On the opening day of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression, announced that Uruguay will be the first country in the world to receive the newest model XO children's laptop.

Uruguay began working with OLPC in 2007 and by mid-2010 achieved complete laptop saturation, providing XO's to all 570,000 primary school children in the country. The project recently ordered 60,000 XO 1.75's in order to take advantage of the many breakthrough hardware and software features in the new model.

This morning in Cambridge, Mass., at OLPC's Global Country Workshop, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte announced the second generation of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO laptops. Negroponte didn't share many details about the XO 2.0's hardware, but from the quick press coverage we can learn that the XO 2.0 will be half the size of the original machine, and will boast one-of-a-kind flip design with two touch sensitive displays. "The next generation laptop should be a book," Negroponte said. The design will provide a right and left page in vertical format, a hinged laptop in horizontal format, and a flat, two-screen continuous surface for use in tablet mode. "Younger children will be able to use simple keyboards to get going, and older children will be able to switch between keyboards customized for applications as well as for multiple languages," the press release reads. The XO 2.0 is scheduled to be released in 2010 with a price tag of $75, but this sounds a bit unrealistic at this point, after all we are still in 2008.

Today, Microsoft and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) announced an agreement that will make the Microsoft Windows operating system available on OLPC's low-cost XO laptops for the world's poorest children. Through this agreement, trials of the XO running Windows are planned to begin as soon as June in key emerging markets. Recognizing that the challenge of providing high-quality education for children in the developing world is too large to be solved by any single organization, Microsoft and OLPC are committed to working with governments and nongovernmental organizations to ensure the success of these pilot programs.

Software giant Microsoft is making progress in creating a modified version of its Windows operating system designed to run on the XO laptop built by the One Laptop Per Child project. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole said:

We're spending a nontrivial amount of money on it. We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes. At the end of the day, there's no guarantees.

The OLPC project intends to start producing its laptop next month, which is designed for elementary school children in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The laptops were originally designed to run Linux, however Microsoft hopes to develop a cut-down version of Windows in order to install it on the XO, with the biggest issues being reducing the power consumption and the space required by the operating system in order for it to run efficiently.

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world's children, has considerable momentum. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month.

Orders, however, are slow. "I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written," said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. "And yes, it has been a disappointment."

But Mr. Negroponte, the founding director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, views the problem as a temporary one in the long-term pursuit of using technology as a new channel of learning and self-expression for children worldwide. He is reaching out to the public to try to give the laptop campaign a boost. The marketing program, to be announced today, is called "Give 1 Get 1," in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399. One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. The donated computer is a tax-deductible charitable contribution. The program will run for two weeks, with orders accepted from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26.