Tech Tonic

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

After nearly 24 hours of travel on a plane, ferry and bus, I thought it would be wise to ask the hotel to give me a wake-up call lest I get up too late to attend the keynote sessions at the Mobile Asia Congress in Macau. I needn’t have bothered. At precisely 6:30 in the morning I woke up to a loud sound that was something of a mixture between a boom and a buzz. I floundered out of bed and opened the wide windows of my room only to witness a grand scene. The Macau Grand Prix test drives had begun and Formula-3 cars were screaming along the ridge of a mountain outside my window - the same mountain I was cursing the night before for ruining my view of the riot of neon from the casinos in the distance. High speed mobility suddenly took on a whole new meaning as I enjoyed my ringside view with early morning tea.

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The first day’s keynote sessions were beginning to depress me. NTT DoCoMo’s CEO was talking about 4G trials in Japan while China Mobile’s Chairman announced that 8 cities would be trialling 3G by the end of the year and Beijing would have complete 3G connectivity in time for next year’s Olympic Games. On the other hand Bharti’s CEO was forced to showcase how his company was innovating to provide 3G like apps on 2G networks. Geniune mobile broadband, it seemed was just not in our “kismat”. As if almost on divine cue, I got a “mobile alert” news flash that the DoT had just announced the new 3G policy. I thanked the Lord and for the first time in a conference, actually bothered paying attention in the sessions discussing 3G.

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The speaker line-up at the opening keynote that I just talked about, is the best evidence possible of the peculiarity of the mobile phone industry. The operator - the guy who provides you an easily commoditized, utility like service - has the biggest clout in the industry. Imagine the premier global conference for …umm… ‘Home Appliances’ having the CEOs of the electricity companies as the big draws. Or say, a high-powered internet conference with the ISPs stealing the limelight! The outlook for operators though, will definitely get less rosy as standards like WiMax catch on and data becomes a carrier for voice as well. If my entire city is WiMax-ed, all I need to do is install Skype on my laptop or PDA and enjoy blazing fast internet and super cheap calls without even having a telephone number.

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The other thing thats different in the mobile world is that Google isn’t all powerful … yet! I asked an executive from JumpTap - which competes directly with Google to provide a mobile ad platform - why his company was even bothering to be in business ever since Google’s dominant online ad system got ported to the mobile. He said that many of his clients did in fact switch to Google, but quickly came back to him saying “You guys make Google look like Microsoft”. A compliment indeed. Google’s wireless business chief for Asia was himself gracious enough to admit to me that, in China, HE’s the tiny startup and Baidu.com is the overpowering giant with nearly 70% of the mobile search market share. But the G seems to have a bigger masterplan. It’s bidding for wireless spectrum in the US and seems intent on putting an end to the fractured world of mobile applications with its new development platform called Android. Watch this space!

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Everyone it seems, is intent on taking down Microsoft’s cash cow - MS Office. IBM decided to back Sun Microsystem’s pet project Open Office - a completely free, open-source version of MS Office - while Sun’s own Star Office began to be bundled by Google in its free-for-download software pack. Google for its part, got IT services giant CapGemini to endorse and evangelize it’s Web 2.0 take on Office called GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition). The future of the online document is currently a slugfest between all these parties. Microsoft wants Office Open eXtended Markup Language (.OOXML) to become the global standard format for saving documents while the rest are pushing for the OpenDocument Format or (.ODF) at the International Standards Organisation which has the decision-making mandate. The ISO is currently gridlocked because there were more than the required number of dissenting countries against the Microsoft standard, in a round of voting earlier this month. India, which is represented at the ISO by the Bureau of Indian Standards was also a naysayer and there will be frantic lobbying in the next few months to get the BIS to take its final stand at Geneva in February.

