More low-cost laptops are headed to a retailer near you.

Intel plans on expanding the distribution of its inexpensive, school children-friendly Classmate PC to U.S. and European retail outlets, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday.

The Classmate will sell for $250 to $350, Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel's emerging market platform group, told Reuters. Apparently Intel has already been conducting pilot programs using the devices in classrooms in the U.S. and Australia.

Though the Classmate is already available on the retail markets of India, Mexico, and Indonesia, this will be the first time the device has been for sale to consumers in the developed world.

Intel designed the PC for use in schools in developing nations. Local manufacturers build them with customized software configurations for the needs of specific local markets.

To judge by their activities, one might think some MBA students at Cornell's Johnson School in the state of New York were pursuing a degree in international development. Their projects range from water purification technologies for poor African communities to a sustainable tourism initiative in Croatia.
Students are required to apply social, economic and environmental conditions to their business development plans. And they are not doing this from a classroom. In teams of four per project, they have travelled to such places as India and Senegal to oversee the implementation of their ideas.

The activities of the Cornell students are part of a growing body of MBA coursework focused on the "base of the pyramid" business strategy. Known as BoP, the idea is espoused by influential US-based academics CK Prahalad and Stuart Hart, who argue that companies can help eradicate poverty by providing goods and services for the 4bn people who live on less than $2 a day.

For many participants, the attraction of the Cornell course was getting out of the classroom and into the field. Melissa McEwen, a Cornell MBA graduate, last year spent part of her time in Croatia evaluating how a resort project might play a role in sustaining the culture, economy and ecology of the island of Kalamota.

By John Markoff

Bill Gates’s bold Davos challenge to the world’s capitalists last week should have come with equally bold footnotes.

"There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age," he asserted. "Breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them."

Conspicuously missing from the appeal, which asserted that human nature is not just driven by greed but also by concern for our fellow beings, was any reference to the work and thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

The microfinance innovator, who is known as the "banker for the poor," recently wrote a book, "Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism," that foreshadows Mr. Gates’s newfound social philosophy.

By Nicholas D. Kristof

With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics.

But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).

Andrew Klaber, a 26-year-old playing hooky from Harvard Business School to come here (don’t tell his professors!), is an example of the social entrepreneur. He spent the summer after his sophomore year in college in Thailand and was aghast to see teenage girls being forced into prostitution after their parents had died of AIDS.

So he started Orphans Against AIDS (www.orphansagainstaids.org), which pays school-related expenses for hundreds of children who have been orphaned or otherwise affected by AIDS in poor countries. He and his friends volunteer their time and pay administrative costs out of their own pockets so that every penny goes to the children.

Mr. Klaber was able to expand the nonprofit organization in Africa through introductions made by Jennifer Staple, who was a year ahead of him when they were in college. When she was a sophomore, Ms. Staple founded an organization in her dorm room to collect old reading glasses in the United States and ship them to poor countries. That group, Unite for Sight, has ballooned, and last year it provided eye care to 200,000 people (www.uniteforsight.org).

In the ’60s, perhaps the most remarkable Americans were the civil rights workers and antiwar protesters who started movements that transformed the country. In the 1980s, the most fascinating people were entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who started companies and ended up revolutionizing the way we use technology.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs "The Power of Unreasonable People."

By Ben Arnoldy

Problems at One Laptop Per Child show how social entrepreneurs can blaze trails but miss the payoff.

The vision was grand: Develop a cheap laptop and get it into the hands of 150 million school children in the developing world.

Making the computer turned out to be the easy part. On Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, showed off the $200 XO. The innovative computer sports a bright screen readable in sunshine and a highly efficient battery that can be recharged by cranking it.

But One Laptop has run into controversy – a corporate partner and the group's chief technology officer pulled out in recent weeks – which has experts noting perils for the broader social entrepreneur movement.

Social entrepreneurs, who aim to solve social problems using business-world principles, have tackled everything from expanding rural credit to marketing indigenous crafts in recent years. But experts say the problems at One Laptop point to a challenge for these emerging entrepreneurs. They often excel at trailblazing new markets among the world's poor but struggle to achieve large-scale sales and distribution.

