Did you know that Intel has bloggers, too?

For a while now, my primary technical contact at Intel with respect to Classmate PCs has been Jeff Galinovsky. He's their Regional Manager for Intel’s classmate PC activities in North America. While Intel has done a lot with emerging markets, Classmates (and plenty of other more vanilla netbooks) are gaining traction in mature markets, like North America.

I finally met Jeff (check him out on Twitter at @classmatepcdude) in person this summer at the Classmate Ecosystem Summit where he mentioned that he was going to start blogging for Intel about his experiences with Classmate PC.

Well guess what? He did! He's posted a few items, but his latest is particularly worth sharing. Regular readers will know that I'm a big fan of the Classmate, am deploying 60 of them this summer, and would give my eye teeth to use them in a truly 1:1 fashion (instead of just replacing labs as I'm doing now). Jeff does a great job of talking about some of the great 1:1 solutions included with Classmate and built around the "Classmate Ecosystem", as they call it (of course, that's his job, but the post is a nice summary). You can find his blog here. Talk back there or here with your thoughts on 1:1, Classmates, and netbooks in classrooms.

No, Intel doesn't sponsor this blog. I don't get any kickbacks from them to talk up Classmate or trash OLPC. They did pay my airfare down to Miami for the Ecosystem Summit, but I had the opportunity to speak with (and blog about) a number of companies whose products extend far beyond Classmate. Nope, I write favorably about Classmates because I've been so impressed by the hardware and software and can't wait for students to get them in their hands this fall in my district.