Category Archives: Tech Articles

Smart cities are here

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You punch a smart card at the main entrance of your campus, and guess what happens in your home. The electric kettle switches on, and the AC starts chilling the air in the living room. As you take left towards the apartment, the bathtub oodles with soap bubbles and the Hi-Fi media center starts flipping through your favorite playlist. You step on to the welcome mattress outside your home and the fingerprint scanner identifies you and the door opens gently and John Denver welcomes you home with his famous number, “Country roads take me home”. Just that the roads of the country lead you to a super connected home.

Welcome to the world of smart homes and cities. While digital homes are already here, smart cities are not too far away. In India, Dimension Digital Controlls can turn your home smart in just a matter of days. Their SmartHome provides a networked system that can operate all lights, audio/visual systems, all electrical appliances through a single remote, keyboard or touchscreen: the choice is yours. All the systems talk to each other through radio frequency, so there’s no need for messy wires. You can install cameras, store all the visual information for later viewing and keep a tab over your house through the Internet when out of station.

Says Managing Director Padamraj Bagrecha, “We are the only player in India which gives a complete integrated solution and our SmartHome is really catching up in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.” Digital Controlls offers five modules: door access system, light control, surveillance, security and home entertainment. You can pick up just one of these or go for the works.

Digital-home-all

As Wi-Max peaks into the city, the residential and other estates will get connected, as per the plan. The Digital Living Network Alliance or DLNA was formed in June 2003 and recommended Network Media Product Requirements or NMPR specifications. So all you’ll need to have will be a product compatible to NMPR specs and a Digital Media Adapter, or DMA to synchronize all your devices at home, which means viewing pictures stored on a PC on your TV screen without having to lay any cables. Wiliam O Leszinkse, Director of Digital Home Marketing, Intel, speaks highly of the technology-”People will be able to take their content wherever they want to. And the experience will be the same wherever you are.”

Remote is the key

Now the big question. Will this actually happen? Ask Intel and they nod in approval. The keyboard may not be a comfy device to all, but the remote sure is. Post-announcement of the Entertainment PC, which is a PC, TV, home theatre all rolled into one, Intel is confident that the setup will run well on any operating system with a remote. Imagine doing away with the keyboard and mouse and controlling the command center of the house with just a remote. That would appeal to people of all ages and all groups. More than 170 companies have joined the DLNA bandwagon and have started rolling out NMPR compliant gadgets.

And Intel isn’t alone

Intel isn’t alone in their thinking. Microsoft’s new Windows XP Media Center 2005 operating system has new features that help a PC compete with consumer electronics devices in the living room, and that turn a PC into a home server capable of feeding audio and video to multiple devices on a wireless network.

It’s designed to turn the home PC into a complete entertainment center. And the simple on-screen interface is designed for a remote control rather than keyboard and mouse (but it’ll work quite Ok with either). In fact, if you can operate a DVD player, then the Media Center shouldn’t be too difficult for you.

Apart from the global giants, Indian biggie Reliance also has big plans through its Netway. The Netway provides high-speed Ethernet links to homes. If you’re a subscriber, then you’ll get the “all-in-one” of high-speed telephony, a host of television channels, video on demand, jukebox, time shifted TV, audio and video conferencing and even surveillance services. What’s more, even the Netway’s centered on the remote that can also be used as a keyboard, mouse and phone!

Looks like it’s going to be a roller coaster ride for both smart homes and smart cities soon.

(This appeared in the January 2005 edition of Living Digital magazine)

Presenting the naked Net

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What if you could buy a stripped down version of a computer just to surf the Net?

For most people, the Internet and word processing are arguably the two most important features of a computer. So it was just a matter of time before someone gave you a stripped down device that offered that and nothing else. AMD has announced the launch of the Personal Internet Communicator (PIC), which it hopes will revolutionize Internet access, the world over.

And it’s cheap. You’ll be able to get a mouse, keyboard, monitor and enough CPU to surf the Internet comfortably for just $249 (around Rs 11,200). Don’t expect it to be released in the US though. It is targeted in Asia and Latin America, where AMD plans to take the Internet to the masses.

