Facing The Google-y

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT

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!

Flight Mode!

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT Cafe

So there I was, sitting in a Jet Airways flight frantically scrolling the “Pearl” trackball on a Blackberry Curve, engaged in a fearsome battle between paddle and bricks, when the air hostess tapped my shoulder. “I’m sorry Sir, you have to switch that off”, she says politely. “It’s in flight mode”, I tell her, hoping that I haven’t let the ball fall while looking up. “There’s no such thing as flight mode, Sir”, she tells me knowingly. Politeness can be annoying when combined with ignorance. “But if you’re letting people use laptops, how is this any different? It’s just a small computer”. I’m not giving up easily but she doesn’t seem flustered. “No sir, the ‘waves’ cause the screens in the cockpit to flicker”. Now she’s just making stuff up. When I question her as to what waves exactly, since all the radios (GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) on my phone are off, she pulls out her trump card. “I’m sorry sir, DGCA notification 133, prohibits use of phones, sir”. I give up and put my phone away. It could still have its radios on in my pocket and there’s no way she would know. Just to test the idiocy of the rule, I keep my data card in my laptop switched on throughout my next flight. This makes the laptop work exactly like a phone but no one asks me to turn it off. I’m quite certain that I’m not endangering my co-passengers or the aircraft equipment, because I’ve cross checked with at least three people before boarding this flight. A telecom company CTO, a pilot and a professor of electrical engineering all tell me it’s a big bogey with no scientific basis. The rule itself is archaic and my experience clearly proves that it has no way of being effectively implemented even if it were true.

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The new on-board DTH (or actually shouldn’t it be called DTS ie. Direct-To-Seat?) on Kingfisher Airlines is awesome. Watching live television in the air is quite a kick and even makes long flights bearable. The LCD screens have a very good viewing angle and in fact I was easily able to see the screens of passengers sitting on either side in addition to my own. The brightness and contrast control buttons don’t work and not all channels have equally good reception. There was no disturbance at all on my flight though colleagues tell me that it doesn’t work perfectly in bad weather and they’ve had blackouts on certain flights. Scrolling tickers on news channels are a bit blurred but imminently readable and the pixelation is visible only when you stare hard at something static like a channel logo. The headphones that come in the little kit are supposed to clip onto your ears and start biting the earlobes after about an hour. Some of the frequent flyers around me seemed to be aware of this and were using their own headsets. Overall, the experience gets two thumbs up and is definitely a differentiator. The only annoying part of the experience is when the captain interrupts the TV audio feed to make an important announcement: “Ladies and Gentleman … introducing live TV on Kingfisher …”. Considering every single person on the flight is already tuned into some channel or the other, the timing is awful. Suddenly, a bunch of people burst out laughing. I peer through the seats in front of me, expecting to see them all watching The Great Indian Laughter Challenge. Nope, that’s Yana Gupta giving flight instructions in Hindi. I agree – that’s pretty hilarious!

Social NOTworking ?

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT Cafe

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

iPhone At Last!

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT Cafe

We waited for the “unlocked” piece that would, rest assured, hit the Indian grey market a few days after the iPhone launch in the US. It never came! All that chest thumping in the newspapers from the Palika bazaar and Nehru Place wheeler dealers proved to be an empty boast. This baby was secure and unbreakable. There was only one way to do it – the legal way. We called up TV18’s New York bureau chief, Indira Kannan and asked her if she would buy one, activate it and send it across to us. Luckily Indira’s existing plan was coming to an end and she wanted to switch operators anyway. In the US they have number portability which means she could retain her number even if she changed to AT&T. So she bought it, got it up and running, routed her calls to voicemail and set up a cheap international roaming and dialing plan on it. She packed it, shipped it and sent it. Just to make sure that there would be no customs hassles, we asked her not to send it in the box. It arrived safe and sound.

*****

Suddenly, the geeks at Tech 2.0 are the coolest, most popular people in the office. We’re getting mobbed and manhandled. People are asking us for autographs! Ok, maybe not that last sentence, but the rest is true.

