Tag Archive for 'BANGALORE'


Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.




Microsoft tries to understand BOP teleuse

In the end, Microsoft’s best intentions may not satisfy what locals want. The company surveyed 8,000 people in emerging markets and found their most pressing needs for technology often revolved around entertainment and surfing the Internet.

“It reinforced for us that the emerging middle classes are sort of like the middle classes here except they don’t have as much money,” Mr. Toyama said. “It’s sometimes easy for us to get caught up in things and forget we are serving the needs of real people.”

The above comes from a story on Microsoft’s social research unit in Bangalore, an organization LIRNEasia has had many interactions with, and hopes to work with in the future as well.

We were under the impression that they did mostly qualitative research, and that…

Indian Railways to provide broadband Internet on rails

Railtel Corporation of India, the communication arm of the Indian Railways, is planning to set-up cyber cafes at over 200 major railway stations across the country by the year-end, Railway Minister Nitish Kumar said on Thursday.

“The first cyber cafe will be inaugurated on Friday at New Delhi Railway Station. Based on the feedback of the users, we are intending to extend to over 200 important stations in the country in the first phase by the end of this year,” Kumar told reporters at the commissioning of the “optic fibre communication link on Bangalore-Secunderabad, Secunderabad- Vijayawada-Chennai and Chennai-Ooty-Bangalore” here.

The railways would also experiment by providing broadband Internet access on moving train, the first such instance in the world, he said. The service would be launched on…

Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Imagination par excellence

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, resident of Sri Lanka, citizen of the United Kingdom, and man of the universe, passed away on the morning of the 19th of March. His was a life well lived. He will be remembered.

Sir Arthur imagined what the world could be. In some cases, such as the geostationary orbit that was named after him, he even did the mathematics to substantiate his imagination. But the mathematics was not the true achievement: it was that he imagined this wondrous idea of a specific orbit where satellites would be stationary in relation to the earth and could therefore serve as very tall towers for wireless transmissions with line of sight covering one third of the surface of the globe; it was that he imagined it a decade before…

Is this the time for India to move into ICT products the big way?

Having made its mark on software in style, there is nothing wrong India becoming ambitious to do the same in hardware. That seems to be the message we hear now.

Instead of resting on its laurels as the preferred IT services destination, technology players and academics in India must look to creating compelling products for the domestic and global market with an eye on cornering at least $15 billion worth business by 2015. This was the challenge thrown out by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) to the Indian IT industry, at its annual Product Conclave that opened in Bangalore on Nov 19, 2007. (Read the report in ‘The Hindu’)

Interestingly, last month Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala noted the same at the recent Wireless World…

Mesh Networking at WWRF

At Wireless World Research Forum meeting currently held in Chennai, there were two presentations on Mesh Networking. While Chanuka Wattegama of LIRNEasia spoke about the Sri Lankan experience, Sharad Jaiswal of Bell Labs, India presented a similar initiative in Bangalore. There were many similarities between the two on the approach.

VillageNet, the Bangalore initiative, is a low cost IEEE 802.11 WiFi based mesh network designed for connecting villages in rural India, providing low-cost broadband Internet access for wide regions. It targets the rural market around the world, where large populations live but paying capacities are low. VillageNet offers a low-cost, high performance alternative to traditional wireline and cellular technologies that have prohibitively expensive deployment costs. VillageNet connects villages in a mesh using long-distance wireless links. The…

Innovating for Asia’s BOP

Can dinosaurs dance?
Oct 11th 2007 | From The Economist print edition

Responding to the Asian challenge

ARE consumers in India and China too poor to afford high-quality Western goods? That used to be the old idea of doing business in these countries as firms offered watered-down versions of their products at reduced prices. Mr van Houten, of chipmaker NXP, says Indian and Chinese consumers are forcing multinationals to design sophisticated products that more closely meet their needs, and this is making firms operating in Asia better innovators.

By recruiting ingenious local engineers and designers in places like Bangalore and Beijing, and paying close attention to trends and practices in the market, firms are coming up with products and services that can be sold in other parts of the…

India remains outsourcing favourite, says survey

BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India remains the favoured technology outsourcing destination, an industry report said Sunday, amid concerns a rising rupee and soaring wages would blunt the country’s competitive edge.

A study by industry publication Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons put the Indian cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune at the top of a list of 15 emerging outsourcing destinations for global companies.

Kolkata at number five and Chandigarh at number nine were the other two Indian locations on the list, which contained three Chinese and two Vietnamese cities as well.

Why not leave it to the parents (and the government stick to its knitting)?

Looks like some people can’t get out of the old habits of trying to regulate everything and anything.  The license raj is not quite dead, sadly.

Parents are best positioned to make these kinds of decisions, not blowhard Babus.  The state should not try to micro-manage people’s lives.  Leave the decisions to those best positioned to make them; don’t issue regulations that are impossible to enforce.   Is that too much to grasp?

India News - India State News, KA: Ban on mobile phone use by students

Karnataka government has decided to ban use of mobile phones by school children aged below 16 and sale of handsets to them in order to protect their health. The decision was adopted at a meeting of Education and Health Department in Bangalore.…

India woos West with education

BBC News, Bangalore

Long known for its outsourcing, India is now increasingly marketing itself as a destination for affordable education.

From his bedroom in Bangalore, biology teacher Vishal Bhatnagar uses an electronic pen to highlight the main parts of the human endocrine system on the laptop screen in front of him.

“What I’m trying to show you,” he says, speaking into a headset, “is that most of the chemicals in the body are poured into the blood to be effective.”

One-on-one tuition

Eight thousand kilometres (5,000 miles) away in London, student Veenesh Halai follows along, making notes and asking questions.

They’ve been brought together by a high-speed internet connection and a growing global appetite for cheap, one-on-one tuition.

Read the rest of the article on BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6312771.stm

India: A Crucial Cog for I.B.M.

India Becoming a Crucial Cog in the Machine at I.B.M.

Click here for full article [registration required]

By Saritha Rai, New York Times, June 5, 2006
BANGALORE, India, June 4 — The world’s biggest computer services company could not have chosen a more appropriate setting to lay out its strategy for staying on top.
On Tuesday, on the expansive grounds of the Bangalore Palace, a colonial-era mansion once inhabited by a maharajah, the chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., Samuel J. Palmisano, will address 10,000 Indian employees. He will share the stage with A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, India’s president, and Sunil Mittal, chairman of the country’s largest cellular services provider, Bharti Tele-Ventures. An additional 6,500 employees will look in on the town hall-style meeting by satellite from other Indian…