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. ;-)

Loyalty?

Apple Inc is bigger than its long time rival Microsoft and friend-turned-foe Google and is in no mood to leave the throne. The iPhone 4 just cemented its position even more firmly.

But it was not all rosy, what with the gizmodo leak and steve losing the bang that he is so used to generating in his keynotes. People soon forgot all this when the real deal was released and was lapped up by enthusiasts. So much so, that people started dumping their hardly used iPhone 3G phones to get the latest fad, fashion statement, cool gizmo, the "in" thing, etc etc. Not soon after the release the problems with iPhone's signal reception issues cropped up and the blame was on its much touted antenna design. True to apples legacy, they seem to have recovered from this setback too, albeit rather lethargically. But Apple could not let go of this shame so easily, after all they had a reputation to maintain. The person who got the sack was Mark Papermaster, the HW design guru.

This lead led me to read a bit more about Mark and the first thing that hit me about him was that he was with IBM for 25 years!! I know that some in India too agree that IBM is a place you are retire at, but still 25 years, wow!! But then, even after 25 years and after all his contributions, when he left IBM to go to Apple, he was sued by IBM! Yes, that is what 25 years bought him, a law suit and 2 court certificates to prove that he hadn't leaked any "IP" to Apple.

I have always believed that, you can almost never buy loyalty. Either the employee feels it or he doesn't. And if loyalty sounds too old school, call it professionalism. But whatever you call it, "it" is hard to come by. During my early days, I have gone through bouts of this loyalty pangs and almost felt guilty when I had to quit. Did it a second time, it got better and slowly realized that there is no such thing as loyalty. Once you leave a company, the company has to keep the interests of those who are still associated with it at higher priority. This can be at the cost of friendships and unsaid remorses (in some cases 25 years of it!!).

As insensitive as it may sound, it is business, nothing more, nothing less. They companies know it, the employees seem to take some time to figure it out. :-)

Living Legend

I am no fan of the ipoo's. I never liked the ipod and didnt find the value in ipod touch either. I am likely to get one soon enough to know what the value talk is all about. I also didn't like the iphone when it was released, but the recent ones have been more promising. I have a similar doubt on the value of the iPad which too will be lapped up by consumers faster than they can be sold :-). But all being said, one thing majority of us will have to agree to is the "i" brigade has changed that way the world listens, communicates and connects. The man behind this revolution, like many others, is Steve Jobs. This compulsive entrepreneurs business life can be compared to that of a cat and his revivals to that of a phoenix. And when a man of his vision talks, people listen and with reason. Here is a small speech he gave to a bunch of Stanford grads. Seems rather melodramatic at times, unbelievable at times and possibly a bit gloating too, but a captivating listen none the less .

Start chirping...

... or tweeting.

Airtel has collaborated with Twitter to make tweeting available and affordable to all those non smartphone types who are still stuck in the world of sms's (your truly included). If you couldn't tweet coz your office blocks visiting non-work related sites or don't have net access at home or don't have phones with GPRS (nor 3G) enabled, your tweet solution is here.

I called up Airtel to confirm this and to find out if we had to pay a premium for sending and receiving these tweets. The answer I got was that the SMS's to this special number will cost the same as your local SMS and there are no other hidden charges. Happy tweeting...

Shadowy Google

It has hit the press and spread like wild fire, that google has threatened and in fact is pulling out of the biggest and possibly the fastest growing internet penetration markets in the world, China.

Google started with the "Don't be evil" as part of its code of conduct but has been walking a tight line as it has grown into the behemoth it now is. One the times when it turned a blind eye and chose to flirt with this code of conduct was in China. China has been a tough market to penetrate for many and the chinese cyber wayside is full of their remains. Google of course thinks it is special and can break the jinx and has been spending considerable time beefing up their china plans. But the cyber attack seems to have changed everything and a hasty plug pulling has happened. But I think there is more fire beneath all this smoke!

