Leveraging India As India Stands Up

Google TechTalks May 25, 2006 Ashok Jhunjhunwala Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India and was department Chair till recently. He received his B.Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maine. From 1979 to 1981, he was with Washington State University as Assistant Professor. Since 1981, he has been teaching at IIT, Madras. ABSTRACT Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwala has significant expertise in incubating technology to make a difference for the masses in India. Dr. Jhunjhunwala leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. This group is closely working with industry in the development of a number of Telecommunications and Computer Network Systems. TeNeT group has incubated a number of technology companies which work in partnership with TeNeT group to develop world class Telecom Access products. The group has also incubated a company which aims to install and operate telephone and Internet in every village in India. Come here what he as to share from his vast experiences in this field. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- My comments... This is an excellent talk showcasing some of the recent developments in India. Particularly I like Dr. Jhunhunwala's comment that India is a huge market, BUT at the right price. He goes on to describe, how we have tailored some of the solutions to the west to meet the demands and the price points that would work in India. In the process, we have creates a market for these solutions at the most competitive rates in the world and still end up making a decent profit. This obviously opens up the world market for us. The other thing that I liked very much is the passion and pride with with Dr. Jhunjunwala speaks about some of the very interesting work being done out of India.Very inspiring.

The ever evolving mobile phone…

The mobile phone “revolution” is quite a recent phenomenon. While the growth of the mobile phone adoption is a record in itself in the sense that it is the fastest growing consumer electronic in the history of mankind. The phone essentially conjures up images of “Hello, Hello” and communication, it is interesting to see how the mobile phone has diversified into the domain of features reserved for other gadgets. This truly is an example of convergence.

Compare the features in the above diagram to that of a simple phone or even just the walkie/talkie from the last decades. Probably the common node would be the one to do voice calling and that also a subset of the functionality that is present in the mobiles of today. So, does it look saturated ? Has all the innovations that could be part of the mobile phone , already in there ?

There are a slew of new areas that can me made possible to do with the mobile phone and that are just waiting to hit the critical mass with mass adoption of 3G(read faster) networks. While the possibilities are endless, some of one that I can think of now( and some of these already have been tried as pilot projects in some countries in Europe and in Japan) are TV broadcasting to the phone, Location based services(there is a whole gamut of services like ‘provide me directions/map to the nearest Macdonald’s restaurant from here’ that you could provide under this umbrella), Navigational services, Remote computing( using your mobile phone as a client computer to the office network and work from anywhere) and many more. It would be interesting to see the whether in the next few years, each of the new features that has already converged into the mobile phone, like, the camera , would become more and more powerful( higher megapixel, optical zoom, sophisticated features) or a completely new set of features would make it’s way through, or both. Nevertheless, one important factor for the success of the mobile phone is it’s mobility and which has also led to it become a personal device. On the other hand, as you try to pack in more and more features into this tiny device, the size also becomes one of the limiting factors. Lets wait and watch.

The camera in the phone...

Did you every wonder how the cell phone companies came up with the idea of introducing a camera in the phone ? Alexander Graham bell would probably never would have imagined in his wildest dreams that the device he created for the purpose of communication, would one day be also be used for photography. The two seem to be very different applications. In hindsight, and with the success of the camera phones, it does seem an intelligent move by cell phone companies to include this application with your phone. However, what I am really interested is in understanding what would have the conversation looked like when in the board room of a cell company someone came up with the idea of packaging a camera(and that also a very low quality one to start with) with the device. There would have been arguments like, “why would someone who wants to make a call, be interested in a camera that takes postage size photographs ? (It’s seems that the idea of mouse as an input device to computers was something that was first proposed to the Xerox board, who rejected it as being frivolous)“ Some one else may have put another point across in favor. A deviant from the natural evolution of the product. I mean, you could add a bigger address book, voice activated calling, speaker phone, backlit LCD display, black&white to color display, password protection for calling specific numbers, barring specific calls, needing a password to receive calls from specific numbers, programming to automatically call specific set of numbers at specific times and speaking a pre-recorded message, call forwarding, programming to send a busy tone to specific set of numbers and so on…but, having a camera on the phone ? Give me a break !!