I’ve been reviewing gadgets for half a decade now and never has anything in my hand got the reaction that this gets. Just seeing the joy and wonder on people’s faces when you show them some of the nifty multi-touch tricks, is fantastic. Tech 2.0 Editor, Varun Singh, got to spend a night with it and I’ve pried it outta his hands for a couple of days till the reviewers take over.

I’ve been an iPhone skeptic in the past, but I may just cease to be a naysayer. None of the cool features have any real utility but Apple has never been about pragmatism has it? The sheer “cool” value of flicking your fingers on the screen and “pinching” photographs puts you in another league of user. I’m sure our reviewers will find lots of glitches but the first week preview is a total thumbs up.

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A source at NASSCOM tells me that they’re trying to get Apple founder Steve Jobs to address the big annual summit in February next year. It’s definitely going to be a stretch since Apple has little interest in India. Not only have they refused to officially set up shop in one of the world’s fastest growing markets but they were among the first to pull back tech support from Bangalore.

I suggested that NASSCOM try the emotional route to bringing him here. Jobs, at Stanford’s 2005 convocation, admitted that he used to have his only meal of the week at a Hare Krishna temple. This was when he was hanging around at Reed College for a year, even after dropping out and learning ran dom stuff like calligraphy, which eventually inspired the superb Mac intosh fonts. He then backpacked around India for a bit with a friend before going back to start Apple. And if all that isn’t enough, his spoof online avataar, the consistently hilarious ‘Fake Steve Jobs’ loves saying “Namaste!”

Hack Jobs All Around!

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT Cafe

A recent article in Forbes magazine had me a bit startled when it claimed that India, along with the UK barely accounts for 2% of the world’s cybercrime. “No way”, was my first thought! On examining the article carefully, I came across a sentence that, in my opinion, shredded the hack-job hypothesis – “Researchers at Sophos Labs say they … can roughly identify the host country of malicious software by tracing the default language of the computer on which it was programmed.” That has to be the most flimsy basis ever for such a study! A quick survey of all the computers in my immediate vicinity in office proved me right – almost no one in India, irrespective of operating system used, bothers to change his or her default language from US English to UK. I have no numbers to support this (does anyone?) but overwhelming personal, anecdotal and logical evidence suggests that the Queen’s dialect isn’t the default option on even a fraction on computers in this country. In the same article, NASSCOM’s director of cyber-security praises the legit IT industry for giving folks with computer skills better things to do. This is true to a limited extent, though what is not discussed is that our IT-BPO boom creates an altogether new ecosystem of lucrative “data crime”. The phenomenon is rampant in India, especially in smaller firms but is not defined as cyber crime in this particular survey.

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Memories of covering India’s first high-profile cybercrime – my first major assignment as a hack (as in journo not techie) – are still fresh! It was the most bizarre sequence of events that I’d ever witnessed. For days on end we were briefed that a “hacker” (as in techie not journo) was defacing the Mumbai Police’s Cyber Crime Cell website and taunting the cops of the newly formed division. The way in which the cops who were briefing the press pronounced the name brought visions of a respectable doctor of Maharashtrian origin on the lines of Savarkar, Gavaskar, Dandekar and therefore this Dr. Neyu-kar. It was only when we actually saw a screenshot of the defaced page did we realise that it was someone aping the famous Pentagon hacker who went by the alias of Dr. Nuker as in “nuclear” or as George W would say “nu – killer”. As if that wasn’t comical enough, the culprits were caught by tracing their IP address, not to a particular machine, but a general geographic area and then physically sweeping every cybercafe in the vicinity hoping to get lucky. Lucky the police were though in their enthusiasm, they roughed up one of the two teenage pranksters a bit and he later accused them of torture. Six months later, they were offering the same kids software jobs with the “rehabilitation” tag. The boy who’s arm was allegedly broken wasn’t amused and declined the “offer”. To be fair, the Mumbai Police’s cybercrime wing has come up by leaps and bounds in the five years since the incident. Hell, there was a time when other police stations would transfer cases of computer equipment theft to them. I swear I’m not making that up – a senior cop assured me that it actually happened!

