“The ornamental design for an electronic media reader, as shown and described.”

About as exciting as the original Kindle design it describes, but this isn’t a utility patent, so you can’t really expect much from it. That said, the reference citations it contains are interesting. Among the devices included: the iRex iLiad, the NUUTbook an early prototype of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO laptop and Apple’s MacBook Pro.

Note: Be sure to see the liveblog of the Amazon announcement in New York by MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, starting at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

And you weren’t shy! And by the time I was done tallying your crowd-sourced tips, I had a pretty comprehensive list of everyone who plans to make, or is rumored to be making, a competitor to Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle. But many of you were sure that News Corp. (NWS) must be talking to iRex Technologies, the Dutch company that is already producing a line of Kindle rivals under the “Iliad” brand.

And you were correct, says iRex CEO Hans Brons. iRex plans to sell its devices in the U.S. using a “private label” strategy–it will make the readers but sell them under someone else’s brand–and it has talked to News Corp. about the possibility, he says.

But to be clear, Brons isn’t saying his company has a deal with News Corp. (which owns Dow Jones, the owner of this Web site). For the record: “It is definitely a logical path, and a logical conclusion, but I cannot confirm that we are working with News Corp.,” he says.

Fair enough. And no comment from News Corp. But imagine that iRex did end up building something for Murdoch and company. What would it look like?

A lot like the one Murdoch described earlier this month: iRex has a machine in the pipeline that will feature a big screen and full color, Brons said. The difference between his color screen and those of his competitors? Most of the latter take the e-Ink technology that powers the Kindle and Sony’s (SNE) Reader and add a color filter on top of that. That reduces the brightness of the screen, Brons said. But he promises that the iRex color screen, which he hopes will be on the market in 2010, will solve that problem.

And if News Corp. doesn’t do a deal with iRex? Well, as I mentioned above, there is no shortage of folks working on would-be Kindle killers. Thanks again to readers who helped me round up this list:

Fujitsu–Already selling an e-reader with color e-paper

Bridgestone–Also has a color display

Endless Ideas–Dutch company behind the black-and-white BeBook reader

Samsung–Its Papyrus reader features a touchscreen

Pixel Qi–Start-up focused on making cheap color screens; run by Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project

Anyone else I should be looking at? Let me know.

So it was only a matter of time before the project was forced to rejigger its operations, which it did this week. Just weeks after administering its “Give One, Get One” holiday season drive, the OLPC slashed its workforce by half, reduced salaries for its remaining staff and began restructuring operations.
Like many other nonprofits facing tough economic times, One Laptop Per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said in a post to the foundation’s Web log. “While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries.”

That’s nice to hear, I suppose. But given the OLPC’s track record with social innovation–and business realities–it’s difficult to put much faith in such assertions. “OLPC promised a product, a sub-$100 laptop, it simply can’t deliver based on underlying economics of the computer industry,” a spokesperson for OLPC competitor Ncomputing told CRN. “And it asks governments already unable to provide basic services to not just buy these laptops but pay to ship them from the factory in China, truck them throughout the countryside to the schools and then support and maintain them. The hidden costs were a nightmare.”

That’s quite a sum to demand for the alleged infringement of a design patent–especially one for which there is evidently a fair bit of prior art.

But that doesn’t seem to phase faze Lagos Analysis much. “This patent infringement lawsuit is another step in LANCOR’s continued protection of its intellectual property,” said the company’s founder, Ade Oyegbola (who, it should be noted, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990). “LANCOR will continue to take aggressive steps to protect its intellectual property around the world.” Adding “ALL MY BANK ACCOUNTS IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD HAVE BEEN FROZEN AND I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE IN THEIR DISLODGEMENT, FOR WHICH YOU ARE ENTITLED TO 35% OF THE SUM OF $45.4 MILLION …”

The desktop has become a lot like teenage sex: A lot of people are talking about it but not many people are doing it.”

–Matthew J. Szulik, Red Hat CEO, October, 2005

I’d argue that a worldwide monopoly, enforced by business practices that a federal judge has found to be predatory and anticompetitive, probably has more to do with killing innovation than anything the open source movement could ever do.”