Obviously, someone was not thinking on the same lines and so we had the camera in. Looking back, if I try analyze the reason for success of camera phones, it looks to me that the mobile phone was transforming from a simple communication device to a much more personal device. The personalization was boosted due to the mobility aspect of the mobile phone. Why is the landline phone not a personal device ? Because, it cannot be carried in your pocket with you all the time. The same set is used by all members of the family. For the mobile phone, you may want to use your choice of ringtones, wall paper, skin covers, User interface themes , just to suit your tastes(also note that there is a whole entertainment industry that has evolved around providing content around these features on mobile phones). You don’t share this device with anyone else the way you used to share your landline phone of yesteryears. So, the phone was transitioning from a simple communication device to a personal entertainment device. In that sense , including a camera in that package made sense. Then with the introduction of mms (multi media services) by cell phone operators, people could relate to the camera as another communication feature by capturing and sending the images.

No matter what , I still find it very fascinating on how something like a camera could be imagined on an extension of a device that Alexander Graham Bell produced and be such a huge success. Can you think more examples of such “radical innovations” ?

Googling around the world !!!!

How often do you use Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/ ) ? More and more people are now becoming aware if this application and using it extensively. For those who are not aware , let me brief you on what this wonderful application is.

Google earth is an application that combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. You could

1) Fly from space to your neighborhood by typing the address and zoom right in.

2) Search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions.

3) In the ariel view Tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings.

4) Save and share your searches and favorites. Even add your own annotations for later reference.

Now, that’s a mouthful. Just imagine, something that only till a few years ago was privy to set of people in institutions like NASA, ISRO and other organizations that utilize satellite imagery( eg. Businesses that provide GPS and other location based services) is now available to anyone with a desktop computer. The application is also free and so “everyone” can afford it.

While this may not look like a big deal, but is definitely a precursor of things to come, and which indeed would be a big deal. For right now , not every part of the world is covered to same level of detail, this is only a matter of time, provided there are no legal issues that crop up on the way. I have been playing around with the application for quite sometime now. Always wanted to go see the Grand Canyon but could never make it. Thanks to Google Earth. I have already flown over it a number of times now. For many of the cities in US, you could also zoom in from the top(from a satellite/air plane ) view down to a street level detail and choose to see the map in 3-D perspective or a flat area map optionally annotated with locations for hospitals, hotels, schools, etc. Imagine planning a trip to a city in the US and you could actually choose where you want to stay and even peep around the neighborhood.

So, where does all this seem to be headed ? To start with, probably in the next 5 years, not just the US, but all major cities around the world would be mapped to a street level detail and then on for the second level cities and so on. So, if you wish to plan a holiday in any part of the world, you could actually go for a virtual Holiday first then decide. Travel operators could actually use this technology to help their clients choose their perfect holiday spot. Does this look like the extrapolation of the “Visual walkthrough” concept that has now become so common among architectural community in which they actually make their clients virtually walk through the building using a reconstruction of their model building through 3D software ? Is it the return of virtual reality , with a vengeance ?

The next level of virtual tours could actually be walking down the streets of a remote city , in real time , sitting on the desktop. Actually , Microsoft is working on a concept called the virtual local live, street level where they are not only using the imagery from the satellite , but instead are photographing the city from the ground and stitching the photographs together along the map so that you could drive a virtual car through the “real” streets. It seems that to capture majority of the city like seattle they needed to stitch together 10 million photographs. Find more details at http://preview.local.live.com/

So, what is required for the to make your virtual tour of the world more real ? More processing power to process the images, higher bandwidth to provide the real time experience of the virtual tour, more storage to store the millions of photographs…and guess what !!! This is all happening, every day, every hour , every minute and second…

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