At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.
In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
India-born scientist-CEO K.R. Sridhar has unveiled his “Bloom Box,” a power plant in a box that could eliminate the traditional grid. He provided a sneak peek over the weekend.
Sridhar is the principal co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy. Prior to founding the company, Dr. Sridhar was a professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering as well as Director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Sridhar received his Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering with Honors from the University of Madras, India, as well as his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Below, from The Times of India:
At its heart, Sridhar’s Bloom Box claims to be a game-changing fuel cell device that consists of a stack of ceramic disks coated with secret green and black “inks.” The disks are separated by cheap metal plates. Stacking the ceramic disks into a bread loaf-sized unit, says Sridhar, can produce one kilowatt of electricity, enough to power an American home – or four Indian homes.
The unit can be scaled up, installed anywhere, and be connected to an electrical grid just like you would connect your PC to the Internet. Hydrocarbons such as natural gas or biofuel (stored separately) are pumped into the Bloom Box to produce clean, scaled-up, and reliable electricity. The company says the unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell, although Sridhar admits to some initial, but minor, glitches at some installations.
A hoax it is not, although some are suggesting there is a lot of hype around the launch — somewhat like with that of the Segway transporter that was much bally-hooed but did not live up to its billing. As with Segway, the big catch right now is cost. Large-sized Bloom Boxes of the kind installed at some Silicon Valley campuses costs around $ 700,000 to $ 800,000. Sridhar estimates that a Bloom Box for the residential market could be out within a decade for as little as $3,000 to produce electricity 24/7/365. “In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home,” Sridhar told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. More:
The sneak peak has generated a lot of buzz on the net: See here, here, here
Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:
Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.
The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.
The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.
“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:
It’s rare to find research that simultaneously advances basic science and brings good into people’s lives, but Pawan Sinha’s Project Prakash does precisely that. An investigator of human visual processing, Sinha is interested in how these brain mechanisms develop. For his work, Sinha realized the ideal subjects would be individuals who developed sight after blindness. Since he could not ethically create such an experimental population, he had to “rely on natural experiments” — children born blind, but who recovered their vision.
Sinha found these subjects in his native India, which has the world’s highest number of blind children — more than one million. They are victims of Vitamin A deficiency, congenital cataracts, and absent or atrocious medical care. But salient to Sinha’s research, many of these blind children could be treated. He glimpsed a humanitarian and scientific opportunity, and Project Prakash (Sanskrit for light) was born. More:
A 2008 image of an online cartoon of Savita Bhabhi.
What does Savita Bhabhi—the sari-clad Internet porn star—have to do with Google’s threat to leave China?
For Indian companies, potentially a lot.
Savita, of course, is the voluptuous cartoon character who looks like a cross between reality television star Rakhi Sawant and Veronica Lodge of the Archie Comic book series. There’s nothing subtle about Savita—although she certainly tries.
“I’m going to take a shower! You should also change out of those wet clothes,” she greeted a neighbor in a November episode, for example. As expected, the two end up together in the shower. The illustrations are explicit, the dialogue laughably simple: “Oh that feels so…” or “Oh I’m going to…”
In June, the Indian government banned her. Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the ministry of communications and technology, says the decision was driven by a complaint received from a women’s group in Maharashtra. He did not know which one. More:
Click here to read India’s tech minister’s take on Google, China
In an interview with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24×7’s Walk the Talk. From TheIndian Express:
Tell us about your journey in science — you started off as a physicist.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: I originally thought I might go to medical school. And I got admitted to the Baroda Medical College , but I also appeared for the National Science Talent exam. That was at the encouragement of my mother. I made a deal with my father — that if I got the scholarship, then you shouldn’t force me to do anything. He wanted me to be a doctor. I got the scholarship, and while he was away, I transferred my admission from medical college to study physics. The clerk thought I’d made a mistake, and I actually meant the other way round.
For our generation, the first choice was medicine. Next was engineering. If you failed in both, you went for the IAS.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan: One thing that motivated me was that a group of professors, some of whom had come back from the US, had completely modernised the curriculum. 30 years later, my son studied basically the same curriculum at Harvard. So that was a motivation for me to go into physics. Somewhere along the line I realised that I was not going to be a good physicist. I would just be doing some boring calculations and not have any real insight. I believe physics is on a difficult plane, because to make truly fundamental breakthroughs in physics is very hard now. At the same time, molecular biology was blossoming. It seemed every week there was an important discovery being made. More:
It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.
A Guardian investigation has discovered that several internet companies have quietly introduced filters to prevent Indian users from accessing sexual content.
The Yahoo search engine and Flickr photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo) altered their sites earlier this month to prevent users in India from switching off the safe-search facility. The block also applies to users in Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea.
Microsoft has also barred Indian users of its Bing search engine from searching for sexual content. Users who do try to search for sexual material receive a notice informing them that “your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content”.
The clampdown is understood to be in response to recent changes to India’s Information Technology Act of 2000, which bans the publication of pornographic material. More:
Six days a week in the wee hours of the morning, Saswati Patnaik logs into her home computer.