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I haven’t bothered to install Microsoft Office on my relatively new desktop, purchased nearly six months ago. I’ve been banging out all my “Word” and “Excel” masterpieces on the completely free of cost and extremely user-friendly Google ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’. It started out accidentally, I must admit. On the first day of using the new PC, I needed to create a spreadsheet. Hypothetically speaking of course, I could have downloaded a pirated version of MS Office and a crack, but thanks to my (Exatt) “fraudband” it would have taken forever. I swear, the thought never crossed my mind but I’m just laying out the options. Piracy is evil! Anyway, I decided to check out the online options and the rest as they say is history. However, before you get inspired and start to uninstall, do analyze your usage. The online versions are fairly useless for complex documents with tons of images, tables, macros etc. and make a mess of charts, graphs and most functions beyond the basic ones. If your Excel usage borders on programming, then you definitely want to hang on just a little longer.

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Lest I come across as some sort of Microsoft basher, let me quickly inform you that I’ve tried most of the alternatives to Microsoft Office over the years and they’re all junk. I worked on Star Office for nearly a year in an organization that had both licensing and ideology issues and swore never to use it again. I used the absolutely free Open Office for nearly six months as well, but gave up after missing a very tight deadline which involved waiting for what seemed like six hours for a document to open. The other day, someone from IBM invited me for a demo of the latest version of Lotus Notes and my first reaction was “They’re still making it? Pray - why?” I know only one person who’s company still uses Lotus Notes. Needless to say, nearly her entire team interacts and exchanges documents using their Gmail IDs, with ‘Notes’ being used as nothing more than an intra-company “official correspondence” notice board for formality sake. Now if only Google gets a PowerPoint equivalent up and running soon, I will never have to download a cracked version of … sorry, I mean never have to legally purchase a licensed version of MS Office ever again.

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

For someone’s who not even six months into the job, Shailesh Rao seems incredibly at ease. The new Managing Director of Google India made his first major television appearance as a panelist on the CNN-IBN special program called “Rules of the Orkut Age”, which was telecast over the weekend. You would think that Shailesh has little patience with the media after all the trouble with the Shiv Sena, Mayawati, murder cases and government discomfort about Google Earth. Well, not only did he agree to come on the show, he was also rather honest. He admitted for starters, that his company really had no idea why Orkut is such a rage only in Brazil and India and not even on the radar in the rest of the world. The panel was televised with a live audience comprising parents, teachers and schoolchildren. Rao was mobbed by the kids after the discussion was over and he looked a bit overwhelmed for the first time that day. Some of the children seem to be masters of the medium and made some pointed suggestions. “Uncle, when you click on that page, there’s one link in the corner that gives you only three options and there should be a fourth option for ..” and so on and so forth.

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My own use of Orkut, in a way breaks all traditional rules. I’ve put up my real picture and my actual contact details such as email ID and office address. I add ANYONE who asks to be added, EXCEPT people whom I know. Thats right, each and every “friend” of mine on Orkut is someone whom I’ve never met. That’s because, we have a large Tech 2.0 community on Orkut and we’ve decided to use it as a sounding board for the website and the TV show. All Tech 2.0 team members are online and are encourage to accept all friend requests. Tons of readers and viewers, all inherently interested in technology join the group and go berserk arguing with each other in the message board about which mobile phone is better and how they hate each other’s digital guts! They start their own opinion polls and put in requests and feedback. A lightly moderated community on a social networking site can be a terrific tool for anyone in the business of building an audience. As for the people I know, I add them on Facebook! Seperation of church and state ie personal and professional is essential in cyberspace!

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I’m not sure if this is directly related to any diktat from the Indian government but it seems like too much of a co-incidence. The tiny cantonment town of Wellington near Coonoor in the Niligiris has been blurred out by Google Earth. I was using Picasa - Google’s online web album service - to tag some old photos taken when my father was posted at the Defence Services Staff College. The program was not allowing me to zoom into the area, though the adjoining towns were clearly visible. This seems strange because although Wellington has a military facility, its an educational setup and not an operational base with weapons. Civilians can roam most parts of the town freely and officers from friendly nations also attend the one year course. Could this location be on a list that the government has given Google India? Well, the harbour, jetties and other facilities, for instance, of India’s massive new Naval base at Karwar on the coast of Karnataka are crystal clear in the satellite imagery. Obviously there’s some gray area here - and I’m not talking about the map of Wellington!

