Monday, December 20, 2010

Yes, we can!

A long time ago, (and wow has it been a long time!) I had written about how Indian IT industry must climb up the value chain. Since then I have known a few companies that have done so through high tech startups based off US but getting a lot of quality work done out of India and also of a handful of brave souls doing business in the west based out of India. The entrepreneurship spirit in India is blooming in other industries, but what about IT?

A story which has caught my attention for many months and has been kept alive during all the gadget talk at office is the much heralded and very little known Adam tablet. “Oh no, not another ipad wannabe”, you say. Well my friend, before we kill the product by calling it an ipad killer, let us give it some attention and possibly its due. This device has quite a few firsts to its name:

1. Its gonna be the first android 2.3 (gingerbread) based tablet
2. Its gonna be the first tablet to house the power frugal nvidia tegra 2 at its heart
3. Its gonna be the first tablet to have the pixel qi screen
4. Its gonna be able to play more than a day of continuous 1080p video playback
5. And most importantly, Its gonna be the first India based tablet which fights in the world scene (not counting olivepad)

The CEO of notionink, the company behind the Adam tablet, is Rohan Shravan, an IIT alumnus. Unlike his numerous predecessors and peers, he chose to NOT create jobs in US, but rather in India! He is a young chap and his confidence in his product was evident during his interview to ET Now. The start has definitely been promising but the company has pushed out the release dates in the past (not surprising) and any more details may kill a lot of the “new” stuff that Adam tablet has to offer. There is also the challenge of getting people to write some seriously nice apps for this platform, which wont be easy for a small company. Also, they need to give the look of a company that is out there to do serious business and actually beat the likes of Apple and Samsung and avoid such goofs.

All in all, very proud of what this company has achieved! And if they bring down the price by another $100 (wishful thinking never killed anyone) and ship within India for less than $50 then I will buy one. ;-)

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Movie and reality

There are so many movies released these days with either very interesting plots or very interesting promos that I end up seeing a good number of them. I then feel hardly inspired to write movie reviews because a good number of them won't even be worth a mention. But here is a post that is not a review but yet is inspired by a movie.

I watched Rakht Charitra a few weeks back and today watched the second part of the RGV two part experiment. The movie in itself was just an extension of the first part and all violence, what got me interested were the pearls off wisdom that RGV had to say at the end of the movie. :-)

Did some googling, some wiki and some youtube and what I discovered was quite scary. The movie in both its parts shows a lot of violence and shows the heady mix of politics and caste issues in Andhra. The violence shown is so gruesome and the revenge and vendetta so unreal that the realization that all that was shown was more or less factually correct was most shocking.

Whatever be the reasons and I don't claim to understand any of it, to know we live in situations where forget corruption but this level of violence exists is an eye opener. I have read on and off about naxalites and how violent they are when they exact revenge and then too see it in celluloid strangely makes it all the more real.

The political system and will around such gruesomeness also tells you that no matter how much we middle class try, India has too much baggage it carries for us to pull it out off this mess. Was I naive enough to think we could, yes, I was.

I believe that if each individual sets his house right, then, over time, the nation will also be set right. Not all of us have the will to fight against crime and corruption, but a long as we support those who are, we are doing our part.

But if the ground reality is this bad, do we stand a chance?
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Wednesday, December 15, 2010