The homemaker — and tutor for a Bangalore company called TutorVista — rises early to help American high school students write English term papers, prepare S.A.T. essays or finish homework assignments.
Outsourcing, of course, started as a way for American companies to lower costs by shifting work to cheaper locations. After nearly two decades, that practice has become so mainstream that hundreds of U.S. businesses — from Wall Street banks to law firms, architects and others — routinely outsource to India.
But now a growing number of individual Americans are following in the footsteps of businesses — and outsourcing homework.
For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour. More:
Pranali Kalbhor stands on her toes and peers into the little box outside her father’s kirana store. Then, she presses the green button on the box like she has seen her father do, clears her voice and asks in Marathi: “Bharatache pahile pradhanmantri kon (Who was the first Prime Minister of India)?” The voice at the other end says “Jawaharlal Nehru” and Pranali preens. The nine-year-old’s teacher had asked the class to find the answer to the question and now she knows.
In Loni village in Maharashtra, where Pranali is from, no child would have Googled the answer to that. The village belongs to that part of the world that isn’t wired to the internet; it’s where the ‘World Wide Web’ sounds like a boastful misnomer. It’s for places like Loni that Rose Shuman, a social entrepreneur, thought up the idea of the Question Box—the kind that Prabali spoke into—as a way to empower people with information. The Question Box is a project of Open Mind, a California-based non-profit venture of which Shuman is CEO. Open Mind and its little boxes have travelled quite a bit ever since they made their debut in India in 2007. Apart from two boxes in Pune district, Shuman has taken the service to two rural communities in Uganda. More:
Many Indians bought their first mobile phones before they had their first experiences with personal computers. Pranav Mistry thinks that most of them might also skip keyboards and mice and go straight to more intuitive and interactive interfaces.
Pranav Mistry, speaking at the TEDIndia conference. Photo: TED
Mr. Mistry, a 28-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, demonstrated what one such interface might look like at the TEDIndia conference taking place this week in Mysore, India, about three hours west of Bangalore.
He calls it SixthSense, and it uses a camera and projector brought together in a pendant that is worn around the neck.
His prototype, and the software that powers it, works with smartphones and turns walls, sheets of paper and other surfaces into screens for, say, browsing the Web. The camera translates gestures into commands — for example, you can hold up both your hands to frame a scene and flick your thumb to take a picture. Aim the device at an airplane boarding pass and the projector flashes the status of your upcoming flight. Mr. Mistry even demonstrated a clever way to copy and paste text from a printed page. More:
Scientists have long dreamed about turning thorium – which is less radioactive and produces less nuclear waste than uranium – into an alternative fuel for nuclear energy. From the New York Times:
India has been making advances in the field of thorium-based fuels, working to design and develop a prototype for an atomic reactor using thorium and low-enriched uranium.
The country has a long-term objective goal of becoming energy-independent based on its vast thorium resources, Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, said in a speech in Vienna in September.
Dr. Raja said that India’s new thorium reactor does not use an accelerator. Instead, it is a fast-breeder reactor and neutrons are produced by a plutonium core rather than an accelerator.
“The advantage of using an accelerator is that if something goes wrong, we can switch it off,” Dr. Raja said. Accelerator-based systems operate at subcriticality, which means they can produce fission without achieving a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. More:
Below, from World Nuclear News:
India has announced intentions to export power reactors to other nations and is developing an advanced design for that purpose. The head of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, announced yesterday in Vienna a special version of the forthcoming Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) adapted to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. More:
Sujoy Guha, a biomedical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, believes that the most critical problems are a result of artificial hearts attempting to mimic the real thing.
The human heart has four chambers, but only the left ventricle is responsible for building the pressure that moves blood around the body. Depending on one chamber to do the hard work places this part of an artificial heart under enormous strain.
Dr Guha likens the process to trying to scale a four-foot rise in just one bound. “Do it too often and your knees will give way,” he said. “Much better to use a series of small steps.”
The sudden build-up of pressure inside conventional artificial hearts can also damage blood cells, Dr Guha said. This can lead to clotting and strokes, and means that patients must be given anti-coagulants, which place them at risk of severe bleeding. More:
Can a new mobile phone service in rural India help promote economic empowerment? From Wall Street Journal:
It’s easy to see why the fishermen of the southern Indian state of Kerala captured the attention of a Harvard economist when they began using mobile phones a few years ago to track prices in the markets where they sold their catch of the day. Observing how these devices can be used to promote economic growth, Robert Jensen wrote in a 2007 paper titled, “The Visible Hand(set): Mobile Phones and Market Performance in South Indian Fisheries — The Micro and Mackerel Economics of Information,” that “before mobile phones, deciding which [market] would offer the best price was sheer guesswork.” With mobile phones, however, suddenly it became an information-based decision. What’s more, noted Jensen (who is currently at Brown University in Rhode Island), “it’s not a zero-sum trade-off.” The fishermen’s customers benefitted from lower prices and greater choice, and there was less waste since the fishermen could easily identify the villages that would have the greatest demand for their fish each day.