What if the attack on google sites (gmail) was in fact more than what google is making it out to be? What if there was a serious breach and google is trying to hush-hush the whole thing away while they take time to plan a cover up? Baidu is still the most popular search engine in China and google is not used to losing, at least not in search game. What if Google has lost patience as it fights the local search engines and are too big to claim defeat and see this as the right opportunity to get out of a bad state ?

Google has been pretty shrewd with its business dealings belying its otherwise geeky image. But this move is definitely business impacting and seems indefinite by nature which makes it even more real. Something is brewing or already has brewed, but the might of Google will definitely manage to close the lid on this faster than we think.

Foolhardy

While casually browsing I came across a website which is supposedly useful to take meeting notes, agendas etc. I don't really know how useful something like this would actually be, but I thought of giving it a shot.

The site has a minimalistic look about it and before signing up, I wanted to understand what all it can actually do and I clicked the "intro" link and it didn't work. I was using firefox and switched to chrome and the link still didn't work. Last option, I went to IE 8 and then I get the below message.



Quite a gutsy company I would say, but it has got many things wrong here.
1. It is gonna take a while before IE dies, so don't narrow your user base.
2. I was using IE 8 and not IE 6
3. I used IE only coz firefox and chrome both couldn't open the link.

A brave but foolhardy company. :-)

Search is on...

It has been a long time since I have covered a gadget on this blog. I have been on the hunt for a good TV media player which has the required HD play power and at least DTS downmix if not decoding capabilities. There are quite a few pretenders, like the Asus O!Play, Ryan AC PlayonHD etc, and I had almost narrowed down on the WDTV Live, but my perennial indecisiveness ensured I didn't jump the gun and boy am I glad I didn't!

A couple of days later, I see this! Now, this thing is super cute, super powerful (for its size) and feature rich. And as luck would have it, it is also super costly, approx $500. But as a colleague of mine at office suggests, you can never get more future proof (at least w.r.t media players) than a comp as upgrades are more easily available. Maybe I will wait for a few more months and see if more like these crop up and if they can be price competitive with the current slew of TV media players.

Until such a time... droooooooool! :-P

Genius!

I happened to read this article and view the video just a few minutes back and it just blew me away! Here is the wiki-link for the more interested folks.

A prototype device of $350 and you have further integrated the two worlds we live in today! This invention has the potential to be the next killer technology wave and when commodotized, it will be available to the common man at a price which will pressure M$ into thinking differently on their surface computing plans. Lets hope and pray for all the philanthropic dreams of Pravav Mistry to also come true!

Pushing it...

Google is at it... again. We were today welcomed to watch the first glimpses of the Google Chrome OS or simply Chrome OS.



I have used the Chrome browser on and off. It is quick, it is more secure, it is not as customizable as firefox (yet), but in my experience it does hog a lot of memory incrementally. But none the less, it is a good attempt at a browser with certain clear innovations.

Now, the Chrome OS seems to be pushing the envelope even more considering the paradigm shift that we are expected to take compared to our regular OS use. This is probably the reason why they are releasing it more for the smart phones and netbook market rather than make it mainstream. The one thing about Chrome OS which sucks (at least for us poor souls in India) is that the whole OS is built on the assumption that you have a super fast net connection, which in India costs a bomb.

Anyway, we can be spectators watching the spectacle unfold and waiting for when our ISPs can offer us world class broadband at world beating price (like the telecom industry has). :-)

Reality beckons

The "startup days" of Linux seem to be behind it. Saw this interesting article come by and I couldn't agree more.

The more popular linux becomes, the more user friendly it becomes, the more it looks and feels like Windoze.

Its been a year...

Google surprised the world with its entry into the browser war when it released Chrome. It has now been a year since and Chrome has reached 2.0 w.r.t stable releases and 4.0 w.r.t developer releases. I have used Chrome on and off over the year and one thing that is going for it is, well, its fast... speedy gonsalves fast!! But for the add-ons I am so used to on firefox, I would have moved to Chrome. Another thing that Chrome touts is security and sandboxing. It would be good to see some benchmarking done along these lines (i.e most secure browser) than along the same old lines of speed, speed and more speed.

