First, the ability to draw in chat. This laptop is first and foremost a tool for expression. For kids, that means being able to express with text, but it also means drawing, music, whatever. We want to make sure that we have a more rich experience than just text can deliver. So we’ve been experimenting a bit with allowing drawing in chat. As time goes on we’ll start to add other interesting types to the chat. We hope that it will be possible to share music that kids have created as well as images that they find. This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds – there’s already a music activity in the works.

Second, the concept of presence. Sadly, Tom is alone in the world so other people on the network don’t show up. So he’s missing the most important aspect of the interface. We want this interface to be social. This means that kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating.

For example the [Share] Button that he mentions doesn’t just share a link with another person. When that person opens the link he or she can optionally follow you as you travel from web site to web site. This ability to take someone on a tour could be used by a teacher at the front of a class or it could be used by two kids who might want to show something to each other. But the point is that they are working together, no matter who they are.

The [Share] Button is just a sample, though. What we really want to do is to make sure that the concept of presence and that the ability to share anything with other people on the network is available throughout the interface. That presence is the fundamental driver for the interface instead of being just another program that you run.

This is the latest OLPC prototype we’ve gotten from the great guys at Quanta. Today we had an all day meeting with various countries who are interested in deploying the laptop. You have no idea how excited people get when they have a real live artifact to play with. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of this adorable little laptop with everyone in the room. The laptop is a star.

The laptop pictured above is a test machine. The case was created by a machine, but only as a one-off. It is running one of the test OLPC boards, which means it’s pretty close to the end laptop. It’s booting off an internal flash drive and is running a well-stripped FC5.

That picture on the desktop is my lovely wife. She got to have her photo taken with a bunch of dignitaries today – and she didn’t even know it!

Also, Damn! That Pete Barr-Watson guy posts photos all kinds of fast!