Do you have an outdated USB thumb drive sitting around? Inveneo is a non-profit that “focuses on designing, integrating and supporting affordable technology systems that match the needs of people and organizations in under-served areas of the world.” They currently have a Thumb Drive Drive underway to collect and distribute the drives to various organizations.
This post at BoingBoing has a bit more information: they’re only interested in 16M or higher drives, drives like this are probably not really helpful (funny how BB posts sometimes intersect unintentionally), and they’re targeting school labs in Africa.
Thumb drive capacity has soared (and cost per megabyte has plummeted), and there’s a whole generation of smaller capacity drives that have been overtaken by the current multi-gigabyte versions. With no moving parts, the drives will last a long time; let’s put them to use.
posted December 14, 2006 by eric
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