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Orkut has finally decided to acknowledge that it is a rage in India by announcing that it will conduct special Independence day polls on the site. Google’s social network has been getting all kinds of bad press lately, not to mention threats from the Shiv Sena, even though the party patriarch’s grandchildren are fairly active users. I’ve always wondered why Orkut is such a big hit in some countries (60% of the traffic is from Brazil and about 15% from India) but a complete dud in Europe and North America. Very few Indians use MySpace which rules the roost in the US though Facebook is apparently becoming very popular especially among those who’ve studied overseas. In fact the whole “social networking” thing is a bit crazy and no one knows who’s going to survive and more importantly what can be monetized and how. The original pioneers like Friendster, LinkedIn, Ryze and Classmates have rapidly been overtaken and specialist networks like Youtube (videos) Flickr (photos) and Digg (News) have just complicated the whole thing.

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The social networking scene in India is displaying classic “bubble” symptoms. President of Reliance Entertainment, Rajesh Sawhney recently told contentsutra.com that Big Adda, the ADAG group’s social networking site would break even in 3 years. That’s an eternity in the internet business and thus such a prediction about something that nobody in the world has figured out how to milk, is pretty ambitious to say the least. The Indian arm of Sequoia Capital recently invested in minglebox.com adding to its portfolio that already includes dating portal fropper.com. I’ve checked out all these sites and while they seem interesting enough, I don’t see the need to sign up for more than one or maybe two such services. The other day I was in Bhopal and introduced to a local internet entrepreneur who runs scratchmysoul.com which claims to be the world’s only people mapping site. The project is based on the intellectual property of Raghav Chandra who belongs to one of the most important offline social networks in the country - the Indian Administrative Service!

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“Desis” seem to have gotten the short end of the stick as far as cashing out on the social networking boom in Silicon Valley is concerned. Jawed Karim, whose father is Bangladeshi, was the third, ignored co-founder of YouTube and only got crumbs from the sellout to Google (a mere $64.6 million as against $326 million each, for the other two co-founders). Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg is facing a high profile lawsuit from a group of former Harvard colleagues who claim that he stole their idea. One of them is a young man called Divya Narendra, who reportedly works for a hedge fund these days. In both cases the desis seem to have been the technical whizkids who did most of the backend work while the smooth talkers laughed all the way to the bank. In fact Indians or people of Indian origin are yet to make a big impact on what being called “boom 2.0″ in the valley. Possibly the most influential Indian 2.0 in the valley these days is Om Malik who runs the Gigaom.com blogging network. Its core competence? Extensive news, information and analysis of the Web 2.0 phenomenon - circular ain’t it?

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FULL DISCLOSURE: There is a rather large official “Tech 2.0″ community on Orkut.com

Ours is the generation, straddling the analog, digital and now high-def. We remember taking photos with film cameras, watching scratchy VHS tapes, later VCDs and listening to cassettes before making the changeover to CDs. Stuff is getting outdated faster than ever before and keeping up with involves constant conversion of personal media into newer digital formats for convenience, archival value and easy access. If Con-version 1.0 was about converting VHS tapes and audio cassettes, then 2.0 involves disposal of what was once cutting-edge. The problem is that all this involves engaging in some fairly monotonous tasks that will never get done in the regular routine and cannot as yet, be outsourced easily. They’re best left to lazy days, whilst watching sitcom reruns, test matches or mindless movies that don’t need full concentration. Typical summer vacation stuff! Now most of us don’t have the luxury of two whole months like the good ol’ days anymore, but if you do, here are some summer tech projects I recommend. :

Music:
Apple has officially overtaken Wal*Mart & Best Buy as the US’ number one music retailer and while India has been slow to catch on to the legal download bandwagon, the future is pretty bleak for CDs. “Ripping” your CDs ie. converting them to a friendlier digital format like MP3 is relatively easy. You can use a program like iTunes if you’re an iPod user or the default Windows Media Player for one-click ripping. If you’re connected to the net, these programs automatically pick up song, artist and album information. You’re literally a zombie, ejecting, inserting and replacing CDs and before you know it, the music collection is fully wired!