Here is a comic book (old one) that was released by Google when introducing Chrome to the world. The comic book, though geeky, tries to explain in as layman terms as possible the ideology behind the Chrome browser. A good read...

Competition...Maybe

The ipod/iphone mania never seems to subside and probably for good reason. I used the 1st Gen and 2nd Gen ipods and absolutely hated it. They were so high on fluff and so low on actual features or for that matter music quality that it was almost insulting to see tech geeks go for it! I usually try to place the geeks above the fad factor.

But seems like a lot has come off age at the ipod circle. I recently used an ipod touch which a friend got from US and also iphones which many in my office own. I was pleasantly surprised by their sound quality and the apps support on them. In my opinion, the app support alone is a HUGE factor to its continued growth. But, it still sucks w.r.t to value of money, at least in my opinion, but it is in many ways the 'only' option for folks who need a relatively complete solution.

Creative which not so long ago was doing pretty good for itself in the mp3 player market and has slipped off late has come out all guns blazing with Creative Zii Egg, their first multi touch mp3 player (and more). The SW and HW specs on this are drool material. They have mixed Andriod with the new Zii chip interface and the Plaszma reference platform to give 1080p nirvana! The rest of the feature set indicates a keenness to go over board and beat ipods out of the market. They have also priced it attractively with a purported starting price of $199, sweet! They have dual camera, one for video conferencing and one for HD recording. They have got wifi, bluetooth and some version of GPS which I didnt go into details off. They have also provided SDHC based expandability over the 32GB of internal storage and most importantly have introduced the now buzz word touch interface.

The video and the link should give you the rest of the story. Lets see how far this one goes, but on the face of it, seems like a winner...

It is Time...

It has been a while... but it is about time!

Google Mail, Calendar, Docs and Talk are all out of beta! Coincidentally VLC has also reached 1.0!

Outsiders...

I came across an article in New York Times today, and it absolutely surprised me. Just last week, I was discussing with a cousin of mine on what is the laptop he should be buying and I told him, "Go HP, else Go Dell else Go anything else, and buy Acer if you are strapped for cash". My statement was not based on market share or any such thing. It was purely based on personal experience using these products in India (bought in the US) and their technical pros and cons and most importantly their support responsiveness. Yet, very quietly Acer has moved up the ranks and is now challenging Dell, the rags to riches american story for the No.2 slot in PC/Lappy sales! Quite commendable, especially in this economy.

I was similarly caught on the wrong foot when I was making another buying suggestion (I do that a lot :-)) on a MP3 player, and I said "Go Ipoo if you want to follow the trend, Go iriver/cowon if you want quality (and feel geeky) or Go Sandisk if you are strapped for cash". Very soon I got to know that Sandisk has grown to be next only to ipod in mp3 player sales across all models of mp3 players! Its a different matter that Sandisk seem to have given up on their mission to be the "ipoo killer", but none the less, this latecomer and ranked outsider had played the market right, more with respect to pricing than with innovation and won (for most part)!

I suppose its these kind of stories that smaller companies and ranked outsiders need to think that they can make it big some day, though thinking and getting there are very very different ball games. :-) BTW, I am thick skinned enough to continue with my "buying suggestion" sessions. ;-)

Money, Money...Must be funny...

Intel has started on a fresh wave of Ads titled 'Sponsors of tomorrow'. Below is the original Ad.



People can't let anything this fancy go by without a spoof, so here is the Oops version. :-)



Apparently, the guy featured in the original Ad is not the real Ajay Bhatt and is an actor. Kinda killed the concept for me...

Anyway, what I was coming to was, a friend of mine who works in the US told me that the same Ads run there too, which means that a lot of money is being spent on this campaign across the globe. What is quite strange about this Ad and the whole campaign is the timing. I know friends at Intel who have told me about colleagues who got pink slips and possible pay cuts. And this is the time that Intel wants to build a "feel good" factor in people minds about itself? This is not a product Ad, this is not a technology Ad, this is a generic Ad telling that smart people work at Intel and since we are firing and not recruiting you are not welcome. ;-)

Looks like Intel has a lot of money, just not for retaining existing jobs.

