Technologic China stakes claim to India’s geeK eMPire booming
1
T he founders of the Internet sensation filesharing website The Pirate Bay appeared in court in Stockholm on Sep- tember 28 to appeal against multi-million pound dam- ages and a year-long jail sen- tence. The trial is expected to last until October 15. Of the four, Fredrik Neij (32) and Peter Sunde (32) were present in the Svea Court of Appeal, Stockholm. In April 2009, along with Neij and Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (25) and Carl Lundstroem (50), were found guilty of having made 33 copyright protected files accessible for illegal file sharing via Piratebay.org. Founded in 2003, the web- site is one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world. It offers a search engine for torrents that can be used for file sharing. The site has more than 23 million users across the world. Last year’s court case was seen as a vital and symbolic victory for the movie and music in- dustry. Entertainment com- panies, primarily Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertain- ment, EMI and Columbia Pictures benefited from the damage payments. However, the founders continue to ap- peal in the court. O ver 20 million handsets are sold every month, a quite incredible figure that means India has the largest demand for mobile hand- sets in the world today. The Indian market is also unique for offering different models, ranging from the most basic ones, priced at Rs 1,000, going all the way to fully equipped Smartphones and jewel- crusted devices priced at Rs 2-3 lakh. And with this growing middle class comes a big- ger disposable income, and with the extra income comes the desire for a better mobile device. Keeping this in mind, the CMAI (Communications and Manufacturing Asso- ciation of India) organised the 8 th China International Mobile Sci-Tech Exhibition, solely for the Indian handset market in Shenzhen, China, last month. The exhibition hosted mo- bile devices, including pre- cise replicas of sought-after devices like the iPhone 4, Blackberry, Android and Vertu. To a layman, it’s diffi- cult to differentiate these from the real thing, apart from the fact that they don’t cost an arm and a leg. These carbon copy replicas have almost all the features of their ‘original’ counterparts, except, in- stead of carrying a price tag of Rs 30,000 or more, they are available at prices rang- ing from Rs 2,000–5,000. At these prices, a prospec- tive buyer could now own a mobile phone with enough memory to store over 1,000 songs, high resolution cam- eras/video cameras, email cli- ents, social networking appli- cations, calendar, games and tons of other applications. To put this in perspective, the average price of devices com- prising some of these features is currently fixed at around Rs 8,000 in India. Apple popularised the con- cept of mobile applications, and almost all the handsets made today follow Apple’s lead in making available as many applications, games, utilities and features as pos- sible. With GPRS rates very lowin India, the mobile sub- scriber base has been in- creasingly accessing social networking platforms like Facebook, Orkut and Twit- ter, directly through their mobile phones. In fact, a large number of handsets present at this fair, soon to be intro- duced into the Indian market aggressively, included those with pre-embedded social networking capabilities. Besides mobile phones, the exhibition also displayed other sought after products soon to be introduced in In- dia at very competitive prices, including Tablet computers. After the enormous success of the iPad, major computing brands around the world are competing to introduce their own Tablets at the lowest prices with the most features. After Kapil Sibal’s announce- ment about India producing a $35 Tablet in 2011, various Chinese manufacturers dis- played their prototypes, some priced as low as Rs 8,000, to attract Indian retailers. Various Indian handset manufacturers were present at this exhibition to either take back ideas of what can be produced in India, or di- rectly place orders. President of CMAI, N.K. Goyal said, “In less than a year, India has seen the rise of over 170 handset brands capturing 30 per cent of the entire mar- ket share, overtaking Nokia, Motorola, etc. It is due to the presence of these brands that Indians are able to choose ‘what they want’ from their mobile device today at afford- able prices.” the sunday guardian 20: supplement to the sunday guardian | 03.10.2010 | new delhi Technologic 33 Jokes from InterWeb Uncertain future China stakes claim to India’s booming mobile market Vishal