Video:
With the new high definition format, ‘Blu-Ray’ players and discs, trickling into the market, VCD is officially TWO generations behind the curve, even as DVD reigns supreme. As most people upgrade to big-screen TVs, VCDs will look stretched and awful. The only displays that will justify their existence are the ones on small portable media players such as the iPod Touch or the Cowon A3. Ripping VCDs though is much more painful than CDs. You have to pop the disc into your PC and open the MPEGAV folder, in which you’ll see many files with .DAT extensions. Typically, the largest sized file will be the movie while the rest will be annoying trailers that VCDs usually force on you. Rip the movie into a compressed format such as MP4 using a program such as Free iPod Video Converter available at jodix.com. The next problem is that most VCDs are spread over 2-3 discs, which means you have to repeat this fairly time-consuming process for each disc. After half an hour or so you’ll have three MP4 files which need to be stitched together. Yamb is one of the simplest programs for this and can be downloaded free at softpedia.com or download.com.

Documents & Photos:
This is most worthwhile one. Buy a basic scanner, and just put your head down for a whole day - you won’t regret it. On most flatbed scanners, you can arrange four or five photographs in the preview and select them individually for final scanning. Some of the higher end visiting card scanners are easier to use for small 4×6″ photos. Most scanners will save multi-page things like passports or contracts into a single PDF file - all you have to do is remember to ’scan as document’ and not as ‘image.’ Trust me, the effects on quality of life of this one-time painful task are immense. About nine months after the fun and frolic, when nasty surprises come your way (I’m talking about tax deadlines, whatever were YOU thinking?) you’ll be grinning like a Cheshire cat!

I would highly recommend outsourcing these tasks to your kids, especially during hot summer afternoons, when there isn’t much to do. If you have some to spare, do get in touch - don’t worry, I have considerable experience in exploiting underage labour for technological pursuits. I remember one particular summer vacation just after first year of college, when I wanted all my hand-written articles and essays converted into digital format. Having just turned 18 and with more interesting things to do, I decided to offer my 13-year old brother the task. About a week of 4-hours-a-day labour for 50 bucks. My brother couldn’t believe his luck: “FIFTY whole bucks AND I get to use the computer? All to myself? Which means if I type it out fast I can use the remaining time to play games? Deal!” Sigh. No wonder, the Indian IT industry was my calling as a journalist - I’d understood the business model way before its time!

The PDA-phone market is going to be a two-way race in 2008 as Apple’s iPhone takes RIM’s Blackberry head-on both in the corporate-IT and in the consumer tech space. Surprisingly the pioneers of both the PDA and the mobile phone - Palm and Motorola respectively, are struggling since neither managed to merge the two categories together as succesfully as the (relative) newcomers.

However, earlier this week, two PDA-phones from these fallen legends landed on my desk for review. One was the Moto Q8 and the other the Palm Centro. The first thing that struck me even before I opened the boxes was the price. Both these full-keyboard phones are priced at around Rs.14,000! That’s a good 10k less than the (hacked) iPhone or the Blackberry Curve. After exactly, half an hour of probing each device, it suddenly struck me: “Oh My God! Palm and Motorola should.. like …totally merge dude!”

I’m no investment banker and am barely familiar with the financials of either company. I have no clue about valuations, strategic fit, anti-trust implications, blah blah. I’m just a long-time fan of both companies’ products and as a consumer I would LOVE to see ‘MotoPalm’ emerge as the third player, who according to the “Rule of Three” management mantra, will shake-up the market in style!

