Category Archives: Tech Articles

Data, not devices is the key

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Hotmail2Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia talks to Sunil Rajguru about the Internet, mobiles and his take on gadgets

How different would Hotmail have been today if you were still in charge?

I think Hotmail has done a great job so far but I’m aware that Microsoft for some reason is not giving the 1 GB of space to international users. I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen for sure. Because I think Internet users are Internet users anywhere in the world and they’re equally valuable. Also, we would’ve certainly kept up with all the Gmail features to make it more relevant and quicker. I would also have done a better integration with instant messaging.

How much has e-mail and instant messaging changed the world we live in? For example many claim that the standard of English has gone down because of these things.

You’re looking at the negative aspects. I can’t say if the standard of English has gone down or not. But it certainly has made the world a closer place. Today, companies and individuals can be in dispersed locations around the globe. E-mail and instant have brought in immediacy to all workflow and all types of communication that we conduct today.

We’re having a lot of security issues with the Internet. How far are we away from solving these issues?

Security threats will continue to be prevalent no matter what. There’s no way of preventing most of these things. They’re part of the whole explosion of the Internet and the freedom of the Internet. I think they’ll happen but they constitute a small percentage of the benefits of the Internet, so I don’t think people should shy away from using it. For example, any new new technology comes with its disadvantages. Abuse is not the fault of the Internet, it’s something that we humans do and so that’s an element of society.

A lot of players are talking of a Web upgrade or a brand new Worldwide Web. Do you think it’s necessary?

The IP protocol is inefficient right now. It was designed 30-40 years ago and I think if the same infrastructure can be used but with a better protocol, then it’s great. Certainly if you can carry and make the transmission of bits more efficient, you can get that much more horsepower, that much more content. So all these initiatives are useful because they’ll make the Internet a better experience.

What do you think of projects like e-Chaupal and AMD Personal Internet Communicator that are taking the Internet directly to the rural areas?

All of them are fantastic. The largest growth in the next ten years will come from the developing world and in order to bridge this digital divide, cost is a major factor. Less than half of the population lives on $2 a day. We can’t be a happy planet if there’s a digital divide. Ultimately we live in an information rich world. Power comes from information. Education is a form of information, dissemination and it’s extremely important that we provide access mechanism to the have-nots of the world.

What can India do to increase PC penetration?

PC usage is growing, but lower than mobile usage. That’s because of what it’s used for. A mobile device is something that people are very familiar with. What it can do is obvious. People love to communicate, people love to chat and people love to be always in touch. The cost of mobile telephony has fallen dramatically. But that’s happening with PCs as well. The cost of PCs has fallen dramatically and the cost of Internet access is falling dramatically. With more and more fiber being laid, you’ll see that India is just ready and waiting for a PC explosion and an Internet connectivity explosion as well.

3G mobile phones will always have Web services on all the time. Internet access will be on all the time. But do you think the Internet will be as popular as the mobile?

No, the Internet will be as popular, but for different purposes. So you’ll always be always on it for things that you absolutely need like email, or the latest stock ticker, alerts and messages. Now will it completely replace the Internet? No, because the screen size is important for your workspace because we’re not going to smaller screens but bigger ones. Big screen increases productivity. So for some things the mobile is great and always on is fantastic. But for other things the desktop metaphor will continue to remain. So I think one complements and is not in competition with the other. Ultimately, the key is your data. You’ve to be able to be get to your data from any device. I think the individual data will become more important than devices by which you access your data.

Are you a gadget guy?

I’m not a gadget person. I’m more of a realist. I like things that really improve and enhance my effectiveness and productivity. I’m not crazy and I don’t go and buy the latest iPod. I have a fantastic PDA and a laptop, but I check my mail in the workplace like everyone else. And I don’t have a Blackberry.

Will Bangalore manage to remain India’s Silicon Valley despite all its infrastructure problems?

I don’t think Bangalore will be India’s Silicon Valley for all times to come, because of exactly the same reason you mentioned. If infrastructure is inadequate and other places are offering better infrastructure and the same type of workforce, then the other cities will develop faster than Bangalore. So certainly the local government here has to keep that in mind and realize that they don’t have a monopoly

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in May 2005)

Gimme more!