–Szulik on Microsoft’s 2001 claim that Linux “stifled innovation”

Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s wisecracking chief executive officer, is stepping down after nearly a decade on the job. He’ll remain with the company as chairman of the board, but Jim Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer (yes, an airline exec), will take on the CEO role.

Szulik, who’s been with Red Hat since just a few months after its IPO in 1999, said he’s giving up the CEO job because of a family crisis. “For many months, my family has been challenged by serious health issues,” Szulik said during a conference call to discuss the company’s strong third-quarter financial results. “It became clear to me that I needed to direct the same level of attention and effort in support of my family at this time that I have invested in Red Hat for nearly a decade.”

And hopefully–no, presumably–that will be enough to resolve whatever crisis it is that Szulik faces (and all of us here at D wish you the best, Matthew). Under his stewardship, Red Hat reported yesterday that third-quarter profit surged 39% from a year ago, to $20.3 million. Revenue rose 28% to $135.4 million.

“For many years, my face has been pressed up against the windshield trying to look into the future,” Szulik wrote in a farewell posted to the Red Hat blog. “Learning and adapting to an evolving Red Hat community, culture and marketplace. Red Hat associates past and present, along with members of the open source community and our customers and partners, picked up their brushes, dipped them into a paint palette of color to create this artwork called Red Hat. I take pride when customers and industry types comment to me that the people of Red Hat are ‘different.’ Not like the cylons who have come to dominate the industry of technology. Through our actions, the open source community and the people of Red Hat are defining a modern economic relationship between developer and customer. Collaboration. Transparency and value delivered. Our customers and marketplace are responding as evidenced by our financials and strong market potential. What was once considered a joke in 1998 no longer is. Today governments and industry are responding to the values and practices of open source as evidenced by their support of OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] and the broad open source education initiatives in India, South America and parts of Africa.”

The company has assigned some 40 developers to the project and plans to begin limited field trials in January. If all goes well, XP for the XO could be available as early as the second half of 2008. “We want Windows to run on the XO and we are investing significant energy and talent,” James Utzschneider, general manager of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, told The Wall Street Journal. “We really want to make sure we have a quality experience before we make commitment to governments.”

Quite an interesting turnabout. After all, Microsoft has been slagging the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO machine since its conception. Just a year ago, Bill Gates publicly derided it while presenting Redmond’s ultra-mobile Origami machine at the Government Leaders Forum. “The last thing you want for a shared-use computer is for it to be something without a disk, and with a tiny little screen,” he said. “If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user. Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type.”

Yesterday, we wrote about the troubles of the One Laptop Per Child project. Here’s more!

Click on the image to make it bigger:

Walt Mossberg and I have had Negroponte at two of our D conferences to talk about the effort (pictured above), which is a great idea in concept, although a much more vexing challenge in reality.

Negroponte’s goal in 2005, which turned into a project called “One Laptop Per Child,” was simple and profound: Create a $100 laptop with interactive and connected capabilities to distribute to 150 million of the world’s poorest schoolchildren in developing countries.

Unfortunately, he is likely to fall well short of that goal now, due to unexpected and stiff competition from for-profit tech companies (most specifically the OLPC frozen-out and miffed Intel and Microsoft), too-high pricing for the product and the need for long-term technical support for its users.

“I’m not good at selling laptops,” Mr. Negroponte is quoted in the article as telling colleagues. “I’m good at selling ideas.”

And here’s the video that goes with the Journal story on OLPC:

“Give 1 Get 1″ is something of an about-face for the OLPC and its co-founder, Nicholas Negroponte. Originally, the organization decided against selling the the so-called “$100 laptop” in the states. It worried the device would appear anemic next to entry-level laptops from Apple, Hewlett-Packard and others, and it feared selling it stateside would distract the organization from its original goal: to bring computing to the developing world’s children. But with early orders for the device falling quite a bit short of expectations, it reconsidered. “There’s a much bigger gulf between a handshake with a head of state and a real check coming out of the treasury,” Negroponte told the Boston Globe. “You could argue I could have been more realistic in the beginning, but if I had, I would never have done this.”