Just hear me out on this. The Palm Centro is the most compact smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard that I have ever seen. It’s not particularly slim, but neither is it a brick. My first thought on seeing the tightly packed keys was, “No way my fingers are going to handle this.” Surprisingly, not only are the keys beautifully beveled, they also provide the softest, yet most tactile feel on any phone keyboard in the market. There are lots of nice touches that can only come from a company that knows its users well. Let me give you two quick examples. The biggest problem I face when using touchscreen phones is that my earlobes keep pressing on the screen and often end up deleting contacts or setting off alarms - its eerie! Sure, in some phones, you can turn the screen off just after dialing or taking a call but thats painful. The Centro has a simple setting that allows you to lock the screen whenever you’re in a call. Next, I work in television so I’m often rushing into a studio and fumbling last minute to silence my phone, lest it ring during a live recording. “Unlock keyboard.. whats the key combo?? drat! ok, find ‘profiles’ in the menu, activate ’silent’ … woops in a hurry I pressed “loud” … too late .. cameras rolling… I’m done for!” Palm pioneered the physical silent-switch on the outside that just puts all sound off with one slide of a button. I love it - no wonder Apple copied it on the iPhone!

The Moto Q8 on the other hand is the slimmest Windows Mobile ever. In spite of having a full keyboard it’s way thinner than nearly all Windows phones that don’t have keyboards! Do you see what I’m getting at? The Centro’s keyboard on the Q’s ultra-thin body with a silent-switch thrown in could be the ultimate smartphone!

What software will this as yet mythical phone run? Palm’s hived-off software division was acquired by a company called Access which has turned the once proprietary Operating System (OS) into a Linux-based open-source platform. The Centro is among the first phones to use this new Linux-based OS. Motorola has thrown everything and the kitchen sink at its phones as far as software is concerned. It has made phones running its own OS, Palm, Symbian, Windows and pioneered mainstream mobile Linux resulting in current models such as the MotoMING. It also acquired a company called Good which is basically makes messaging software that competes with Blackberry, and from what I’ve heard, is superior if not as good in most aspects. With both companies having great Linux-on-smartphone experience, they’re best positioned to use Google’s upcoming Android mobile OS that promises to liberate phones and make them more like PCs.

Anyway, while “researching” some facts for this column, I was dismayed to learn that my brilliant merger idea was not original by a long shot! Half the corporate world seems to be clamouring for Motorola to acquire Palm. As of writing this piece, no such thing has happened though by the time you see this in print, MotoPalm may be for real. However, if you see a Centro-Q running Android in the near future, please do contact me and volunteer your services as a court witness when I sue the new entity for royalty.

It’s the end of the financial year and while I collate my bills and claims, it’s also high time I audited FY08’s tech purchases. I bought lots of stuff, some cool, some junk so lets take a hard-nosed look and pass judgment:

ASSETS

- Shower Radio:
Technically I didn’t buy it since it was gifted but what a great gift! It really doesn’t get better than (a waterproof) FM Radio in the bathroom. This inexpensive cute chunky plastic box has just two knobs - one for controlling the frequency and one for volume.There’s a small digital clock and holes for the in-built speaker. It takes 4 AA batteries nevertheless highly recommended!

- Nintendo Wii:
This one was swung by WAF (Wife Acceptability Factor). There was no way an Xbox or PlayStation was entering the home and having me glued to it 24×7. The Nintendo Wii on the other hand is the most fun, stress-busting and yet addictive gaming experience I’ve had. We’ve thrown Wii-kend parties with friends who just can’t get enough of it. Whoever said gamers have no social life?

