Dell notebooks will be available in retail stores in India for the first time, the company said Tuesday.
The company hinted that it would make this move last week, saying it planned to increase its presence in China and India, two of the world's biggest emerging markets for computers. Dell already has a relationship with one of China's largest retail chains, Gome.
Some Inspiron notebooks will be sold through Indian retailer Croma.
(Credit: Dell)In the announcement, Dell said it plans to offer Inspiron desktops and notebooks, and XPS notebooks through Indian electronics outlet Croma. Dell has a presence in India, but prior to this announcement, only via direct sales channels where customers could call or order a PC online.
The move to make its PC available in retail stores follows a strategy the company began laying out almost a year ago when it first announced it would offer some PCs through Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. Since then the Texas PC maker has added U.K. electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse, Bic Camera in Japan, Gome in China, Staples, and Best Buy.
(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)
As Sony continues to search for the right formula to reclaim its crown in music-playing electronics, one of its newest products may be taking a cue from its roots: the portable radio.
Sony Ericsson is coming out with an attractive new line of phones later this year that include built-in stereo speakers and radios, as well as some unremarkable camera and Bluetooth features. Unfortunately, the radio doesn't seem to receive digital broadcasts--it's just a standard AM/FM, as this is a low-end handset destined for India and other emerging markets.
(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)
That's really too bad, because portable digital radios seem to be going through something of renaissance where design is concerned, especially in Europe, with some resembling transistor models from the '60s--an era that was the equivalent of Sony's Golden Age of Radio.
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OLPC)
With the dust-up this week about Intel leaving the fold of OLPC, it got me to thinking: Will One Laptop Per Child become the TiVo of PCs for emerging markets? In other words, they spark the revolution but gain relatively little from it.
TiVo of course almost single-handidly created the DVR category and market. Their technology was very well executed, they created a user experience that is still unparalleled in terms of ease and joy of use, and with continual roll-out of innovative capabilities that kept stretching the definition of the product.
But ultimately their business model proved insufficient to the task of dominating the category that they had created, and the superior user experience and features were not enough to compete with the "good enough" offerings sold with monthly subscriptions from cable and satellite providers. If "great design" were all that mattered in making a product succeed, by all rights TiVo would own the DVR market, but sadly that is not the case. The fast followers have largely taken over the market.
OLPC has many of the same traits: Tightly integrated user experience, innovative design and features, and a rather shaky business model that is hard to see how it will scale well. Ultimately OLPC's legacy is likely to be similar to TiVo's too: it sparked the market and brought attention to it in a high profile way. But others with more clout, better understanding of the business imperatives, and the distribution and manufacturing muscle to back it up will in the long term come to dominate. Creating a platform of ingredients, rather than trying to be the all-in-one marquee solution, is probably going to be the winning strategy, as it has been with DVRs.
OLPC has had partnerships to help build out their capabilities, but the bickering as described by Charles Cooper is emblematic of the strains that occurred with TiVo and its early service provider partners. There is the dance of each wanting to dominate, and each waiting for the tipping point when it makes more sense to go it alone. In OLPC's case, as with much of the effort's history, it is happening embarrassingly publicly.
Let's hope that these fast-followers don't take the lazy way out and just sell cheap PC's, but instead design them based on a rich and deep understanding of the cultural needs of the children, teachers and schools who will use them. Ideally these will appear out of the cultures themselves (similar perhaps to the Asus eee PC), and given the globalization of design and engineering capabilities there's no reason why that couldn't happen.
The Solar Turbine Group is trying to bring refrigeration to emerging nations by harnessing the power of the sun.
The organization, which consists largely of MIT alumni, has devised a solar thermal generator that can be brought to market for $12,000 or less. A typical system can generate 600 watts of electricity or 20 kilowatts of energy for heating and cooling, according to Sam White, director for STG. The same system can also produce both at the same time, albeit less of each.
Parabolic mirror for capturing the sun
(Credit: Solar Turbine Group)Like other solar thermal systems, STG uses mirrors. Mirrors concentrate heat from the sun onto a tube filled with a liquid (in this case glycol). The heat from the liquid can then be used in two ways. One, the heat can be transferred to another liquid. The second liquid gets vaporized and ultimately gets used to turn a turbine to create electricity.
Two, heat from the glycol can be used to boil refrigerant.
Although many villages in emerging nations don't have electricity, a lack of refrigeration is perhaps a more dire problem. Without refrigeration, food-borne diseases spread more rapidly. Farmers also can't store their crops in hopes of getting a better price, noted White. Thus, something like this could help improve health and local economies.
One reason the Northern Hemisphere (in my mind) moved ahead of the Southern Hemisphere is that the people there had to only figure out heating, a relatively straightforward process, rather than cooling. (I came up with that idea one day in Malaysia after walking into an air-conditioned Burger King after four hours in the midday sun.)
Hawaii's Sopogy is marketing similar devices in developed countries.
The company has installed a few prototypes in Lesotho and wants to put some in India. What has the group learned? That they have to show locals applications where and how the generator can be used. Locals just don't come up with the ideas on their own at first. "That was probably the most useful insight," he said.
The low cost comes in part because many of the parts required to build one of its solar generators are actually old car parts, White said. There's another problem solved: putting salvage to good use.
It's taken 27 years to reach 1 billion PCs in use, and market researchers say it will take only five to reach the next billion.
Forrester Research is set to release a report Monday titled, "Worldwide PC Adoption Forecast to 2015," saying that many of those next billion will be used by first-time PC users in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India and China. At least 775 million new PCs will be in use in those countries by 2015, according to Forrester.
Not only is access to computers beneficial to those users, it also will represent a big bump in sales for PC manufacturers and sellers. Though the computer industry can still profit from selling replacement machines to existing users, the big money to be made is in the far greater number of users who have never owned one.
There are, of course, drawbacks in entering new markets, the report warns. Computer sellers in mature markets can count on a fairly predictable cycle of PC buying, but untapped markets are hardly as predictable and vendors will likely need to work together to scale production appropriately over the next decade, says Forrester.
Additionally, at least part of the bump in PC ownership and use will be due to programs like One Laptop Per Child, Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, Intel's World Ahead, and AMD's 50X15, which aim to bring low-cost computing to underprivileged students and developing countries.
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