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Some interesting news from the hacker community: Two Indians, Nitin and Vipin Kumar, who run a security consultancy called nvlabs.in were supposed to present at the prestigious and often controversial BlackHat conference in Las Vegas, this past weekend. The duo claimed to have cracked the most widely used, supposedly impenetrable, hardware-based encryption system that powers, among others, Windows Vista’s much hyped advanced security features. The briefing, “TPMkit: Breaking the Legend of [Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Platform Module] and Vista (BitLocker),” was mysteriously withdrawn from the conference without any explanation. I tried contacting the duo who (after asking me to send an encrypted email for safety) politely declined comment as did the event organisers. The Kumars apparently impressed audiences when they presented a different paper on a similar theme at the Amsterdam leg of the Conference series, earlier this year. Online forums are now buzzing with conspiracy theories as to why the “superhack” was mysteriously withdrawn from BlackHat – a conference that has drawn criticism in the past for exposing security vulnerabilities and making them public.

Music To Our Ears

First published in the Hindustan Times (Mumbai edition)

Column in HT Cafe

Steve Jobs has set the cat amongst the pigeons by penning down or rather typing out his thoughts on digital music on his company website. The Apple CEO is convinced that the current regime of selling online music embedded with DRM (Digital Rights Management) software is futile and should be done away with altogether. DRM among other things prevents songs purchased through Apple iTunes or other online stores from being played on all types of players and being shared across computers. Microsoft’s latest Zune player for instance will not even play songs with an older version of Microsoft’s own DRM called “PlaysForSure”. Jobs’ theory is simple. 90% of songs sold on the planet are on CDs, which have no DRM. Apple and other online music sellers are mandated by contract to update their DRM code every time it gets hacked which of late happens nearly every other month. His logic is that it’s futile to try and outwit the hackers while online music growth remains stunted. Moreover, Apple’s internal research shows that barely 3% of all songs on the average iPod are bought online (and therefore DRM protected), while the rest are ripped from CDs. Incidentally ripping songs from your own legally purchased CD onto your own computer is illegal in the UK though not yet in the US and India.

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All the major music labels led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have unanimously rejected Job’s argument. The RIAA says that more DRM not less is the way forward and is cheekily advising Apple to license their DRM technology to more players. Unfortunately the RIAA’s credibility among music fans in general and the digital community in particular is currently at rock bottom. The industry association has been on a trigger-happy binge of suing individual users including children, pensioners, students and housewives. Recently the RIAA sued a few dead people and a family that does not own a computer based on its highly unreliable IP (Internet Protocol) tracking system. It even lost a case to a mother who contested the RIAA’s claim that she was liable for her minor daughter’s downloading activities. The RIAA seems to be in denial about the fundamental problems with the music industry and prefers to treat its customers as thieves. People are willing to pay for their music. It’s the twelve-song CD with eleven trashy numbers that they’re fed up with. If downloading is made easy and reasonable, there’s a high chance that people will not bother figuring out how to get their music free of cost. Hackers on the other hand will easily crack any type of DRM.

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Co-incidentally a long-running case involving Apple and a music company got resolved this week. Apple Corps, the London based record label of The Beatles, settled a three decade old trademark dispute with Jobs’ Apple Computer. However, the case is also legendary because it was inadvertently responsible for one of the biggest goof-ups in television news history. When the BBC wanted to discuss this case during a hearing in May last year, it asked tech pundit Guy Kewney, to come to their studios and offer his expert opinion. At the same time though, Guy Goma, a business graduate from the Congo was waiting in the Beeb reception to interview for an IT job with the venerable broadcaster. The rest as they say is history, as a mix-up resulted in a bewildered Goma being led into the studio, which he apparently thought was part of an elaborate initiation stunt. Only when he was introduced on live television as Guy Kewney did he stick his tongue out on air in horror. He quickly regained his composure though and gamely answered the three questions thrown at him with wonderfully generic responses. The BBC has been trying to get bootlegged clippings of this video removed from the web but they’re freely available on YouTube. Hey! Maybe Guy can do an interview on DRM and end up sounding more credible than the music industry!

Gizmos of the Year 2005!

First posted on Moneycontrol.com

2005 was the year that the world went gizmo crazy – absolutely no two ways about it.