- iPod Touch
I bought this purely on a whim - no iPhone yet in India and I desperately wanted to “flick and pinch” (before dirty thoughts enter your mind) photos, songs and videos. But once this thing gets on the net, it’s the best handheld internet browser EVER made. Its also among the best resolution screens on so slim a device and my VCD collection is now being ripped for use solely on the Touch.

- SMC Mini Wi-Fi Router
It costs less than four thousand bucks, is incredibly easy to set up (just plug the internet cable in) and doesn’t require software installation. Multiple laptops and Wi-Fi gadgets (such as the previous two on this list) then easily share the single net connection at home. Just remember to password protect your router lest the neighbours decided they don’t need to buy their own.

- HP Scanjet 2400
I had no idea that scanners had become so cheap - less than 3k - though when I did order it, I questioned the need to pick up such a big dust collector. However, a little discipline from my side in scanning EVERYTHING to make life paperless has proven to make this the best decision of the year. I’ve not had to pull out anything from old files to xerox - just browse, attach and email/print!

LIABILITIES

- Skype Wireless Phone
This is nothing but a plastic “phone” shaped Wi-Fi device that has no software except on it except Skype. You connect to Wi-Fi, login to Skype, access your friends list and call them. Its basically a substitute for having to sit in front of your PC with headphones and mic. Nice concept, but not worth 5k considering I’ve used it less than a dozen times all year!

- Digital Photo Frame
I bought two of these as gifts, but was too tempted and opened one to keep for myself in the drawing room. The image quality is poor, it has an ugly cable for power supply that gets in the way and most importantly I haven’t had the time or “enthu” to replace the memory card with pictures that I slotted in, when I first opened it nearly a year ago.

- Onkyo Gladiator 5.1 Home Theatre
This one was heavily subsidized thanks to credit card points but took a dozen follow-ups over 4 months with HDFC bank before it landed up. It takes up tons of space and has created a wiring mess. Moreover there aren’t enough movies out there in the market with 5.1 Dolby sound to enjoy. White elephant alert!

- LG xCanvas 37″ HDTV
Its on the same table that the much bulkier “tube” was on, so the space-saving of the thin LCD is redundant. TV signal in India is not HD (High Definition) so my cable actually looks worse on this than on my old 29″. I don’t have an HD gaming console and I don’t intend to buy a Blu-Ray disc player till prices hit 10k ie. mid 2009! Early adoption be damned, this could have easily waited; I’m sure a 46″ will be the same price by next year!

- Sony Cybershot T-100
Never buy a digital camera which requires that the battery be taken out and charged separately. I have no issues with the camera itself; its only the painful charging that has ensured that I’ve never had it ready when I most needed it. In any case, in the future, I’m going either for a great mobile phone-cam or an entry level Digital SLR . The era of these in-between pocket “digicams”, for me, is over!

It had been a while since I’d done a 10-hour long road trip and options to keep myself busy such as reading a book or watching a video on my iPod Touch had been ruled out because of motion sickness. The only alternative was audio but listening to music for more than half an hour, isn’t really my thing. I decided that this was the time to try out Audible.com - the world’s leading ‘audiobook’ provider. I’d read that Amazon had just announced it was buying Audible for 300 million dollars and I’d made a mental note to try out the concept of “listening to a book”.

The night before the trip, I logged on to Audible.com and punched in my credit cards details and other information. The site has a nice clean design, loads quickly and the registration process, at first seems smooth. I initiated the one-time download of the Audible Manager software and while it downloaded in the background, I got down to making the tough choice of picking my first audiobook. You can chose books by category or look at the bestseller lists or even the site’s own recommendations. The most brilliant part about the interface is the ability to hear how the book is going to sound. Under a small image of every book cover is a play/pause button that on clicking, immediately starts a sample excerpt. You get a feel of the narrator’s voice and style which is critical to the selection process. For instance, listening to Lord of the Rings could be a disaster unless you’re a certified Elvish speaker! The narrator pronounces all the names and places using the exact guidelines laid down by author JRR Tolkein himself for these (fictional) languages, which is mind-bogglingly confusing compared to reading it yourself and mentally pronouncing stuff however you want. On the other hand, something like The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss had narration which sounded easy and conversational. I decided that this was my pick and clicked the ‘purchase’ button.

