The Worthy And The Weird

Everytime a foreign IT major takes a peek at India, you know a head-hunters ball is about to begin. Even Bill Gates did not make it any less obvious. But as some of them were about to discover, we turned out to be offering stuff thats more intriguing than IT professionals heads. This one, dear reader, is about technology.

India offering technology? Once you cut through sarcasm as thick as a CIOs glasses, our choice of the worthy and the weird makes sense. When you learn that some of them have been assiduously wooed by IBM and Texas instruments, a lot of that sarcasm erases itself.

 

To make sure we dont offer herbal microprocessors and the like, (and to watch our digital backs, of course) we took a few precautions:

It should be a new technology / trend altogether and not a modified version of an already existing process.

The process should have been patented in India and, if need be, in the international market as well.

The product should have been field / beta tested.

The company should be preferably in the process of a technology tie-up or in the process of marketing its product within the next few months.

Robots that guard, robots the feed

What started as a college project a couple of years back has now transformed Kishore Kumar into a full-fledged technocrat. A student of Bangalore-based Dayanand Engineering College, he developed a robot unit for security against forced entry in restricted premises as a part of his summer project in 1994. Its sturdiness and quick maneuvering capability caught the interest of a few local entrepreneurs. With their sponsorship and a Rs 25,000 funding from his college, Kumar developed a more professional version. And since then there has been no looking back.

Kumar has so far successfully beta-tested two robots the Secu-Wo and the RobotPram which have been passed as commercially viable. Robotech International (India), of which Kumar is the managing director, has been approached by the Robotic wing of IBM, Texas instruments and a couple of Korean giants, go the grapevine. In addition, some Indian companies like Bharat Jyothi Industries and Pyrie Scientific Technologies are keen on having manufacturing tie-ups with Robotech International.

I have not yet decided whether to have a technology tie-up or stick to assembling the whole thing myself while giving the international marketing rights to the global giants, I am keeping my options open, says Kumar.

The Secu-Wo

The Secu-Wo is a light-weight (about 5 kg) robot which occupies a space of about two to two and a half feet. It is fitted with four wheels with a diameter of five inches each. It is basically a security system complete with sensors, two mechanised arms, a camera, a 8085 microprocessor kit, with a vacuum cleaner attachment at the base, a cordless phone and a tape recorder on top. The system is aimed more towards independent homes and bungalows than apartments.

The Secu-Wo can take orders from only those whose voices and photographs it possesses, and it can identify strangers too, says Kumar.

As soon as the gate is opened a sensor signals the Secu-Wo. An electronic voice announces Someone at the gate, please check. Just speak call out your name, and the system will shut up. In case the system is not answered, it issues a warning to the visitor after about 15 to 20 seconds. The pre-recorded warning goes Please wait outside the house'' and this is repeated twice. In case, the person does not heed this, the Secu-Wo positions itself about five feet from the door and its electronic eye focusses and takes a full-length photograph of the intruder. It then issues another warning Please stay where you are; do not move''. If the intruder moves inside, the robot instantly moves back even while it places a call to the local police station. Meanwhile, the robot also sets off a loud siren in the house.

And when it is not fending off intruders, it can vacuum-clean the house at a voice command.

And that is not all that the robot does. It detects the arrival of mail in the mailbox with sensors and can even fetch it. It can even take tea to the living room. The arms of the final field-tested version are made of steel while the rest of the body is made of fibre glass. It has two DC motors and 12 volts rechargeable batteries which can be continuously used for 18 hours. It has also got the optional arrangement of plugging it on to the mains.

Expected cost: Rs 8,000.

The RobotPRAM

The RobotPRAM prototype was field-tested on 18 babies, and one of them was the Karnataka chief minister's grandchild. The pram has a single arm, microphones, can move around on its four or six wheels and comes with a digital temperature controller. It can change the nappy, sing a lullaby, give the baby a bottle, take it for a stroll and keep the baby warm and cosy.

