Salaam Bangalore!
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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The steady flow of intellectual property has seen over 5,000 patents filed from India
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INDIGENOUS INNOVATION: Tata Elxsis portable broadcast media player and Handy DVR.
IN AN annual event that is showing increasing signs of `middle age spread' and mediocrity, the Bangalore IT. in event which ended last week, had one saving grace: A small corner of the pavilion hosted by the Software Technology Parks of India, brought together a dozen information technology players.
Mostly based in the city, the technologists had made India proud with the release of innovative and globally relevant products or technologies in the year gone by.
Bore testimony
It was called the IP or Intellectual Property Zone — and it bore testimony to the fact that while India-based product development companies had already applied for over 5000 patents, Bangalore was still the jewel in the crown, the fourth-largest technology cluster in the world.
IP is not weighed the same way as Godzilla: which means, Size does NOT matter. Some respected and established names in IT were next to rank start-ups and it was difficult to say who had created the most compelling product.
Tata Elxsi, which has set up a special lab for innovation and design engineering at Whitefield, Bangalore, unveiled the Handy DVR.
This is a hand-held device which connects to a laptop computer or other portable screen-backed device to receive, relay and record terrestrial television to the emerging Digital Video Broadcast (DVB-H) standard.
It uses the Universal Serial Bus (USB) to connect with the portable PC and records programmes on a Multi Media Card — similar to what digital cameras use. The company is also ready with the reference design for a Set Top Box tailored for the emerging boom in Internet Protocol-based TV.
The Indian engineers of Rambus, a world leader in high speed chip interface technology, are responsible for the parent company being the first in the world with an integrated communication solution for the new 5 GHz PCI Express (an Intel-origin standard). Called the Rambus Gen 2, it enables system integrators a quick and easy path from concept to device production.
Fuelling many products
Another `Made in India' Rambus product, showcased last week, the XDR 2 memory interface, fuels a host of new consumer electronics products like digital TVs — and the new Sony PlayStation3 games console.
They like to call it `your branch office in a box' — NetD, the Sunnyvale, California's Bangalore-based development team has put together just that: a unified services gateway which is router, Ethernet switch, firewall, intrusion detector, an Internet telephony box and an Internet Protocol-based Virtual Private Network — all squeezed into a single 19-inch rack mountable chassis. The services gateway comes in two versions, SG-4 (4 slots) and SG-8 (8 slots). Another Bangalore-based software player is Xora (pronounced Zora!), a specialist in wireless technology solutions.
Their most recent innovation builds an interesting application on top of the Global Positioning System of satellite-based position information. When used in conjunction with a GPS-enabled mobile phone, Xora's Time Track helps companies track and locate employees and field staff. Linked to wireless Blue Tooth scanning devices, it allows users to view and download detailed reports on the Web.
The company has tied up with over 70 clients (and 6,000 users) in the U.S. and once GPS phones are available in India sometime next year, Xora may accelerate its position-sensitive offerings here as well.
If you thought triple play — industry jargon for the simultaneous access to voice, data and video — was state-of-the-art in multimedia technology, think again.
The Bangalore-based Innomedia Technologies begs to differ — and at the IT.in expo it showcased what it calls a hexa-play device. This was a video server-cum-player, which handles digital television channels, a personal video recorder, video-on-demand services, Internet access, telephony based on Internet protocol, and a person-to-person video server.
The customer-end of these six technologies is a handy `remote' called ChoisPad (short for Converged Home and Office Integrated Services), which connects to TV, tape recorder, cable channels, phone and Internet all without wires.
The latest version of ChoisPad on display was a multilingual device, which (when working with the appropriate software) allows the user to follow the words of a song on the TV screen through text in multiple Indian languages — karaoke-style.
Innovation, the key
Other exhibitors in the IP Zone usually figured in a round-up of the usual suspects whenever innovation is the key in Bangalore: Encore, one of the two companies that turned the concept of the Simputer into a finished product, has wisely diversified into products like the `Saathi,' a hand-held tactical military computer and the CSIR-sponsored hybrid computing platform, Mobilis.
Tejas, is now a respected name in optical networking products while Ittiam has emerged as one of the world's preferred sources for the digital signal processing technology.
NXP used to be a Philips company. Today it brings its pedigree to bear on a host of media technologies for home, car and mobile device. Relative newcomer SirF, has cannily latched the GPS to a variety of platforms from cameras to wristwatches to create innovative, location-sensitive applications.
Just reminding visitors that Hyderabad too was a hotbed of IT innovation, SemIndia, soon slated to be the nation's first state of the art Silicon foundry, was clearly not going to sit around doing nothing while the government got its administrative act together.
It has started manufacturing a range of broadband modems and routers using indigenous know how. And how!
The dozen players showcasing Indian innovation at its best proved that the more things changed the more they remained the same.
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