On what basis do I make such a grandstanding statement? Well, we had war, terror, natural disasters, historic mergers, demergers and god forbid reality TV fighting for headline space. Yet among all these cataclysmic events, most of the world seemed obsessed with one question:

Will the next cool device be an i-pod phone or maybe an i-pod video or maybe an i-pod refrigerator? (Ok, I made that last one up).

Gadgets filled all the 10 spots on the Froogle (Google’s price comparison engine) list of most searched items in 2005 and back home, they accounted for most of E-bay India’s revenues with a mobile phone being sold every 8 minutes on the website!

We’ve been tracking the latest tech toys on our weekly program The Tech Show and this week we’re compiling our list of the best gadgets of 2005. Here are our picks:

Desktop Of The Year: Apple iMAC G5
Look ma – no CPU! We had puzzled colleagues in the office figuring out where the rest of the computer was, till we convinced them that the whole thing was one slick unit. The fact Apple’s super new OS Tiger comes pre-installed means that there’s never been a better reason to switch to the world of Macintosh.

Laptop Of The Year: Panasonic Toughbook
Panasonic makes laptops? Since when? Well, actually they corner 75% of the world’s defence market but don’t like to advertise that fact because of Japan’s sensitivities towards indirect profiteering from war. However, the Toughbook’s unbelievable durability – it’s waterproof, fireproof and impact proof – and its incredibly lightweight body won us over.

Phone Of The Year: Sony Ericsson W800i
What swung this one for us was the 2 mega pixel camera, the superb sound quality and headphones, an expandable memory slot, easy drag and drop software and most importantly, the ability to use the music player without switching on the phone, giving it an incredible 20 hours of battery life.

PDA Phone Of The Year: iMate Jasjar
The Palm Treo 650 could have won this category if only Hutch had got it pre-configured with a Push-Email solution. However, they didn’t and thus the Jasjar, in spite of its silly name, wins for sheer versatility – it’s a full-blown MS Windows enabled tablet PC in your pocket. It’s also sold as the O2 XDA Exec or if you’re in the US, the HTC Universal.

Gaming Device Of The Year: Sony PlayStation Portable
This could have been a tough choice had Microsoft officially launched the X-box 360 in India, but Sony’s handheld wonder wins this one hands down. Photos, DVD movies, music, games and even Wi-Fi surfing make this the ultimate all-in-one device minus a phone. The screen quality is superb and the gaming experience is top class.

DigiCam Of The Year: Casio Exilim Z-500
They may not have the legacy of a Kodak, Canon or Olympus but they invented the digital camera and they know what’s important. Staggering battery life – 500 shots on one recharge, Anti-shake technology that actually works, huge LCD screen and a super slim body make this an easy winner for us.

Network Device Of The Year: Maxtor Shared Storage Drive
Home networking is getting more popular as broadband comes into homes with more than one computer. However, most such users don’t enjoy configuring IP addresses. The Maxtor SS drive is a stylish looking, auto-configuring 300GB device at a very decent price. We loved it for the sheer simplicity of installation and use.

Hurricane Ballmer

First published in the December 2004 issue of Mantram

“We need you, we need you, we need you, we want you, we want you, we want you, come on we can do it, yeah baby!”, bellows the 48-year-old as he smacks his fist with the Who’s Who of India Inc looking on, part bemused, part embarrassed but wholly overawed by Steve Ballmer’s theatrics at a CNBC-TV18 event in Mumbai titled ‘Unlocking Innovation’.

That classic football coach chant is what Microsoft execs are subjected to, when they muster up the courage to tell Steve Ballmer that they’re thinking of retiring. They rarely succeed! The Microsoft CEO was responding to a question from a fellow CEO in the audience, who was curious to know what occupies most of Ballmer’s mindshare. Pat came Ballmer’s reply – “People – I always want to know if we’re getting the best people and whether we’re retaining them.”

That’s terrific news for the 1,600 odd people who will soon be joining Microsoft in India over the course of the next year. Ballmer made the big headcount announcement in Hyderabad as he kicked off his India visit by inaugurating a sprawling new campus that would, within the course of a year house 3,200 employees in the India Development Center (IDC) and the Global Delivery Center, India (GDCI).

