Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, has announced a project to develop $100 laptops for schoolchildren.

The non-profit One Laptop Per Child group has ambitious plans to distribute 150 million laptops in three years. The idea is based on applying the concept of open source to education, according to Negroponte.

"All we can do is seed the change and, like Wikipedia grew, and like Linux grew, do the same for open source education," he said.

The group will demonstrate a prototype of the laptop in November at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.

The first countries to distribute the laptops are expected to be Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand.

Negroponte explained that the cost of the 500MHz 1Gb laptop can be reduced to $100 because the group will cut out the cost of sales, marketing, distribution and, most importantly, profit.

The group plans to deliver laptops directly to national ministries of education, which can distribute them like textbooks.

The prototype is expected to have a dual-mode LCD display found in inexpensive DVD players which can also be used in black and white, in bright sunlight, and at four times the normal resolution.

It will be Linux-based, full-colour and full-screen, and will use alternative sources of power, including clockwork. The laptops will be enabled with Wi-Fi, and have at least four USB ports.