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While the battle for microproces sor speeds has ended (thanks to dual-core chips), the battle for more storage space has just begun. People want to store everything they have: Songs, home videos, pictures, games-you name it. And our options are mind-boggling. Content with floppy and hard drives of a few GB a few years ago, today we have CDs, DVDs and 100 GB plus hard disks. And the best part is that storage is getting cheaper and more plentiful for everyone.

Getting hungrier

Also gone are the days when you wanted storage just on your computer. The day won’t be far of when even your fridge will have a hard drive. Today we have a handheld MP3 player with 100GB of memory and the next revolution is waiting to happen in mobile phones. That’s when the full range of data services like downloading multimedia, games and applications becomes hot. Then you’ll wish that your mobile had a few GB to begin with at least.

How long is long?

Says Wong Chuan Yong, a manager with Iomega (which came out with the Micro Mini USB Drive), “People will go to any lengths to store all the information they have. Recently one of our customers bought a 35GB REV drive for his home computer that is actually meant for the SMB market.” This external drive comes with a 35-year-guarantee.

So does that mean that drives that last long will become popular? Not necessarily, feels Wong Chuam Yong, the key will be “transfer technology”, that is, how easy it will be to transfer your data. For example, today you can convert all your VHS tapes to CDs or DVDs if you want to. Technologies like those will always be handy.

Virtual storage

A lot of people, including Microsoft chief Bill Gates, are putting their weight behind the Internet for storing content. That means you don’t have to worry about what technology is used where. While online storage is already on the rise, the right bandwidth and the right price for unlimited storage space could tilt the balance in favor of virtual personal storage as the preferred choice. Already Gmail offers accounts upto 1GB and Streamload offers 10GB of free storage and just $4.95 a month for unlimited storage.

But whichever technology prevails, personal storage may well prove to be the killer application of the future.

Hard or Flash?

While computers have a hard drive, most MP3 players and gadgets have flash drives, which are smaller and more durable. That’s because they don’t have internal moving parts like hard disks. But flash memory is much more expensive and unless the price factor is brought down, most gadgets might end up with hard drives rather than flash ones.

Think perpendicular

Today in hard drives, data bits are recorded on magnetic mediums by being placed parallel to the media plane. The more bits you can pack in a given area, the more the storage capacity increases. A new technology is being worked on to place the bits perpendicular to the media plane. That means you can pack many many more bits in a given area and far greater storage. Hitachi, IBM and Seagate are all working on this technology.

Then and now

The first “storage device” was the punched paper card of 1804 that was used in silk looms. Computer hard disks were invented in the 1950s. Then you had large disks which had a diameter of 2-and-a-half feet which could hold only a few MB of memory. So if you wanted loads of memory, it had to be brought in a truck! Today Seagate has brought out a mini hard drive of 1″ form factor which can hold 5GB of memory.

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in April 2005)

All you need is A laptop

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A TV journo can transmit broadcast-quality images with a notebook, Web cam and basic Net connection. Even doctors can prescribe medicines to interior areas wirelessly

Many Hollywood movies show a TV van racing to a breaking news scene. The TV reporter and cameraman jump out as someone inside makes arrangements for a live feed. Looks great but it’s very cumbersome. And it’s difficult to drag the van and heavy equipment to remote areas. Now, what if you could condense all that into a laptop? Well that has already happened. Now a TV reporter just needs a laptop, a mobile camera and an Internet connection (dial-up will do) to transmit broadcast-quality images to his studio.

Beehive System’s vid’link MOBILE is a laptop-based news gathering solution, which is used for video conferencing and newsgathering from remote locations over really low bandwidth mediums like Internet and satellite phones. The real time video transmission package is Live’burst, which is a two-way interaction video solution. Well heavy TV equipment may prove to be a burden in many a situation, but a laptop can find its way to the remotest of places. A TV reporter can transmit with just a satellite phone from anywhere in the world. Some of the TV stations using this technology are NDTV, Sahara and Sun TV. In fact, this technology was also used for reportage in the Tsunami tragedy that took place recently in Asia.

Long distance prescription

While the benefits of telemedicine have been talked about for ages, thanks to the laptop, it can go to places where there are no hospitals. Apollo Health Street is one such organization that is using it to connect its hospitals to the entire world. In fact, Apollo claims to be the single largest telemedicine solution provider in India. The hospital has established telemedicine link with many centers all across India and the world.

