Serendipity35

USB flashdrives are so common now that they are given away like candy. Here is one flash drive that  might deserve more attention. Two entrepreneurs are behind the start-up Keepod which is being called an operating-system-on-a-stick.

They have raised money on the fund-raising site Indiegogo. Their test bed for the project is the slums of Nairobi in Kenya where very few people use a computer or have access to the net.

Keepod means that an old (discarded?) PC can be revived with the drive. It is an interesting approach to recycling computers for the masses.  PC schemes that resulted in machines becoming "clogged up" and running at a snail's pace after multiple users had saved different things to a single hard drive.

The Keepod team has teamed with LiveInSlums (a non-governmental organization) and used the flash drives with students and staff at WhyNot Academy in East Africa. It is a school that finally got electricity two years ago. The team bought a router and a Sim card to hook the classrooms up to the Internet and brought five old laptops with their hard disks removed using a Keepod as the boot up drive.

If a computer has a working screen, keyboard and basic processor it should work with a Keepod stick that contains a unique desktop version of Google's Android 4.4 operating system. The stick will  remember settings, passwords and websites visited and store any files or programs downloaded on the other half of its 8GB storage capacity. The information can be encrypted and is protected by a password needed for operation when it's plugged in.

Video introduction to Keepod

http://keepod.org