[SugarLabsPR-en] Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces v2 of Sugar on a Stick with Improved E-Book Readers, Recycles Any USB Stick Into Learning Environment for Children; Partners with Nexcopy, Inc.

Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces v2 of Sugar on a Stick with Improved
E-Book Readers, Recycles Any USB Stick Into Learning Environment for
Children; Partners with Nexcopy, Inc.

PARIS, December 8, 2009 - Netbook World Summit - Sugar Labs(R),
volunteer-driven nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for
over one-million children around the world, announces the release of
Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Available for download at
http://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto any
ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or
recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without
touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for
GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and
Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and
automatic backup to a Journal. The latest version of Sugar offers
simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating
of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better
Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such
as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and
Read, suitable for reading e-books.

"Sugar on a Stick is a great way to experience Sugar", commented
Walter Bender, Sugar Labs executive director. "In this holiday season,
we wish to remind parents and teachers that e-books are not only for
costly reader units for the well-to-do, but freely available as part
of the open-access to knowledge movement to help children everywhere
develop critical learning skills and to bridge the digital divide
wherever it exists."

Sugar on a Stick includes several e-book reader Activities to find and
display e-books in PDF, EPUB, and DejaVu formats. The Read Etexts
Activity can read e-books out loud, converting any old PC or
inexpensive netbook into a text-to-speech aid for disabled readers.
With Sugar, children can even make their own e-books. Thousands of
e-books for children are available on websites such as Project
Gutenberg, the Internet Archive Children's Library, epubBooks.com,
Feedbooks.com, and ManyBooks.net. Other sites offer online reading,
such as the International Children's Digital Library.

Pilot Sugar projects are underway in American and European schools.
School administrators wishing to deploy Sugar will be interested in
OLPC's recently updated XS school server software, which provides
"safety net" and connectivity services at the school level: backup,
content distribution, filtered access to the Internet, and Moodle
integration. To assist schools interested in testing this technology,
Sugar Labs has partnered with Nexcopy, Inc. of Rancho Santa Margarita,
California, an industry leader in USB duplicator solutions, to open
http://recycleusb.com. Nexcopy will collect used USB sticks, reload
them with Sugar on a Stick, and forward them to Sugar Labs for
distribution to schools. Nexcopy has also donated a 20-stick USB
duplication unit to Sugar Labs.

Greg Morris, President of Nexcopy, commented, "Nexcopy is proud to
partner with a nonprofit organization such as Sugar Labs. We believe
the Sugar Learning Platform is clearly a step in the right direction
for getting children involved with personal computers. Our objective
is to give Sugar Labs the back-end equipment support needed to make
this philanthropy successful and help with producing the large number
of Sugar Sticks needed for global deployment. I am very honored
Nexcopy is a part of this process."


For more information, please contact:

Sugar Labs: Sean Daly, Marketing Coordinator
website: http://www.sugarlabs.org
e-mail: pr@sugarlabs.org
telephone: +1-857-254-1100

Nexcopy Inc.: Greg Morris
website: http://www.nexcopy.com
e-mail: contact@nexcopy.com
telephone: +1-949-481-6478

About Sugar Labs
Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, nonprofit organization, is a member
project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Originally part of the
One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around
the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities
to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs is
supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate
development. For more information, please visit
http://www.sugarlabs.org.

About Nexcopy Incorporated
Nexcopy Incorporated specializes in developing and manufacturing the
finest and most feature-rich flash memory duplicators in the market.
Pioneering the solid-state memory duplication market, Nexcopy supplies
Central and South America, Europe, India, Asia, Pacific Rim and serves
the U.S. market through its headquarters in California.

Sugar Labs is a registered trademark of the Software Freedom
Conservancy. Other names are trademarks of their respective owners.

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