Earlier this morning Wayan mentioned that G1G1 was going global, if you can provide them with a shipping address within the US or Canada that is.

Additionally this morning OLPC issued a press-release that says that Give 1, Get 1 has been extended until December, 31st!



Now everyone can have one!

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization dedicated to providing every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression, is extending its recently launched Give One Get One program beyond the initial two-week limited time offer through December 31, 2007, in the USA and Canada. The extended period gives people more time to participate in this unique giving program and support the mission of One Laptop per Child.

To date, donations to the Give One Get One program have averaged US$2 million per day.

But that press-release also contained another piece of very interesting information:Breaking down that figure reveals that about 5000 donations were made per day, which translates into 5000 "given" machines and 5000 "gotten" machines for a total of ~100.000 X0s purchased so far in the past 10 days. If you extrapolate those number until the end of the year we could see up to around 500.000 X0 sales just via G1G1.

While that is certainly an outstanding achievement I'm not quite sure how Quanta (with mass production apparently having started at 15,000 machines / month) will be able to keep up with that demand. Now it will be very interesting to see how long it takes before the first X0s hit the ground!

Update: The Give Many program has also received an update! While previously donors were only able to designate where 60% (Give 100+) or 80% (1000+) of the of laptops would be sent, with OLPC sending the remaining laptops to a country of their designation, the policy now says:

In each case, the donor designates where the laptops are sent.

While the last version of the "Give Many" policy that I had seen ( Google cached ) indicated that the price was $200 per laptop regardless of quantity we're now back to the previous scheme of Give 100+ @ $299, Give 1000+ @ $249 and Give 10,000+ @ $199 per laptop. (Thanks to Bert Freudenberg to pointing this fact out to me!)

This is definitely a very exciting day for everyone following the OLPC project and my head is still spinning from all the information - talk about a developing story! What do you make of it? Let us know by posting a comment below...