All the doctor needs is a laptop and he can visit the remotest locations and be in touch with specialists at various hospitals. The laptop will allow exchange of information and reports, easy access to the patient’s entire medical history online and videoconferencing between the field doctor and the relevant specialist.

If there’s an emergency, then a General Practitioner can perform surgery with a telemonitored specialist’s assistance. It can also be quite useful for medical training in remote areas and medical advice during natural calamities.

Even a phone can do it!

While you can do all that with a laptop, there are things you can do with a mobile too. Ajay Pal Singh of Beehive Systems says, “One of the largest Indian broadcasters, Zee News, used the vid’link MOBILE solution together with a 3G phone to cover the Olympics event in Athens. They saved more than $60,000 during the entire event!”

In Africa, LifeCell is a program by which you can use a simple mobile to connect to a server in a hospital. As the health worker makes his rounds of areas that don’t have access to doctors, he or she does a basic health check-up and feeds all the information into his mobile. The text messages then reach a central server which outputs it like a news ticker to the on-duty doctor’s computer. The doctor scans all the information and replies with his comments and prescriptions. That in turn reaches the health worker, who passes on all the information to the patient. That way everyone stays in touch with the doctor all the time and he can only visit the hospital in case of a real emergency.

While the concept of working at home has been around for ages, this is the age of carrying a mobile office in your pocket.

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in March 2005)

Let’s meet… in cyberspace

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Are you lonely? Do you want to build a social network just sitting in front of your computer? Do you want to use the Net to build up a business network in a short time? Or do you just want to get together in the virtual world and have fun? Whatever it is, online groups are mushrooming and connecting people all across the world like never before.

Consider the figures. A Pew Internet Survey showed that 20 million people take part in an online group in America alone. An AC Nielsen survey found that nearly 40 per cent of Americans participate in online communities for hobbies, shared personal interests and health-related issues. Today there are hundreds of social networking sites with Friendster claiming that 13 million people have joined them alone.

Virtual camaraderie

But what exactly is a virtual community? One definition could be a social group connected in any way by the Net. The origin of such groups were the Bulletin Board System, where a software allowed users to download and upload data, read news and exchange messages with other users. This was followed by the popularity of the e-mail and as bandwidth increased, it became more and more easy to connect online. Today many sites serve as online meeting ground where millions can discuss matters of importance or even triviality.

So what do they want?

Take the case of Renith Valsaraj, who’s a software professional based in Bangalore. An amateur photographer looking to make it big, he sought out amateur photographers around the world to form an online group. “You don’t want to do things alone. You need company and this is the best way to do that. It’s a serious group and it’s more knowledge transfer than anything else,” he says. He formed the Bangalore Photographers Group and has notched up a membership of more than 300 photographers. Many of them meet regularly and hold exhibitions.

How Bangalore Quiz Group happened

For Prakash Subbarao, who’s taken online quizzing to new heights, it was loneliness that led him to form an online group. He’s formed the Bangalore Quiz Group, which crossed the 500-membership mark within four months of being formed. The group has daily online quizzes and even meets offline from time to time to conduct quizzes “just for fun”.

“I have made tremendous business contacts in a very short period of time. I probably would not have been able to achieve this in such a short time span offline”, admits Prakash.

In his own words: “It happened on one cold wintry night in Bangalore. It was fairly late and I was sitting in front of my PC wondering, “What next?” On an impulse, I decided to start an online quiz group. I went over to Yahoo! and created a group called “The Bangalore Quiz Group”. It took about five minutes to set up. What next? I needed members. So I went over to Ryze.com and posted messages to the two groups where I am a member-the Bangalore Balaga and the Bangalore Business Network. The results were gratifying. Within minutes members started straggling in and in another 48 hours, the membership crossed 100. It was the 1st of September, 2004. We crossed the 500-member mark in January 2005.”

So, what’s your online group?

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in March 2005)

Cache your life!

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It’s your scrapbook, mailbox, camera and camcorder all rolled into one. Call it Moblog (Mobile+Weblog), but it sure is one great way to capture your life

Imagine you’ve had one of the most eventful days of your life. You got a promotion and the subsequent celebrations went wild and your mobile got flooded with SMSes. Luckily you clicked a few photographs with your mobile camera and even a video clip or two. But then it’s all going to temporarily reside on your mobile. What if you could make this moment and moments like this permanent?

