Could This $25 Computer Solve The Innovation Gap?

A recent article from Business Insider turned our attention to the Raspberry Pi, a $25 computer developed by a non-profit foundation, and intended for the education market. The Pi was conceived as a means of facilitating kids’ learning to manipulate and program computers — citing Cambridge University’s challenge in recruiting sufficiently qualified applicants, and a more nationalist problem of not producing sufficient engineering graduates.

Some notes of interest: While the first computers are expected to ship the first half of this year, they will be produced and made available via a batch process of about 10,000 units per month, with an upper limit of about 100,000 units per year, based on the Foundation’s capacity. Its cost will not betray its performance: the computer’s multimedia performance is “substantially better” than the Tegra 3 chip used in many current-model smartphones (with only the Galaxy S 2 approximating the Raspberry Pi’s performance). Lastly, the Raspberry Pi foundation intends to open-source the technology, expecting third parties to develop Raspberry Pi devices around mid-2012.

We love the idea of the Raspberry Pi for providing true computing power to a young audience, and for providing a platform to encourage and facilitate interest in engineering and computing education. While the Raspberry Pi Foundation could have taken a more commercial route by providing affordable web access and browsing to a consumer market, it is taking a narrower focus (and more limited production), but making it accessible (via web store) to a smaller audience interested in the educational aspect of the computer vs. its browsing capabilities. We look forward to hearing more about this product, as it approaches production and initial launch.

Raspberry Pi