Mehra Japan recently invented a surprise machine which can quickly detect a thief. Samples were sent to sev- eral continents before mar- keting the product. In North America, 20 thieves were caught in 30 minutes; in South America, 50 thieves were caught in 30 min- utes. In Europe, 25 thieves were caught in 20 minutes. In Africa, 600 thieves were caught in 10 minutes; and in South Asia, the machine was stolen in 5 minutes ! A new blonde employee calls the Help Desk to com- plain that there’s something wrong with her password. No, it’s not the usual caps- lock problem. “The prob- lem is that whenever I type the password, it just shows stars,” she says. “Those as- terisks are to protect you,” the Help Desk technician explains, “so if someone were standing behind you, they wouldn’t be able to read your password.” “Yeah,” she says, “but they show up even when there is no one stand- ing behind me.” Deep Kalra Founder & CEO of MakeMyTrip.com Technorati Deep Kalra is the pioneer in the online travel booking sector in India. In April 2000, he started MakeMyTrip.com from a small office in Okhla, New Delhi. Within a span of 10 years, the popular website spread its operations across more than 20 states in the country. Under his steward- ship, MakeMyTrip has become one of the largest growing online travel company and the largest e-commerce busi- ness in India. An avid traveller with keen entrepreneurial ambitions, Kalra realised early on that the travel industry and the internet had tremendous growth potential if com- bined together. Before MakeMyTrip.com, Kalra served as the vice-president of Business Development at GE Capital. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and a MBA (PGDM) degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is also a founding member of ‘I am Gurgaon’, an NGO focused on the improving the quality of life in Gurgaon. 27 73 Display resolution Weight Processor Internet Multimedia Storage Battery life Connectivity Availability Camera Display screen BLACKBERRY TABLET UNVEILED Research in Motion unveiled a tablet computer on Monday it hopes will leapfrog Apple’s iPad, highlighting its potential for gaming, media publishing and corporate use OS RAM 1024 x 600 pixels 400g Dual-core 1 Ghz chip Flash-enabled web browser 3.5mm audio jack, built-in speaker and mic, 1080p HD video, video calling 3MP front, 5MP back Not specified Not specified Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n, pairs through Bluetooth with a BlackBerry device for 3G connectivity 2011 (Pricing TBD) 7-inch diagonal, multi-touch BlackBerry Tablet OS 1 GB BlackBerry Playbook 1024 x 600 pixels 7-inch diagonal, multi-touch 380g Single-core 1 Ghz chip 512MB Android 2.2 Flash-enabled Android browser 3.5mm audio jack, built-in speaker and mic, 1080p video, video calling 1.3MP front, 3MP back 16GB, 32GB with optional SD card expansion 7 hrs of use Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n, 3G October (Pricing TBD) Samsung Galaxy Tab 1024 x 768 pixels 9.7-inch diagonal, multi-touch 680g (Wi-Fi), 730g (Wi-Fi+3G) Single-core 1 Ghz chip iOS3.2 Safari browser, no Flash support 3.5mm audio jack, built-in speaker and mic, Up to 720p video playback None 16GB, 32GB or 64 GB flash drive 10 hrs of use Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n, 3G (for 3G models) Available (From $499 to $829) 256MB Apple iPad Sources: Apple Inc. BlackBerry, Samsung MP: Megapixel GB: Gigabyte TBD: To be determined Founders of Pirate Bay will continue appeal in court Dead Rising 2 is an ac- tion and a survival horror video game. In this game, the player controls Chuck Greene, as he fights the zombies. This violent game- play focuses mainly on us- ing improvised weapons to pave their way through over 7,000 zombies who are seen onscreen at any one time. Overall, the game has a well refined strategic action game, and has a knack for capturing the eerie spirit of Americana. Interestingly, the player uses food to re- vive the dying partner be- fore his health runs out. GAME GEAR Dead Rising 2 Android Tablet launched in India CWG mobile application launched US to expand Net snooping powers Binatone, a UK based man- ufacturer of landline phones and GPS devices, has an- nounced the launch of its Android based tablet in In- dia. The tablet, known as the Home Surf Touch Tablet, comes loaded with Android 1.6 and is quite a sleek looker. It boasts of an 8-inch resistive screen and supports Wi-Fi, 2 GB onboard storage and has 128 MB of RAM. The tablet is powered by an ARM 11 667 MHz processor. While the specs might not be top-of- the-line, you get a decent tab- let for the price — especially when