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The four capital funds provided were: Emergence Capital (experts in Software as a Service), Storm Ventures (experts in mobile), Kaszek  (latinamerican fund  with extensive experience building marketplaces) and Atomico (focused on B2C created by Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype)

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

The international angle, Rimer says, is becoming an increasingly common early priority: “Companies have to think from day one about international,” says Rimer. He says that this is because the biggest competitive factor among many of them these days is scale: “A lot of tech startups from the last five to seven years have been less about technology innovation and more about the right service or software that has found a good fit. It’s much more replicable, and so they have to make sure that they conquer the international opportunity very early on.”