I was a Doner for Lantern, but never received one. At the time I was living in Tanzania and was hoping to bring one to a rural school. I’m back in the US now and just wondering if I’ll ever be receiving anything for donating?
I’m also interested in getting one something just to play around with.
I don’t need $149 back in November 2015. Does this mean eventually get some type of product? If so, my address is changed a couple times since then.
Hope this works out eventually lots of children in developing countries could make great use of this.
Yep, still working towards this. The entire goal of the project is to make something that is affordable for even people with very low income. Making cheap, low-volume products which do non-standard things is the tricky part. As you can see from this forum, development is still very active and ongoing.
The last major piece of the puzzle is eliminating a $10-component. So far, the we are losing the battle.
Same here.
I’ve been waiting years.
I am a donor for 2 Lanterns. Any idea of completion date would be very appreciated.
Actively and steadily working on it. I don’t think it makes any sense to provide a completion date, as I have only been wildly wrong in the past.
As someone who has lived in Tanzania, Nepal, Kenya, Lao, and Thailand. I don’t think a $10 price difference is going to make or break the product. Everywhere I’ve traveled in the world in rural areas tons of people have cell phones, very often with no data or minutes. If there is a $10 difference in price, and the products any good, it will make its way down to the income later to the bottom one percent. People and low income communities also tend to share things.
When I was in Tanzania, I was in a local hospital to make donations to patients. I noticed that everybody on these super long slow lines had smart phones on their laps. Most of the people were not actually on their cell phones in anyway. I asked around and it turns out that these people would often have to wait several days to see a doctor. Many of the people are traveling all over the country to come to these higher quality hospitals. I was also told that they couldn’t really charge their phones and none of them could afford the plans. They were essentially holding their phones in case someone back in their home towns called them.
This got me thinking that if I start in org to setup charging station in Government offices, hospitals, and other places were average people have to wait online all day. With a TV and showing paid advertisements, and a wifi connected to an off line web server, that just redirects everybody to tons of public available content educational tools local riding in the public domain. Developing countries almost all have tons of video, audio, content reading content produced every year through international grants that are given away for free. I just thought if I mailed around SD cards or did an overnight upload to the data pool every so often. The goal was to funded the project purely through the ads on the TV. But then we moved out of Tanzania.
My point is you’re better off just shipping out a project that makes it to the bottom 10% generally. The bottom one percent will still benefit.
A great regret is not trying to start this plan and Tanzania.