower the boxes run, and if one student crashes a machine, they all crash together.
Thanks to a respondent, "John," whose school uses the X300s, I made a corrections because he states that: "Only if the shared computer crashes will the X300s crash" which of course is a big distinction. I appreciate the comment and correction.
Even with NComputing, schools still need software, a keyboard, monitor, and computer mouse for each student. The frugal can scour unused monitors and peripherals to recycle.
NComputing makes a compelling alternative to the altruistic but long-delayed and much bally hooed OLPC.
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