Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) Raises $16,000 for the One Laptop Per Child Initiative

The Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG), a professional association for marketers, hosted a holiday party sponsored by Yahoo! and raised $16,000 for the One Laptop Per Child Initiative (OLPC). OLPC will be using the proceeds to purchase 80 laptops. Forty laptops will go to developing nations and 40 will be distributed locally. Items up for bid included a snowboard (with bindings), gourmet wine dinners, Xbox 360, Microsoft Zune, GPS, art, gift certificates to the hottest restaurants, and 2 VIP Tickets to the 2008 Newsweek Oscar Roundtable Interviews.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is a group of professors, technologists and developers that have set out to give free education to every last one of the 2.2 billion children in the world.... 1 billion of which live in poverty.

They will do this by providing a laptop that will:
• Be built to collaborate with other students;
• Include educational games and software;
• Include literature, textbooks, educational articles, and encyclopedia articles;
• Be low-power and come with a self-power device, for places that do not have a reliable source of power;
• Be built to last, even in the harshest of climates and environments;
• Be open for children to learn, expand and discover on.

ABOUT BIG
The Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) is a non-profit professional association dedicated to championing innovation in digital marketing to brand marketers, publishers and agencies through educational, networking and association events. Since BIG’s debut in September 2004, BIG has secured over 200 corporate members and more than 1,000 individual memberships. For more information, visit http://www.sfbig.com.