Another G-service

Google can't stay quite for too long now, can they... They are now coming up with a new service, Google Voice, which is designed to help the person calling you, get to you on any one of the myriad locations you are likely to be in (home, mobile, office desk, lab etc). The way it works is, they give you a special number which gets mapped to all your configured contact numbers. So, calls to this special number can be received on any of your configured contact numbers. This is far from being a brave new idea with many companies already providing similar services (just Google for it).

If you go through the homepage for this service you will see a lot more features. As exciting as this may sound, the service is currently under private beta for GrandCentral users, a company that Google bought quite some time back. And if and when it comes out of private beta, the service is likely to be available only in US. The rest of the world will just have to wait for Google's benevolence to cross the seas. :-( And considering the big market in India and innovative ideas that the telecom service providers here come up with, we can expect an alternative to come up pretty soon. From what I remember, Airtel already had a similar service though only compatible with their mobile and landline services.

Could it be any simpler?

Blackberry takes its first (of possibly many) potshots!



Now, if the product can live up to this, that would be something!

Idea Sirji!

Last weekend, I was watching a football match and also a cricket match and voila, I get another pointless idea and I am bored enough right now to think its important enough. :-)

So, here goes... We have electronic boundary boards showing Ads during football. This means, its not a stagnant single company Ad made of paper and stuck on some cardboard. This is an LED (similar?) board which can show any Ad at runtime. Cricket hasn't gotten that sophisticated yet, but it will get there sooner rather than later. Lets take the case of football first. A live English Premier League game is watched in so many countries. Now, lets take a site like 888. They are a big deal sponsor in EPL and pay quite a bit to get onto these electronic boards. This site is not well known in India and the EPL folks are not going to get as much money(or viewership attention) showing this Ad while telecasting in India when compared to Airtel or similar. Likewise, the India vs SL series is mainly sponsored by IDBI Fortis, a new investment wing of IDBI bank. I am quite sure they have next to no presence in SL and hence this is meant mainly for the indian TV audiences. So, what about the Srilankans ? Wouldn't they be relate more to say, Dilmah Tea ?

In case you haven't got what I am getting at, my idea is that all the boundary boards be made green in colour, so as to make it easily graphicable, for lack of a better word. So, just like in the movies, with the help of Computer Graphics, the green coloured boards can house country specific Ads, hence increasing the sponsorship worth of events and hence more money flowing and more glamourous and all that good stuff.

There is this one glitch of the actual money paying viewers at the ground seeing just green boards. But I am sure there is some technology that can come to help in this case too.

How does it sound ? Can this fund my EMIs while the recession eats aways more jobs (me next?) ? :-)

Bad to Worse

My second favourite gadget stop is teethering! How many more pins to fall ? :-((

Need Solution

I have a simple problem and need a solution. I may not have tried hard enough, but I am looking for a quick answer. Power cuts are a reality we live with today in Bangalore and has been so for the last few summers. I use broadband at home and many a time use Skype for conference calls. I have an inverter at home for backup power supply and it takes over when there is a power cut in less than a second. My TV, tube lights etc don't get interrupted at all. But my broadband router is a different story. The time it takes for the power supply to get handed over to the inverter is good enough for the router to reboot and this is super irritating. I need to wait close to a minute before I dial back in and as Murphy would have it, this usually happens when I am expected to be doing the talking on the call.



I called up some UPS companies and they say "No UPS can switch over that fast". I don't get it... its a simple problem and should have a simple solution. I am sure there should be other appliances which are just as power sensitive and critical. How come we don't have a solution for this yet!! All I need is a 1 second battery backup after which the battery can give up and my inverter will take over.

p.s: Sudden motivation is, I was downloading a file for the last 6 hours from rapidshare and needed just 20 mins to complete it, but some BESCOM employee felt like testing my inverter and just did a power flip flop. Result is, my download stopped, can't be resumed and now since I am over my rapidshare limit, can't download for the next few hours!!