india

Small products, big innovation: The dawn of a nano age?

Europe loves the VW Beetle, the Renault Twingo, and the Smart. The U.S. has the Mini and will finally get the Smart, too. And recently India proudly presented the spiritual successor to all of these--the $2,500 Tata Nano, a "people's car" that is widely gushed about, not only for its surprisingly slick design but also for its innovations.

In recent years, ecoconcerns, design savvy, and an (urban) willingness to quest for practicality have fostered the trend toward specialized cars that are as small as the niches they serve. While the idea of a small car … Read more

Tata Nano: The Indian Model-T

99 years after the Ford Model T, the Tata Nano has been announced in India for 100,000 rupees, or about $2500. And you know what? It looks amazingly good. I was completely expecting a Yugo ugly box, but you could drop this 10 foot long car into an urban street in Europe (the most competitive subcompact market on the planet) and it would fit right in. It looks amazingly refined and interesting - heck, it looks better than budget models selling for many times the price from most mainstream manufacturers.

And they have a website that is fairly Web … Read more

XO laptop gives 9-year-old unexpected powers

On Thursday BBC News gave us a child's view of the $100 laptop. The article reads like a techie version of Jim Carrey's breakout movie The Mask, with Rufus Cellan-Jones as the star. The laptop, which came by way of Nigeria, unleashes incredible intuition and abilities in young Cellan-Jones:… Read more

Would you pay more for better service?

I used to think customer service and technical support were givens: you either did it well or failed in business. After all, if you don't support your customers, what have you got?

Now I'm not so sure. The multiyear trend of outsourcing service calls--primarily to India--seems to have consumers endlessly frustrated. The big question is: does it matter?

Conventional wisdom says we're frustrated because American jobs are being outsourced. But anecdotal evidence from my own personal focus group suggests that we may have gotten over the outsourcing thing, only to hit a snag on the support itself not being up to snuff.… Read more

Keyloggers to be installed at Indian cybercafes

The debate between personal privacy and national security continues to rage on, but privacy advocates in India have recently been dealt a blow with the news that keyloggers will be installed in the approximately 500 Internet cafes serving the city of Mumbai. According to a report in today's Ars Technica, "cybercafe owners must agree to the installation of the software or else they will lose their licenses." Given that terrorists seek to hide their identities and are known to frequent Internet cafes in order to stay anonymous, the government hopes to thwart terrorism by monitoring computer activities in the cafes.

Vijay Mukhi, the president of India's Foundation for Information Security and Technology, defends the decision to install keyloggers stating, "The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screenshots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data. The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter which part of the world they operate from. This is the only way to patrol the Net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age." But will such surveillance practices actually stop terrorism or will they just leave everyday citizens feeling uncomfortable using Mumbai's cybercafes?

… Read more

The world's fastest-growing economies reject Microsoft

First it was China. Now India and Brazil. The rout of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) standardization efforts is now essentially complete. When the world's fastest growing economies reject Microsoft, Microsoft has a problem.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about India's and Brazil's separate rejections of Microsoft's attempts to standardize its Open Office XML. Microsoft is holding out hope that if it resolves all 200 of India's complaints with its submission, it will have OOXML approved.

Yes, but this largely misses the point.… Read more

India aims for $10 laptop

It sounds too good to be true, but the Human Resources Development ministry in India is trying to get engineers to devise a $10 laptop.

So far, the ministry is looking at two different designs: one from an engineering student at the Vellore Institute of Technology and another from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, according to the Times of India. (The Institute of Science, by the way, is not the colleges that are part of the Indian Institute of Technology. The Institute of Science is a grad school. Out of over 100,000 annual applications, it takes about … Read more