When the child wakes up and cries, the microphones pick up the noise and immediately a lullaby is switched on while the pram gently moves to and fro. If the baby does not quieten down the electronic arm picks up a bottle of milk and brings it close to the baby's mouth. Guided by its electronic eye the arm gently eases the bottle into the babies mouth. After a about a minute, if the eye- sensor combo detects that the baby is not drinking the milk, it pulls away and keeps the baby occupied by jingling some colourful toys. Sensors can even detect a wet bed and change it.

A mini fan made of leather is placed above the pram facing horizontally so that the baby is not exposed to direct air. Once programmed, the fan can switch itself on when the temperature rises.

The whole setup uses up just 12 volts and has rechargeable batteries with plugging on the mains as an optional attachment. The whole setup is priced at a whopping Rs 25,000. As this product is going to be mainly export-oriented, I have incorporated a lot of safety measures which are of international specifications, says Kumar.

Expensive they may be, but there does not seem to be any dearth of buyers. Kumar has already got orders from individual buyers from India and abroad.

WebTV more or less

They say there is nothing more passive than the idiot box. The PC and entertainment on the Web is, on the other hand, a conscious activity. Merging the two together is the kind of thing that WebTV attempted bringing the Web into your living rooms. Well, we in India have already got WebTV up and running sort of.

What you get is stock market information, e-mail and voice mail at minimal cost. Interactive television technology was officially launched on the first of May this year and by the end of the week, the number of people registered crossed 10,000.

Now you can buy and sell on line, get extra information about that movie you wish to watch later in the day and program the now-intelligent TV so that it records the program to be viewed at a later convenient time. The programming is such that in case a change of time of the particular is announced this too taken into consideration, says Tambe.

Telephone directory, up to date arrivals and departures information of flights and trains, the access to facilities and information is thus unlimited.

Organising time that is what this technology will permit, says Mohan Tambe, who heads InterAct Media, the company that indigenously developed the technology. While it allows you to view all your favourite programmes at a convenient time you can also access information from your favourite website.

The infrastructure this technology requires is extremely cost-effective as it piggybacks on the existing cable operators head-end and can be billed centrally. A chois pad (a small telecomputer card based on RISC processor) is attached to the existing cable connection. Another wire from this is connected to the telephone. The keys in the telephone instruments are used for selection 2 is for moving the cursor up, directly below 8 is for down, 6 is for right and 4 is for left and so on.

The chois pad plus the installation amounts to about Rs 8,000. And that is all the investment required at the user-end. The cable-TV operator has to invest in a server amounting to about Rs 1 lakh.

The company has just acquired international patents for this technology. Though Tambe is tight-lipped about the number of people approaching him it is rumoured that apart from US-based Time Warner, a number of Korean and firms based in Singapore are interested in taking up the marketing rights. Back home the Cable Operators Union has shown a keen interest in it.

The question now in everybodys mind is when is the technology likely to hit the homes. We plan to do it cautiously and enter all the metros by the end of the first year of operation, says Tambe.

Worlds smallest multimedia notebook

Thought we would always end up marketing Jap products here? Here is a case of a top Japanese company tying up with an Indian company to sell their machines abroad! Bangalore-based Ncore Technology has developed a multimedia sub-notebook computer, called the Yantra, which at 2.1 Kgs is also the lightest in the world. The Japanese firm, Taisei Engineering, has a tie-up with Ncore to sell the machines through direct mail (a la Dell Computer). The Japanese firm also uses a 100 of these machines in-house already.

The Yantra is a result of two years of hard work and three crores by way of investment. It occupies less than half of a briefcase, has a CD-ROM, a built-in sound blaster, two PCMCIA card slots and a small yet powerful battery which can last for more than three years. Inability to finance long credit periods and the interminable difficulties from customs and export-import laws have however been a long standing problem NCORE had to face.