While we can’t always go around with a digicam and a camcorder, a mobile is the only thing that’s with us all the time. And it’s increasingly being used for all sorts of messages, photos and videos. But the only limiting thing is the small size of the mobile’s memory? What if you could somehow expand this memory and compile it all in a memory library?

Nokia has come out with one possible solution for this. It has come out with a new feature called Lifeblog, which will help you document your mails, messages, pictures on your computer. The Lifeblog is a mobile and PC software combo that keeps a multimedia diary of whatever you’ve collected with your mobile. Your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages are automatically organized chronologically. So you can keep building a database of all that the mobile captures of your life and browse and search it any time in the future. Right now, users of Nokia 6630, 6670 and 7610 can use the Lifeblog.

And Nokia isn’t alone. Many other camera phone manufacturers are urging consumers to use the technology to capture their lives. Samsung has even launched a “Show Your World” ad campaign in America, urging people to convert their daily lives into movies.

Life Caching

The Lifeblog is part of a trend that has been dubbed “Life Caching” in the West. While the regular cache is a special high-speed storage mechanism, Life Cache is the storing of events of your life. This was in part spurred by the highly successful blogging industry on the Internet. 2004 was the biggest year for blogs and bloggers and Pew research showed that blog readership jumped by 58 % in a matter of 10 months in 2004.

And Microsoft is not to be left behind in cashing in on this Life Cache phenomenon. They’re working on a MyLifeBits project, which promises to be a “lifetime store of everything”. In the experiment, one researcher has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. After that, the MyLifeBits software takes over and helps with hyperlinks, clustering and a fast and easy search of the entire database. Another researcher has even developed a prototype called the SenseCam4. That’s a camera you can wear like a pendant or badge. It automatically takes photographs of your daily life.

Make way for moblogging

Even as Weblogging is becoming more and more popular, moblogging is also catching on. It all began when a guy in Denmark posted an SMS from a mobile on the Web. After that in Japan, the craze caught on when people started posting images from their camera phones. Today there are dozens of sites that take stuff from any mobile device (like even a PDA) and post it on the Net. Today, moblogs generally involve “technology which allows publishing from a mobile device”. (It could be an e-mail, video clip or a series of images.) If you want to participate, then there are dozens of sites which will help you do that. (Though be warned, a few of them end up resembling like porn sites as some people just use their mobile camera to record their intimate moments and upload without any online checks).

A moblog is also a type of glog (Cyborglog) that simply means that the person doing the recording is also a participant in the activity. Not to be outdone, Websites are using mobile reports and calling them Moports. The first successful use of this was the Republican National Convention in New York last year. Moport.org received more than 300 mobile reports which included text accounts and photographs of protests. This also works because the mobile is probably the only gadget which is with you all the time.

While enthusiasts have been uploading moblogs for years, Nokia’s Lifeblog gives a chance to record your moblogs privately on your personal computer and not on the Internet for everyone to see. First, you had online diaries and now you have mobile diaries. Recording more and more of your life seems to be getting much easier today.

While currently the world is divided into those who think this is too much of “Big Brother is watching You” and “It’s a great idea”, it remains to be seen whether in the future more and more people cache in on their life or not.

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in February 2005)

Force 3 multipliers

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You’ve just landed in a strange city with loads of time on your hands. You take out your mobile and start playing your favorite games on it. But suddenly that’s no fun. You’ve beaten the computer too many times. You switch to GPS mode and tell the network that you’re “Game”. You immediately see many dots spread over all across the city. They’re mobile gamers who’re “Game” too. That’s when you match your skills in an action-packed game with a total stranger.

After the games are over, you get an SMS that your mobile gaming partner wants to meet you. Now, should you meet her or him? You chuck the danger and raise the stakes. You SMS and challenge your partner to catch you and so begins an exciting chase through the city, which you track on your mobile screen as one dot chasing another. Welcome to the future. This is just one of the possible scenarios that mobile gaming could hold. And it’s not too far away.

If you’ve played board game Scotland Yard, then you’ll see that the hit game can be reenacted in real life with multiple partners. For the uninitiated, in Scotland Yard, five players chase an elusive Mr X throughout London city by train, taxi and bus. If it’s so exciting in the living room, imagine doing that in real life!