Already a favorite recruiter on India’s elite engineering campuses, Microsoft won’t have too much difficulty wooing away the country’s best and brightest from local rivals like Infosys, Wipro and TCS. That however didn’t stop Ballmer from meeting the head honchos of those three firms and signing comprehensive strategic tie-ups with them. After all, if Microsoft soon wants to dominate the world’s enterprise software, it better get the guys who’re most likely to be servicing it, acquainted with its inner workings. While this would mean development of .NET competency it obviously stops short of sharing proprietary Windows source code

That holy grail is only being offered to the Indian government– Ballmer flew to Delhi to meet with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and discuss methods of bridging India’s digital divide. The Indian government has been rather gung-ho about Linux and Ballmer was keen to get the government onto the Windows bandwagon by offering a sneak peek at the source code to clarify any doubts about security. Unlike the governments of Brazil, China and Singapore, the Indian government has not yet taken an official stance on using only Open Source platforms for e-governance and Ballmer’s meeting will probably ensure that it stays that way for a while.

Ballmer’s whirlwind India tour culminated in Mumbai where he spoke to an audience of top Indian CEOs. He was introduced by Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and after taking the stage was quick to admit that he wasn’t sure whether either he or Ambani had the right to be addressing the august gathering considering that they were the only two dropouts from their Stanford MBA class. After hearing his charged-up and passionate take on innovation being the cornerstone of Microsoft’s existence, it was difficult to suggest that completing his stint at Stanford would have done him any better.

Top Ten Google Bombs

First published in JAM: Just Another Magazine

TORA TORA TORA
Since everyone seems to be in ‘Top 10 of the year’ mode, here are my Top 10 Google Bombs of all time …
1. Adam Mathes is the creator of the Google Bomb. He started the first Google bombing campaign as a practical joke on his friend Andy Pressman, who would be immortalised on the web with the words ‘talentless hack‘ linking to his site. Pressman’s site no longer exists though and the first match on Google these days is the original article that Mathes wrote on Uber!
2. Key in, ‘French military victories‘ and your first match will take you to a mock Google error page, claiming that “Your search did not match any documents” and asking you whether you meant ‘French Military Defeats’.
3. Searching for ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction‘ in Google will point you to a spoof version of the Microsoft IE error page.
4. Little wonder then that the words ‘miserable failure‘ when typed in Google throw up the official biography of President George W. Bush from the White House website.
5. Indian master blogger Jivha came up with what is probably the first Indian Google bomb. Google for ‘dishrag of india‘ and you would have been directed to the Times of India site. I say ‘would have’ because the bomb no longer works. In fact it points back to Jivha’s original post suggesting that his blog is obviously more popular than his bomb. He’s been kind enough though to leave a screenshot for us.
6. There’s a whole bunch of serious Google bombs out there. One of them wants to link the word Verisign to a webpage protesting against an apparent wrongdoing on the company’s part.
7. Matt Haughey bombed Critical IP, (a hosting company) for selling his WHOIS database information to tele-marketeers. The bomb no longer works though Google still ranks pages saying ‘Critical IP sucks’ amongst its top results!
8. An interesting ‘justice bomb’ is Operation Clambake which hopes to debunk the myths propogated by the Church of ‘Scientology‘.
9. The worst kind of Google bomb is the commercial kind. But since this one seems harmless, we’ll let Brigitte‘s dad be the no.1 Santa Cruz Real Estate page on the web. (Hopefully he’ll start paying one day!)
10. And finally… an ego bomb! New York Times freelancer David Gallagher wants to be the most famous person by that name on the internet.

IITB’s KReSIT: Key to future of Indian IT

First printed in Express Computer

In a nation and industry that’s focused on IT services you hardly hear of companies that dare to be different from the crowd. IIT Bombay’s Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT) is a rare oasis where you’ll find such firms. Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan, Srikanth R P and Stanley Glancy tell you what makes this school so special, and why it is perhaps India’s best ticket to true glory in the global IT scene

As you drive into the IIT Bombay campus in suburban Mumbai you realise that it is the perfect example to prove the adage about lotuses thriving in muddy ponds. The condition of the road outside is a textbook case of all that can go wrong with infrastructure planning, and the pollution and noise doesn’t help. But enter the campus and as a fresh breath of air greets you it seems like you’ve stepped into an oasis.