Since the Comdex show last year and the PC Show in Sydney however things have started to look up. The presence of Anal K Jain, who quit as Sun Microsystems as its country manager, India to head the marketing team at Ncore helped the company to push the Yantra further.

Thus the marketing strategy of the company has changed. As money is a problem we do not aim to go all out into the commercial market,'' says Jain. The groundwork is going to be in addressing the many niche markets that are available. Take the truck fleets, for example, where global positioning systems cannot be generally built into notebooks. That can be dome with the Yantra, however. Similarly, unique peripherals can be built into the Yantra depending upon the requirements.

And this is one of the strengths that the Yantra has. The Yantras new Pentium 166 MHz-based version to be launched next month can incorporate customised features in form of peripherals including a digital signal processor-based 28.8 kbps high speed fax/voice modem complying with v.34 and v.42 compression standards.

Customers approach us directly and we already handle annual orders of 20,000 customised machines, says Jain.

Let your PC make your music

You too can make you own music album, and you dont need a fancy music director for that. A new CD-ROM application software, along with intelligent disc mastering technology, will perfect and polish your compositions with you.

Imagine being able to make professional quality music even though you are very much a novice, with the system helping you to perfect it. This is not simple Karaoke, says Ranganathan, partner, L C Laser Tech. What we have done is to program the system in such a way that it suggests instruments, beats and at times even pauses in the music so that the end product sounds more polished.

In case a novice records a track, during trial runs, the system likens the product to what a professional would have done by way of adding more wavelength (and thereby quality) and asks if it can incorporate it into the music. The user is at liberty to do this selectively or in whole or not at all. Even in case none of the suggested additions are accepted, just before the recording stage, the system polishes a few of the frayed edges and even there, asks whether it can be incorporated. Thus the user gets enough opportunities and help to present a better musical output.

The technology is so novel that the none other than te electronics finat Phillips has expressed interested in it. The global electronics major already has a tie-up with LaserTech. It has attracted a number of buyers in Mumbai and Chennai from recording studios.

The company also has bigger plans. It has adopted this technology in six related products revolving around the CD-ROM industry as well. These include CD-ROM application software development, CD-ROM pre-mastering, disc mastering and replication, CD-R (CD-Recordable) replication and CD-ROM disc drives. Here, it has another tie-up with US-based CDEC Corporation, a $ 25 million company which concentrates on emerging world-wide potential for optical storage media and devices.

The application software has been so integrated with the different sets of hardware that it allows great flexibility and with little modification can be adapted to the varied uses it is put to, says Ranganathan.

The company recorded a turnover of about Rs 40 crore last year even though the tie-up took place in the last quarter and is projecting a 40 per cent growth this year.

Modem upgrade? Add software!

Heres another hot technology. Tomorrow, if VSNL upgrades its modems to 56 Kbps, your 33.6 Kbps modem will be outdated. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Things cant be so bad if you have a modem that can be updated. That is precisely what Ncore Technology Pvt Ltd.. is hoping to do with its its indigenously, developed modem technology to multinational giants. The technology is considered hot in Us and Japan, though there are no products out there so far.

Using the technology, upgrading a modem is as simple as running the new version of the software the manufacturer will provide.

According to Anal Jain, Chief Operating Officer, We hope to make over $ 2 million US selling this software in the next two years.''

The international firms keen for a technology tie-up with Ncore include US-based Texas Instruments and Dialogic Ltd. (the interactive telephone voice response company) and the Japanese-wing of Mitsubishi Corp.The computer design house hopes to generate $ 2 million US by hawking its indigenously, developed modem technology software to multinational giants.

The company has invested about Rs 1 crore for developing this modem technology software. It is expected to revolutionise modem capabilities to the extent of making it intelligent'' or what is termed as a smart modem, a concept currently hot in the United States and Japan.

The smart modem is priced about 10 percent more than an ordinary modem.

Kanchana

Our line-up includes two robots, a Web-TV of sorts, the worlds smallest notecook PC and intelligent modem and music software.