you compare the price of the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, which are expected to cost Rs. 20k in India. AHMEDABAD: Zoomi, a mobile application that will provide up-to- date latest information on the Commonwealth Games, was launched last week. It has been de- veloped by Smile of India, a knowledge services firm headquartered in Ahmedabad in partnership with KPMG, the leading global profession- al services firm. "From in- formation on participating Commonwealth nations to photographs and achieve- ments of past Games to details about Delhi and India to latest and breaking news, the application would have it all in a Rich Visual format," a company spokesman said. San Francisco: The US government is seeking a dramatic expansion of its power to snoop on Internet traffic in a move that is likely to be copied by many other governments around the world, The New York Times reported. The new regula- tions would require all ser- vices that enable commu- nication to be "technically capable" of complying with a government-issued wiretap order, the report said. These regulations would cover ev- erything from smartphone service providers like RIM's Blackberry to social net- working and even peer-to- peer messaging systems like Skype. AgEnciES Microsoft patches ASP.NET flaw Microsoft has released a security bulletin and "out of band" update for a vulner- ability affecting ASP.NET applications. The early analysis on this vulnerability has called it extremely serious, but in MS10-070: Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Infor- mation Disclosure Microsoft classifies it as "important" rather than "critical." The vulnerability could allow an attacker to view encrypted state on ASP.NET transac- tions. Nearly every version of Windows is listed as af- fected. Initially the update will be available through Microsoft Download Center. Slim-as-a-supermodel gaming powerhouse Asus has released over 30 versions of its Eee PC since 2007 and 1201N happens to be the latest and best. Why? Not only because of its 12.1-inch display but also its ultra thin and light form factor. But the best part is that it’s available in 1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 dual core processor and boasts of Nvidia Ion graphics, perfect for gaming and HD-playing. Other specs of this netbook that makes it the best of the series is its 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth and a six-cell battery that lasts five hours. Before we forget, the netbook is available in black and white. Cute! Costs ` 22,500. Spy camera that is just the size of a USB stick The ultimate SAS Digital Spy Cam with a 1.3MP camera and 15-hour record time is probably as good as it gets in the small spy camera department. Its tiny size and simple operation make the Spy Cam ideal for a variety of uses —extreme sports footage (tape it to your helmet), keeping an eye on things when you’re not there (valuables, babysitters) or for undercover footage. About the size of a USB memory stick, the SAS Spy Cam could be hidden in a packet of cigarettes or even inside a chewing gum packet. With up to four hours per charge, it can be played back on your computer or mobile phone. Costs ` 5,400. Instantly print digital photographs The Pogo Instant Photo Printer is small enough to fit in your pocket and it doesn’t need a new ink. That’s because the ink comes on the heat-activated Zink paper, so ink cartridges just aren’t required. What’s more, the prints are smudge proof, water resistant, fade resistant and tear proof. And the paper is sticky backed — leave the backing on if you want a standard photo, peel it off if you want a sticker. Simply send your images from your phone or camera to it either wirelessly via the wonders of Bluetooth or with a USB lead (PictBridge-friendly camera). Less than a minute later, you have a photo. Costs ` 3,600. geeK eMPire ZAHID H. JAVAlI by our corresPondent Illustration by Sakshi Chopra Kumar | Dev Kabir Malik
Transcript of Technologic China stakes claim to India’s geeK eMPire booming
The founders of the Internet sensation filesharing website
The Pirate Bay appeared in court in Stockholm on Sep-tember 28 to appeal against multi-million pound dam-ages and a year-long jail sen-tence. The trial is expected to last until October 15. Of the four, Fredrik Neij (32) and Peter Sunde (32) were present in the Svea Court of Appeal, Stockholm. In April 2009, along with Neij and Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (25) and Carl Lundstroem (50),
were found guilty of having made 33 copyright protected
files accessible for illegal file sharing via Piratebay.org.