“This title has not been authorized for sale in your geographical region”, was the response - ouch! It became pretty apparent soon, that almost nothing had been authorized (by the publishers who hold the rights) for India. I decided on a whim to try a fabricated address. I didn’t think it would work since many similar services (eg. Apple iTunes store) are able to detect your country from the credit card number itself. Anyway, I made up a posh California residence - hey, it’s the only place in the US whose Zip Code I could remember. Watching ‘Beverly Hills 90210‘ as a teenager in the early days of STAR TV sure came in handy! To my surprise Audible accepted my address at face value and this time around I was able to purchase the book. The download of the eight hour long, 115 MB file had begun. I left the computer on standby since with my ‘Fraudband’ connection from Exatt, it would take all night. Indeed, all I had to do in the morning was drag and drop the file from iTunes onto my iPod Touch.

The listening experience was nothing short of excellent. The book itself was very good and on a player which has video display, you can see which chapter you’re on and skip back and forth easily. The downsides are that its much more tedious to rewind or fast forward compared to turning back a few pages on a real book. Also with the dreadful headphones that most players come bundled with, your earlobes start aching in a couple of hours.Finally, Audible is still an expensive option, especially for a country like India. Books are priced between Rs. 600 and Rs. 1000 which is more than what the hard copy will cost you in a bookstore.

Also, all the files are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management) which means they are stored in a proprietary format called .aa and you can’t (officially) rip them into any other format like MP3 to make copies for your friends. In fact you can burn only one copy of a book onto an Audio CD. Geeky types can find workarounds pretty easily with a little googling. Also, this system works best on iPods with iTunes and is a bit cumbersome with other devices and software. However, since I own an iPod am not particularly keen on making copies, everything is fine by me. The problem now is that I’m so taken in with the theme of The 4-hour Work Week that you might just not see a column next fortnight!

One of the world’s top blogs Gigaom picked up a Tech 2.0 story on the possible blackberry blackout.

One of the commenters Ashwath seemed to think that the Indian tech media is “notorious in presenting Indian regulators as Luddites” (Full comment here). While to some extent I do admit that reporters get their kicks from poking fun at clueless officials, I would have to say that the latter can’t particularly claim to have been unfairly targetted.

I thought I’d do a quick jog down memory lane and pick one instance every year in the 21st century, that India’s administrators have been pwned!

2001: The tragi-comic case of India’s ‘first cyber crime’ that was ‘cracked‘ by the Mumbai cops.  The lunacy of it all is best summed up in this Wired story. (A recounting of my personal experiences for a column is here.)

2002: Delhi Police arrests noted Kashmiri journalist Iftikar Gilani on charges of spying after finding “sensitive information” on his computer. Their case falls apart after it is confirmed that the documents recovered from his computer were freely available on the Internet.

2003: Yahoo Groups gets blacked out in India. Beeb report here. I had a Jt. Secy in the Dept. of IT proudly telling me on camera, that “If it’s anti-national, we will ban it!”

2004: Baazee (now eBay India) CEO gets arrested by the same cops whom he offered to fully co-operate with, in a case of pornographic content being uploaded on the site. He later told me how they tricked him into coming to the police station on a Friday so that they could jail him over the weekend without a hearing till Monday.

2005: President APJ Abdul Kalam (followed by others including the National Security Adviser) wags a finger at Google Earth. While some claim it’s a legit concern, I think that anyone seriously interested in planning an attack is not going to sit and look at 3-5 year old maps that are being sourced from freely available  satellite imagery.

2006: The Government goes into overdrive on internet censorship and knocks off most of the blogosphere in the process of targetting 17 (at first random looking, but clearly politically motivated) sites and blogs. Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression indeed!