3D and 3G

So what does it take to get all the games going on your mobile screen? We asked GPU maker ATI’s Senior Architect Raj Koduri, the man who helps your games get faster, better and more complex. “All you need is 3D graphics, a 3G phone and the right graphics card”, he says matter of factly. Well, 3D graphics are already here and most global networks are switching totally to 3G in 2005, so that shouldn’t be a problem either. And how long will it take a mobile graphics card to support a game like say Doom 3? “One to two years at the latest,” says a confident Koduri. Already, ATI’s Imageon chip helps PDAs and smartphones offer crisp images and streaming video with MPEG4 technology.

Another limiting factor is that games are on only in Java-enabled mobiles, which were pretty expensive. But with the prices of Java handsets falling, more and more people will be able to afford them. And multiplayer gaming will be ready to take off.

How it will take off

So what are the reasons for the growing popularity of mobile gaming? We asked LG, strong backers of mobile gaming, who claim they were the first in the world to bring a cricket game on the handset. Explains Praveen Valecha, product group head (mobile phones), “The mobile is the only tool that’s available with you at all times and at all places. In fact, it was found that in Southeast Asia, 60 per cent of traveling time is spent on the phone.”

So mobile manufacturers are trying to pack more and more into a mobile phone. In fact, gaming is the new cash cow for service providers and it has become even more lucrative globally than downloading ringtones. Datamonitor research has said that in 2005 itself, more than 200 million people (80 percent of wireless phone users) in America and west Europe will play online games with wireless devices. The situation in India is encouraging too. Mobile gaming revenues touched $26 million in 2004, about 5% of the global market, according to Instat-MDR research. The projecting figures for 2009 are a whopping $336 million and everyone wants to get a piece of the pie. There’s money to be made both in downloading and playing the game, as against getting just a flat fee for a game license.

Praveen Valecha says, “Mobile gaming is one of the favorite pastimes of students and teenagers and it is this market that will ensure that mobile gaming becomes a complete industry in itself. And people love team games and strategy games, so multiplayer gaming is the next big thing.”

Mobile gaming is also one of the fastest-growing activities among the tech-savvy in India. The reasons for the current boom are Bluetooth, high-res graphics, connectivity and color screens.

While Ninetendo’s Gameboy (150 million units sold till date) and Sony Playstation are pure gaming devices which are already huge, the future may well belong to mobile cum gaming devices like Nokia’s N-Gage.

Macrospace’s “Fatal Force: Earth Assault” is a multiplayer game where players can join forces in a co-operative mode with nearby friends or play against each other in the more familiar last one standing wins style. Another multiplayer mobile game Everquest has around half-a-million subscriptions in Europe alone.

In India, Nokia is serious about the gaming business. “N-Gage QD Challenge Mobile Gaming Championship” covered 26,000 gaming enthusiasts across 47 cities, in six weeks. The winner walked away with a cool one million rupees. The N-Gage game claims to be the first mobile and connected game deck to feature online high-quality 3D multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth wireless technology and GPRS.

Nokia and gaming are here to stay. Declared multimedia business director, Gautam Advani, shortly after the championship, “India is a large country with a predominantly young and technology-savvy population which makes it an ideal market for mobile gaming. The N-Gage Arena will be the place where gamers meet and create virtual communities, share their experiences, find new challenges and make friends with players all over the world.”

The pancake phone

While the Nokia N-gage has been touted as a gaming device that’s also a phone, its “difficult to phone” features has deterred some people at least. Gaming freak S Sayed, who works in IDC India, chucked his mobile phone and bought the N-Gage. He says, “As a gaming device, it’s one the best devices I have held. Maneuverability and flexibility are great.  There are no complaints there.” But the problem came whenever he tried to make a call. “It’s like holding an elephant. You feel as if there’s a pancake plastered on the side of your face,” he said. He wanted a device that would both be a mobile and a gaming device, but he found it very difficult to make calls. Sayed, since then, has chucked his N-Gage and taken a Nokia 6600, where he “manages to play” some of his favorite games.

Mobile gaming might rank as one of the novelist ways of connecting with anyone at any time on this planet.

(This article appeared in Living Digital magazine in January 2005)