Founded in 2003, the web-site is one of the most visited BitTorrent destinations in the world. It offers a search engine for torrents that can be used for file sharing. The site has more than 23 million users across the world. Last year’s court case was seen as a vital and symbolic victory for the movie and music in-dustry. Entertainment com-panies, primarily Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertain-ment, EMI and Columbia Pictures benefited from the damage payments. However, the founders continue to ap-peal in the court.
Over 20 million handsets are sold ever y month, a
quite incredible figure that means India has the largest demand for mobile hand-sets in the world today. The Indian market is also unique for offering different models, ranging from the most basic ones, priced at Rs 1,000, going all the way to fully equipped Smartphones and jewel-crusted devices priced at Rs 2-3 lakh.
And with this growing middle class comes a big-ger disposable income, and with the extra income comes the desire for a better mobile device. Keeping this in mind, the CMAI (Communications and Manufacturing Asso-ciation of India) organised the 8th China International
Mobile Sci-Tech Exhibition, solely for the Indian handset market in Shenzhen, China, last month.
The exhibition hosted mo-bile devices, including pre-cise replicas of sought-after devices like the iPhone 4, Blackberry, Android and Vertu. To a layman, it’s diffi-cult to differentiate these from the real thing, apart from the fact that they don’t cost an arm and a leg. These carbon copy replicas have almost all the features of their ‘original’ counterparts, except, in-stead of carrying a price tag of Rs 30,000 or more, they are available at prices rang-ing from Rs 2,000–5,000. At these prices, a prospec-tive buyer could now own a mobile phone with enough memory to store over 1,000 songs, high resolution cam-eras/video cameras, email cli-
ents, social networking appli-cations, calendar, games and tons of other applications. To put this in perspective, the average price of devices com-prising some of these features
is currently fixed at around Rs 8,000 in India.
Apple popularised the con-cept of mobile applications, and almost all the handsets made today follow Apple’s
lead in making available as many applications, games, utilities and features as pos-sible. With GPRS rates very lowin India, the mobile sub-scriber base has been in-creasingly accessing social networking platforms like Facebook, Orkut and Twit-ter, directly through their mobile phones. In fact, a large number of handsets present at this fair, soon to be intro-duced into the Indian market aggressively, included those with pre-embedded social networking capabilities.
Besides mobile phones, the exhibition also displayed other sought after products soon to be introduced in In-dia at very competitive prices, including Tablet computers. After the enormous success of the iPad, major computing brands around the world are competing to introduce their
own Tablets at the lowest prices with the most features.After Kapil Sibal’s announce-ment about India producing a $35 Tablet in 2011, various Chinese manufacturers dis-played their prototypes, some priced as low as Rs 8,000, to attract Indian retailers.
Various Indian handset manufacturers were present at this exhibition to either take back ideas of what can be produced in India, or di-rectly place orders. President of CMAI, N.K. Goyal said, “In less than a year, India has seen the rise of over 170 handset brands capturing 30 per cent of the entire mar-ket share, overtaking Nokia, Motorola, etc. It is due to the presence of these brands that Indians are able to choose ‘what they want’ from their mobile device today at afford-able prices.”
the sunday guardian 20: supplement to the sunday guardian | 03.10.2010 | new delhi Technologic 33
Jokes from InterWeb
Uncertain future
China stakes claim to India’s booming mobile marketVishal Mehra
Japan recently invented a surprise machine which can quickly detect a thief. Samples were sent to sev-eral continents before mar-keting the product. In North America, 20 thieves were caught in 30 minutes; in South America, 50 thieves were caught in 30 min-utes. In Europe, 25 thieves were caught in 20 minutes. In Africa, 600 thieves were caught in 10 minutes; and in South Asia, the machine was stolen in 5 minutes !
