Phil Windley also took notes on this evening lecture. I've not been a huge fan of this initiative, and these two paragraphs explain why:

Half the price of a typical laptop is the marketing and distribution. Get a non-profit and drop that. Half of the remaining cost is Microsoft, or more generally commercial software vendors. Free and open source software more than adequately covers the computing needs of most people, particularly children. The fact that there are $122 DVD players says you can build a $100 laptop. The cheapest hard drives are too expensive; so use flash memory.

One big problem is the grey market. They’ll be diverted from children unless you do something to protect the laptop. A few ideas: an RFID card keyed to the specific owner helps. The device is networked, so the owner of the device has to log in every few days to get a token to keep it working. The color (green) helps. The child’s picture could be embedded in the plastic case.

The cost of that DVD player includes sales and marketing as well. What's driven the cost down is the free market at work - commoditization. Using Flash memory is fine, so long as you don't want to store a lot of stuff - and the open source alternatives to word processing packages aren't going to save on space (or performance. Pretty much the same thing goes for other open source efforts as well - in general, size isn't something that the developers have been trying to optimize for.

I like that he's recognized the problem of the grey market - but I think his proposed solutions will drive up cost without actually accomplishing much. If you are trying to introduce an item of value into an area that, in general, cannot afford the extant commercial products, then a lot of your target audience will try to sell the item. It's really that simple.

Having said all that, I like this summation:

The important question surrounding the $100 laptop is “will it be more than a mere technological artifact?” The answer depends on whether the content, and especially the mentoring, can be brought along with it to have real impact.

If they pick their target markets correctly, and are able to provide the right content, it could work. On the other hand, if that market exists, I expect that one or more commercial vendors will end up serving it.