Michael Bletsas is a computer scientist and inventor of the «Hundred Dollar Laptop» (HDL).

He was born in 19th of March in 1967 in Chania, Crete. He studied electrical engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Then he went to the U.S. for postgraduate studies in biomedical and completed three more courses in Boston University and Northeastern University. In 1996, at the age of 28, he became Director of Information Media Lab, a research laboratory owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose director is Nicholas Negroponte of Greek origin.

The two men were tied up with close friendship and began to pursue a common dream: to achieve wireless broadband networking sites without infrastructure. After successful experiments in the island of Patmos( Greece ) and in villages in the jungle of Cambodia, in areas without electricity, the idea to build the HDL, the cheap computer that can reach the hands of the most impoverished children in the most remote areas of planet, was born.

According to him, access to information, electronic information, in particular, should be considered by city authorities as an essential service and must be put in the same category as other basic city services. The economy goes increasingly from moving goods to “moving” information. Nevertheless, we see that governments are often more involved with the infrastructure to move people, material, such as roads, but leave no room for the movement of information. Even in the few cases that it was done it was mainly to get income from that activity. A city in the 21st century can not continue to operate under this scheme. The movement of information is something that falls to the city and not to a large telecom operator who has no intention to deal with local needs.