A new blonde employee calls the Help Desk to com-plain that there’s something wrong with her password. No, it’s not the usual caps-lock problem. “The prob-lem is that whenever I type the password, it just shows stars,” she says. “Those as-terisks are to protect you,” the Help Desk technician explains, “so if someone were standing behind you, they wouldn’t be able to read your password.” “Yeah,” she says, “but they show up even when there is no one stand-ing behind me.”
Deep Kalra Founder & CEO of MakeMyTrip.com
Technorati
Deep Kalra is the pioneer in the online travel booking sector in India. In April 2000, he started MakeMyTrip.com from a small office in Okhla, New Delhi. Within a span of 10 years, the popular website spread its operations across more than 20 states in the country. Under his steward-ship, MakeMyTrip has become one of the largest growing online travel company and the largest e-commerce busi-ness in India. An avid traveller with keen entrepreneurial ambitions, Kalra realised early on that the travel industry and the internet had tremendous growth potential if com-bined together. Before MakeMyTrip.com, Kalra served as the vice-president of Business Development at GE Capital. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and a MBA (PGDM) degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is also a founding member of ‘I am Gurgaon’, an NGO focused on the improving the quality of life in Gurgaon.
27
73
Display resolution
Weight
Processor
Internet
Multimedia
Storage
Battery life
Connectivity
Availability
Camera
Display screen
BLACKBERRY TABLET UNVEILEDResearch in Motion unveiled a tablet computer on Monday it hopes will leapfrog Apple’s iPad, highlighting its potential for gaming, media publishing and corporate use
OS
RAM
1024 x 600 pixels
400g
Dual-core 1 Ghz chip
Flash-enabled web browser
3.5mm audio jack, built-inspeaker and mic, 1080p HDvideo, video calling
3MP front, 5MP back
Not specified
Not specified
Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n,pairs through Bluetooth witha BlackBerry device for3G connectivity
2011 (Pricing TBD)
7-inch diagonal, multi-touch
BlackBerry Tablet OS
1 GB
BlackBerry Playbook
1024 x 600 pixels
7-inch diagonal, multi-touch
380g
Single-core 1 Ghz chip
512MB
Android 2.2
Flash-enabled Android browser
3.5mm audio jack, built-inspeaker and mic, 1080p video,video calling
1.3MP front, 3MP back
16GB, 32GB with optionalSD card expansion
7 hrs of use
Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n,3G
October (Pricing TBD)
Samsung Galaxy Tab
1024 x 768 pixels
9.7-inch diagonal, multi-touch
680g (Wi-Fi), 730g (Wi-Fi+3G)
Single-core 1 Ghz chip
iOS3.2
Safari browser, no Flash support
3.5mm audio jack, built-inspeaker and mic, Up to 720pvideo playback
None
16GB, 32GB or 64 GB flash drive
10 hrs of use
Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi b/g/n,3G (for 3G models)
Available (From $499 to $829)
256MB
Apple iPad
Sources: Apple Inc. BlackBerry, Samsung MP: Megapixel GB: Gigabyte TBD: To be determined
GraphicStorySizeArtist
DateReporterResearchCode
RIM/PLAYBOOKRIM/PLAYBOOK15 x 16 cm Chris Inton, Gustavo Cabrera
28 / 09 / 10-Inton, CabreraTEC
© Copyright Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. http://www.reuters.se/media/graphics/
Founders of Pirate Bay will continue appeal in court
Dead Rising 2 is an ac-tion and a survival horror video game. In this game, the player controls Chuck Greene, as he fights the zombies. This violent game-play focuses mainly on us-ing improvised weapons to pave their way through over 7,000 zombies who
are seen onscreen at any one time. Overall, the game has a well refined strategic action game, and has a knack for capturing the eerie spirit of Americana. Interestingly, the player uses food to re-vive the dying partner be-fore his health runs out.