The lush green environs and sleepy surroundings of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology (KReSIT) hardly give the impression of frantic activity. One just has to reach the fourth floor of this futuristic building however, to witness the future of technology being rewritten by some of the most ingenious young minds in the world. Welcome to the Business Incubator at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB)—the first of its kind in the country.

The Business Incubator idea originally entailed the institute leveraging its renowned academic strength and outstanding industry interface to review business plans submitted by students and pick out those that were conceptually sound and financially viable. The students whose plans were selected were provided with financial and infrastructural support to set up a company that could then work on its products and/or services till it got sufficient funding to move out and make way for the next start-up. The support today includes office space in the Business Incubator, computers and connectivity, and most importantly access to the who’s who of academia and industry to guide these fledgling enterprises.

While the Incubator’s initial location in the Physics Department was makeshift (the KReSIT was initially housed in the Maths department), its beginnings were by no means humble.

Junglee.com founder Rakesh Mathur created history of sorts by funding India’s first campus start-up—Iportia and thus the student entrepreneurship ball was set rolling. Iportia, which later changed its name to Righthalf didn’t exactly take off and after a recent merger with Mathur’s Purple Yogi, now goes by the name of Stratify. Former employee Ketan Pandya, who has just completed his bachelor’s degree from IITB believes that the idea was ahead of its time. “The main concern then was building a user base, which was the currency that VCs dealt in then, rather than actual revenue.” Pandya now works for MyZus, the second campus start-up which met with tremendous success and moved out of the Incubator into its own premises in Powai’s posh Hiranandani Gardens Complex some months ago. MyZus has created cutting edge products in the wireless domain and some of its services have already been implemented by cellular service providers.

Herald Logic and Deus Co Technologies started at around the same time (a few months after MyZus) and made the transition into the new KReSIT building where they are still housed. Herald Logic has been working in the area of reconfigurable software and intelligent enterprise applications. The company headed by Vishal Gupta whose final year project at IITB was the inspiration behind the venture, has developed a host of products and services. That the rest of the world is sitting up to take notice is more than evident. At the last Global Entrepreneurs’ Challenge organised by Stanford University, Herald Logic won the award for the ‘Best Strategy for bringing disruptive technology to the market’ and picked up a cheque for $10,000. The glittering trophy sitting pretty in the office is just the beginning.

Deus Co Technologies on the other hand used a radically different approach. “We decided to adopt an alternative start-up model,” says co-founder Ramashish Bhutada, who was a member of the second batch of M.Tech students to graduate from the KReSIT. “Instead of looking for funding we decided to do some hard core research in computer science for the first two to three years, which is essentially the time frame for a good PhD. The difference however is that a PhD student single-handedly looks at a problem whereas we are a group of people looking at a large number of problems.” While one may think that this approach makes Deus a research group rather than a business start-up in the true sense of the word, the sheer scale of Deus’ ambitions and the fundamental nature of the work being carried out more than justifies the rather long incubation period.

“People say that technology moves fast! That’s absolutely untrue. In the true sense it really doesn’t” says Bhutada whose tremendous passion for the larger issues in the field stands exposed. “In the last four decades of computer science we haven’t been able to create the perfect OS. In the last ten years the only real radical innovation has been the World Wide Web”, he continues. Bhutada contends that unlike the other branches of engineering such as civil, mechanical, electrical, etc., computer science has not got a chance to establish solid engineering foundations. For a large part the commercial application of computer science completely overshadowed its scientific development and as a result almost all the core technologies are yet to be studied thoroughly and perfected.
Kanwal Rekhi (extreme right) and Dr D B Pathak (extreme left) lay the building block for KReSIT

This is precisely the goldmine that Deus plans to excavate now and in the future. Deus is looking to revolutionise the way technology is used in business by developing a layer between existing platforms and applications that will allow one to keep making real-time changes in the system easily, by using extremely user friendly methods such as ‘drag and drop’ for example. They also hope that the complete platform independence and ability to integrate seamlessly with any software will allow companies to combine the presently separate areas of business processing and knowledge management.