AMD doesn’t plan to market the device itself, but will piggybank on telephone companies and Internet-service providers, which will put their names on the communicator and sell it to you, as part of a bundle with Internet access or telephony. Tata Indicom will sell it as a broadband access device amongst households in India.

But how exactly does it work? The PIC has a 366MHz AMD Geode x86, 128MB RAM, 10GB drive, USB, 56k modem, a host of Internet-centric software. It has Windows CE with XP compatibility, and it can boot in 25 seconds, faster than your average P4. If you already have a monitor, then you can pick up the rest of the PIC for $185 (around Rs 8,300).

Around the same time, Intel launched a first of its kind elaborate localized computer initiative in India. The awareness, marketing, advertising and retail program is aimed at increasing PC penetration in India. The marketing campaign hopes to expand coverage to 30 million households in the country.

(This article appeared in the December 2004 edition of Living Digital magazine)

The Fantastic Voyage

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The InfoTech revolution has come here to stay and threatens to change the face of the Earth. We are all speeding on Al Gore’s information superhighway. But the development of all this has not been overnight. Its development can be traced centuries back. At first, computing started slowly, picked up and since then it has been accelerating.

Early Developments: One of the important inventions, which helped in the history of computing, was the ancient abacus, which is still widely popular in Japan in the 20th century. Other developments were the slide rule in 1622, the mechanical calculator in 1647 and the automated loom in 1820. The latter used punched cards and this was the first form of primitive programming.

The 19th Century: But it was Charles Babbage who really laid the foundation for the computer, as we know it today. He made great breakthroughs in the 1830s on his analytical engine with this regard.

In 1876 came the telephone. The foundation for communication lines all over the world was laid. One 20th century invention, the modem, united the computer and telephone to unleash a monster.

The Fifties to the Seventies: During this period in the 20th century came a spate on inventions and ideas in rapid succession. The coming of the microchip in 1959, the minicomputer in 1968 which subsequently helped man to go to the moon, the microprocessor in 1970, the microcomputer in 1974 and the floppy disk in 1975.

The Eighties. PC Magic Everywhere: Perhaps this was the final stage and the most important development, the coming of the computer to the masses. A computer became a necessity for everyone in the West, Steve Jobs quit the Apple scene, but not before leaving his impact on the world and Bill Gates became a billionaire. In 1980, IBM came out with the first commercial personal computer, which incidentally was also the year of the supercomputer. In 1981 came the same computer with Microsoft Desk Operating System (MS DOS), which ensured that computer handling became much more simpler and Gates all the more richer. At that time we had modems with a speed of 300 bits per second, which looked as if they would fulfill future requirements. After that came the Compact Disc and then a spate of PCs, each better than the predecessor—the 286, 386 and 486.

The Nineties. The Coming of the Net: If everyone thought the PC revolution wouldn’t be bettered, then they were mistaken when the Internet took the whole world by storm. In 1991, Gopher, the precursor of the Web was designed to help students find information quickly. In 1992, the World Wide Web was formed thanks to researcher Tim Berners-Lee and the world was finally united on a scale never seen before. The global village seems to be shrinking and shrinking. Then in 1993, Marc Andreessen came out with Mosaic thanks to which we had graphics on the net and in 1994 came the commercial Netscape Navigator, aptly named. Now the setting was complete and anyone in the world and get information at speeds unimaginable just a few years ago. And talking of speeds, in 1996 the Optical Carrier (OC-3) came at a speed of 122 megabits per second, a far cry from the 1981 modem speed of just 300bps.

On the PC front came the Pentium for greater speeds and a larger memory and Windows 95, the real user-friendly operating system.

The 21st Century. Unpredictable: And one shudders to think what the next century is capable of. We have Virtual Reality, which creates a virtual world inside the mind. Computer aided design, medical research, writing—you name it, we’ll have Computer Aided Everything! Entire global business may be done on the Net. And then there’s artificial intelligence. Will the computer finally outwit man in all departments?

(This article appeared in the Hindustan Times newspaper in 1998)