2007: Cops pick up the wrong guy and keep him in custody for 50 days. Apparently the ISP mapped an incorrect physical address to the IP that was posting the anti-Shivaji content. The cops of course weren’t concered with the technical details. Thankfully the poor chap is suing!

Until someone from Taiwanese computer giant Asus told me that the three Es in Eee PC stood for the incredibly unimaginative “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”, I was hooked onto the name. Although it’s pronounced just E-P-C one can’t help but get excited at the sight of so many ‘E’s and conjure up a dragon stance aka Bruce Lee all the while shrieking “Eeeeeee PeeeCeeee!”. Its a laptop straight out of Pokemon world and the name is so much better than DV3244SX or some similar variant of the alpha-numeric combination disease that the laptop business seems to suffer from. The Eee PC is a “subnotebook” that’s light, sleek and surprisingly good looking with a nice metallic glossy finish. The specs are bare bones - a low end Intel chip, 512 MB of RAM, a 7-inch screen, basic ports for LAN, mic, headphone, VGA output and three USB jacks. Memory cards can be inserted into an external slot and there’s even a VGA webcam in the model that I tested out. There’s no hard drive on the Eee PC but a flash memory based ’solid state’ disc ranging from 2GB to 8GB - my model had a 4 gigs. This ensures lightning quick startup and shutdown, lesser risk of data loss and much lower power consumption. The battery manages to consistently give just over 3 hours with Wi-Fi on throughout.

However the make or break in a low budget PC was always going to be the operating system and this one comes bundled with a Linux distribution called Xandros. I’ve mentioned before in this column that I’m a Linux-skeptic as far as consumer PCs are concerned. However the one very smart thing that they’ve done is to load a very simple tab-based version of Xandros as the default rather than the full fledged interface. In fact it looks very similar to good old Windows 3.1 with folder groups and nice large icons. You can see lots of familiar stuff such as Firefox, Skype, Google Docs, a PDF reader etc. on the opening screen. One of the most unnerving things for a first time user about firing up Linux is to see these tons of programs with ultra geeky sounding names like Konqueror, Amarok, Phonon etc. It could make you feel like you’ve been abducted and placed on an alien planet. The Eee PC is the first machine running Linux that I would recommend even to people with nothing but the most basic knowledge of Windows. It opened all websites flawlessly, detected external hard drives, played most common audio and video files and opened all documents that I threw at it.

It’s not without its flaws though. There’s too much wastage of space around the screen. Shifting the stereo speakers from either side of the LCD seems as if it would easily allow for 25% more display. The button below the touch pad which serves as both left and right mouse-key is hard and often unresponsive. External volume controls should have been provided. There are tons of  kinks in the software too. For instance the Wi-Fi setup is a tad complex (an average user should not be left wondering whether he uses WEP or WPA as his security protocol) and refuses to remember your password forcing you to enter it every time. Also, good luck on installing something like an iPod or a digital camera - its a pain getting Linux drivers for most hardware. None of the cellular providers who make USB modems have bothered to throw in Linux drivers, which is a pity since Wi-Fi is not very ubiquitous in India and having this logged on through GPRS would have solved the connectivity problem once and for all.

However in the final analysis, the Eee PC is a winner. I’d still not recommend it to power users for whom their notebook is the critical, primary machine. You don’t want to be stuck ploughing through Linux forums on the net when push comes to shove. However for those of you who have a primary desktop at home or work and just want a portable add-on sort of notebook for infrequent travel or even mobile usage within the home, I vouch for this baby.  If the Linux bit is making you a bit queasy relax - it supports Windows and in the US at least, Microsoft has agreed to sell Windows at a super-subsidized rate of $40 with the Eee PC. The Eee PC is currently available in white and black though light shades of metallic pink, blue and green will be on the shelves soon. At Rs. 18,000 it’s definitely a bargain and more importantly, for some, looks way more expensive than it is.