The adjoining office has been recently vacated by e-infinitus, who have moved to Pune after securing initial funding from Sicom, the venture cap arm of SIDBI. Set up in October 2001 by final year students of IIT Bombay, Siddarth Tandon and Jayant Bansal, e-infinitus is a rarity in the country’s services intensive software industry, by virtue of being a pure product enterprise. The team has completed work on a new protocol for routers, which will allow ISPs and corporate networks to utilise bandwidth far more efficiently within their existing infrastructure. Both Tandon and Bansal are currently in the US making a pitch for their product that fellow incubator inhabitants tout as a sure-fire winner.

And then you have Powai Labs. Reapan Tikoo, the CEO of Powai Labs, did his Masters in Management from IITB and assembled a team of world class scientists and engineers to form this firm. This newest member of the incubator was selected after a meticulous review of over 200 business plans received by the KReSIT this year.

“The idea, research and product were nearly finished even before we moved into the incubator in April 2002. We will get our funding in the next two months and then move out,” says Tikoo, whose confidence is hardly misplaced considering that just last month he gave a slew of presentations to the bigwigs of the semiconductor industry, including the worldwide head of a European electronics giant. Powai Labs is involved in cutting edge innovation in the field of VLSI technology. Provisional patents are already being filed in the US and Tikoo believes that his team of nine has what it takes to give the major players in the field a run for their money.

Probably the most unusual innovation is occurring in the office of Embedded Robot Technologies (eRT). CEO Randeep Singh was the first ever winner of ‘Yanktriki’—IITB’s unique annual robotics tournament in which robots attempt to outwit, overpower or outperform each other in enthralling techno-combat. Randeep was working on a robotics problem when he realised that vision empowerment would be the next step in making robots more intelligent. An ‘artificial vision software protocol’ became the focus of eRT’s development activities. Initially eRT looked at applications in the toy industry with an eye on the East Asian market, particularly Japan. The business model was simple. A $10 increase in the manufacturing cost of making a toy ‘visually intelligent’ could result in a $100 increase in the selling price. The post-September 11 scenario however, opened up new avenues.

Although eRT is still awaiting funding for their futuristic innovation, Phonologies seems to have no problem on that end. Founded in July 2001 and promoted by Valuepay.com they have an office in South Mumbai along with the one in the Incubator. Phonologies is the first Indian company to integrate VoiceXML and VoIP whilst aiming to be a part of the ‘Voice Web revolution’ by making it possible to access the Internet from any type of phone. Users of this technology will be able to conduct a variety of V-commerce transactions without WAP enabled phones.

“There’s no place like IIT”, says Randeep Singh of eRT with a broad grin on his face. He should know, considering he did his Bachelors and Masters at IITB and is pursuing his PhD whilst running the company. “When I say I’m from IITB and my mentor is Prof D B Phatak, half the pitch is complete”, says Bhutada of Deus. Such is the awesome reputation of the institution and so phenomenal is the networking and reach of its alumni in the industry that getting funding is almost a formality even in the worst of times. “Type microelectronics in Google and you’ll find Dr Madhav Desai’s name right up there amongst the top three in the world”, says Tikoo of Powai Labs who is full of praise for the scientific prowess of his team. “The intellectual environment is sometimes almost too heavy,” claims Bhutada who says that he deliberates with professors at 2 in the morning and advice from experts is readily available. The success of the incubator programme has been phenomenal and all the young entrepreneurs agree that many more are needed all over the country. “The government is sitting pretty with forex reserves. Why? Thanks to software! If they want to continue the trend they have to encourage innovation by supporting ventures such as these,” insists Bhutada. It is rather impossible to disagree. All in all, talking to these future doyens of the tech industry is a heady experience. Not as heady as making a presentation to the CEOs of the world’s top companies, insist these young entrepreneurs.

Bhutada narrates an experience of preparing thoroughly and comprehensively for a major presentation to one of India’s most influential CEOs. “We cracked it through and through. We had answers to all his questions, cornered him on all his arguments and basically proved that we knew exactly what we were talking about. Then he just looked at me and asked, “How old are you?” Bhutada says he grinned sheepishly and replied “Twenty Four”. The CEO stared at him questioningly. Bhutada knew, that for once, he had no retort to offer!