Will charity or profit end the digital divide?

When a plan to create a $100 laptop was announced three years ago at the World Economic Forum, it seemed like a stroke of genius. Here was an opportunity for the global business elite gathered in Davos to show they had a heart, and to do so in a genuinely useful way—by developing a cheap way to bridge the digital divide and extend the benefits of the IT revolution to millions of children in the developing world.

Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT professor who came up with the idea, was celebrated (once again) as a visionary. Several firms stumped up an initial $2m each to get the project going, including AMD, NewsCorp, eBay, Google, Nortel and Red Hat. The United Nations also was an enthusiastic supporter.

Today, everything looks a lot messier. Not for the first time, Mr Negroponte has found himself at war with a giant of the computer industry, Intel, which last week quit the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) consortium that is making the education-oriented laptop, called the XO.

By David Kirkpatrick, Senior Editor

An exclusive Fortune interview with Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, regarding Intel's defection from the project.

On Thursday Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) announced it was dropping out of the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, which was set up to develop and market a low-cost - ideally $100 or less - education-focused laptop for the poorest children in the world. The device, called XO, is now in production in Taiwan and in use in a number of countries. Fortune's David Kirkpatrick spoke Friday with Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of OLPC. A transcript is below.

Among other things, Negroponte said that 162,000 XOs had been sold in the U.S. for $399 in the last two months - generating $35 million - in an initiative called Give One Get One, which was aimed at raising money to speed the deployment of the machines to poor countries around the world. Though Negroponte has all along pushed for countries to purchase XOs in large numbers, OLPC has had unexpectedly large difficulties getting them to do so.

According to Negroponte, that was partly because Intel, which had earlier this year become a partner and board member of OLPC, was actively competing with it by selling its own Classmate educational PC-an innovative machine but still more conventional than the XO, given that it uses Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Windows operating system. The XO uses open-source Linux software, a low-power chip from Intel's smaller rival AMD (AMD, Fortune 500), and includes extensive original software designed to help kids teach themselves. (Intel insists that it still supports the idea of providing laptops to underprivileged children, and that more than one approach is the best way to achieve that goal.)

Fortune: What's the biggest single reason your partnership with Intel fell apart?

Negroponte: The biggest single reason was that they were directly selling their Classmate laptop as opposed to having it be a reference design. They're not selling it in this country because they'd be killed by their biggest customers like Dell (DELL, Fortune 500). But in the developing world they are selling directly.

Indian officials have made it plain that they’ve given up using the annual diaspora conclave as a platform to woo investments of overseas Indians.

"The investment or money has not been forthcoming. Therefore, we decided that we will not ask for any investment this year (at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2008) but seek partnership from NRIs for philanthropic projects," Overseas Indian Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi told the media recently.

In India, the contributions made by migrants are not readily apparent in economic terms. Overseas Chinese, for example, accounted for 80 per cent or more of the inward foreign direct investment into China in the 1980s and early 1990s, when that country opened up. By contrast, Non-resident Indians (NRIs) accounted for 10 per cent or less of inward FDI after India opened up. Most of the capital sent to India by NRIs has been personal transfers to family and friends, not FDI.

In the past, NRIs have been critical of the ‘hard sell’ on investment as they do not come to the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas as investors with millions of dollars but mostly as professionals to share their expertise and experience in India's forward march.

"We have found that there has been too much noise about investment and very little actual investment," says Ravi. According to him, only around five per cent of FDI in India is from NRIs. "Yet I have met many people, salaried people, not millionaires, who want to contribute to improving conditions in their home state," Ravi has been quoted as saying.

It was apparently with this thought that the government proposes to announce the setting up of an India Development Fund (IDF) at the NRI conclave to be held in New Delhi on January 8 and 9. January 9 marks the day the father of the nation Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India from South Africa.

The India Development Fund will reportedly be a not-for-profit trust, which will provide a single window to direct philanthropy funds to the social sector. The sectors have been identified keeping in mind the objectives of the 11th Plan, and these are mostly in micro finance, women’s empowerment, health and education. According to the ministry, reputed NGOs will be engaged and international accounting standards applied to the funds to demonstrate proper utilisation to contributors.