game gearmedia on the net
website of the week
game gear
gadget picks
Dead rising 2
android Tablet launched in India CWg mobile application launched US to expand Net snooping powers Binatone, a UK based man-ufacturer of landline phones and GPS devices, has an-nounced the launch of its Android based tablet in In-dia. The tablet, known as the Home Surf Touch Tablet, comes loaded with Android 1.6 and is quite a sleek looker. It boasts of an 8-inch resistive screen and supports Wi-Fi, 2
GB onboard storage and has 128 MB of RAM. The tablet is powered by an ARM 11 667 MHz processor. While the specs might not be top-of-the-line, you get a decent tab-let for the price — especially when you compare the price of the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, which are expected to cost Rs. 20k in India.
AHMEDABAD: Zoomi, a mobile application that will provide up-to-date latest information on the Commonwealth Games, was launched last week. It has been de-veloped by Smile of India, a knowledge services firm headquartered in Ahmedabad in partnership with KPMG, the
leading global profession-al services firm. "From in-formation on participating Commonwealth nations to photographs and achieve-ments of past Games to
details about Delhi and India to latest and breaking news, the application would have it all in a Rich Visual format," a company spokesman said.
San Francisco: The US government is seeking a dramatic expansion of its power to snoop on Internet traffic in a move that is likely to be copied by many other governments around the world, The New York Times reported. The new regula-tions would require all ser-vices that enable commu-
nication to be "technically capable" of complying with a government-issued wiretap order, the report said. These regulations would cover ev-erything from smartphone service providers like RIM's Blackberry to social net-working and even peer-to-peer messaging systems like Skype. AgEnciES
microsoft patches aSP.NeT flawMicrosoft has released a security bulletin and "out of band" update for a vulner-ability affecting ASP.NET applications. The early analysis on this vulnerability has called it extremely serious, but in MS10-070: Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Infor-mation Disclosure Microsoft
classifies it as "important" rather than "critical." The vulnerability could allow an attacker to view encrypted state on ASP.NET transac-tions. Nearly every version of Windows is listed as af-fected. Initially the update will be available through Microsoft Download Center.
Slim-as-a-supermodel gaming powerhouse
Asus has released over 30 versions of its Eee PC since 2007 and 1201N happens to be the latest and best. Why? Not only because of its 12.1-inch display but also its ultra thin and light form factor. But the best part is that it’s available in 1.6GHz Intel Atom N330 dual core processor and boasts of Nvidia Ion graphics, perfect for gaming and HD-playing. Other specs of this netbook that makes it the best of the series is its 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, WiFi, Bluetooth and a six-cell battery that lasts five hours. Before we forget, the netbook is available in black and white. Cute! Costs ̀ 22,500.
Spy camera that is just the size of a USB stick
The ultimate SAS Digital Spy Cam with a 1.3MP camera and 15-hour record time is probably as good as it gets in the small spy camera department. Its tiny size and simple operation make the Spy Cam ideal for a variety of uses —extreme sports footage (tape it to your helmet), keeping an eye on things when you’re not there (valuables, babysitters) or for undercover footage. About the size of a USB memory stick, the SAS Spy Cam could be hidden in a packet of cigarettes or even inside a chewing gum packet. With up to four hours per charge, it can be played back on your computer or mobile phone. Costs ̀ 5,400.
Instantly print digital photographs
The Pogo Instant Photo Printer is small enough to fit in your pocket and it doesn’t need a new ink. That’s because the ink comes on the heat-activated Zink paper, so ink cartridges just aren’t required. What’s more, the prints are smudge proof, water resistant, fade resistant and tear proof. And the paper is sticky backed — leave the backing on if you want a standard photo, peel it off if you want a sticker. Simply send your images from your phone or camera to it either wirelessly via the wonders of Bluetooth or with a USB lead (PictBridge-friendly camera). Less than a minute later, you have a photo. Costs ̀ 3,600.
geeK eMPireZAHID H. JAVAlI
by our corresPondent
Illustration by Sakshi Chopra Kumar | Dev Kabir Malik