Now Jensen’s “visible handset” is reaching further into rural India. Following a nationwide launch this summer of Nokia Life Tools (NLT), India’s farmers can use their mobile phones to access tailored information to help them grow, harvest and sell their crops and manage their livestock. “There is no reason why farmers should not be as successful as fishermen,” says Ravi Bapna, associate professor of information systems at the Carlson School of Management in Minnesota and executive director of the Centre for Information Technology and the Networked Economy at Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (ISB).
Consider Ravindra Shinde, a farmer in Magardhokada, a village in the Nagpur district of Maharashtra. When he recently harvested 125 quintal (a quintal is 100 kilograms) of soybeans and was about to take the crop to market, the price was $32 a quintal. But then he received a message on his handset that soybean production in the U.S. and Argentina had fallen, so he held back and later sold his crop for $48 a quintal. More:
A computer scientist is helping to uncover the secrets of the inscribed symbols of the Indus. David Zax has the story in the Smithsonian.
The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive society of its time. At its height, it encompassed an area of more than half a million square miles centered on what is today the India-Pakistan border. Remnants of the Indus have been found as far north as the Himalayas and as far south as Mumbai. It was the earliest known urban culture of the subcontinent and it boasted two large cities, one at Harappa and one at Mohenjo-daro. Yet despite its size and longevity, and despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations, much about the Indus remains shrouded in mystery. more
Graham Bowley in the New York Times. Bowley is writing a book about the 2008 accident on K2 that left 11 climbers dead:
At midnight one evening earlier this month, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.
My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes – to get a taste, if not a full draught, of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.
K2, which towers 28,251 feet above the border between Pakistan and China like an almost perfect white pyramid, is considered one of the most beautiful but also one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. By the opening of this climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered its summit and 77 had died trying.
But this year, just reaching the mountain had become perilous. I had to travel, in a minibus that felt like a bubble, on a long and treacherous road that skirted Pakistan’s Swat Valley. There, at that moment, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban were fighting for control, making the lowlands south of K2 another of the most hazardous places on Earth. More:
As part of India’s race to send a man into space by 2015, a team of military scientists has been set a particularly tricky mission: to develop a curry fit for orbit.
Last month India approved the £1.1 billion manned mission, and it wants to give its astronauts familiar foods. The scientists face several hurdles, according to A. S. Bawa, the director of the Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL), which is tackling the task.
“Curry tends to be spicy, high in fat content and uses many ingredients; all these factors present significant challenges,” he told The Times. “We cannot afford the stomach of an astronaut to be strained.”
This is mind-boggling. Way ahead of what you saw in “Minority Report.”
TED says “Pranav Mistry is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.”
Hear the applause — and watch the standing ovation — when Pattie Maes, associate professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences, introduces Pranav during her fascinating talk.
Pranav Mistry is a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. He received my Master in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, Master of Design from IIT Bombay. He is from Palanpur in Gujarat.
Two IIT / Stanford alumni, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, set up a search engine, Kosmix. From The New York Times:
Kosmix, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.
As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It’s because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.
“Search does what it does well, very well,” Mr. Harinarayan said. “I don’t think we can ever compete with that.” Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to “tell me more about something,” he said.
Tiger scientist Ullas Karanth, working with the Lex Hiby of Conservation Limited and a team of scientists, has created a new software which can identify tigers by their unique stripe pattern, a first in tiger science. “The method of recognising a tiger by its pugmark has no efficacy and is prone to error. The new software has pattern recognition which can help match two photos of a tiger and identify individual animals,” Karanth says.
The software will also plug a loophole in the present system: identifying where a poached tiger originated from. “This software will be very helpful in long term research, and it will also help in identifying where a poached tiger was poached from provided we have an existing picture of the animal,” he says. “The software can be downloaded for use by anyone, and is currently being used in Karnataka,” he says. The team is now working on a spot identification pattern for leopards.
A few days ago a top Indian official proudly announced that the government would unveil a $10 educational laptop that will have 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, expandable hardware, and operate on just two watts of power. This, they added. would be India’s answer to Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop. The promised “laptop” was to be unveiled in the temple town of Tirupathi on Tuesday, February 3. [Read that story here]
This photo of the "laptop" was projected on a screen. (Courtesy The Hindu)
The much-touted laptop for the masses said to have been built by students of Vellore Institute of Technology that would cost a mere Rs 500 actually turned out to be only a computing device.
When is a laptop not a laptop? When it’s introduced by Indian education officials, apparently. The buzz and hype surrounding the Indian Education Ministry’s breathless announcement last week that it would be unveiling a $10 laptop aimed at the poor fizzled out like a wet firecracker Tuesday evening when officials finally debuted the device.
The rest of the laptop remains a mystery, however. Key tech specs such screen size, processor, storage, and battery life weren’t released, and we’ve yet to see an official photo of the vaporous hardware.
And Fast Company has reasons why “it is a load of hype“:
And by touting it as “the world’s cheapest laptop,” the Indian media stirred up a megaton of fuss. Is it even possible that “laptop” was an inappropriately misleading piece of translation?
The Hindu story was headlined “Ultra-low-cost access device introduced”:
The Ministry of Human Resource Development unveiled here on Tuesday what has been tagged as an “ultra low-cost” computing-cum-access device that can “make wonders” in the dissemination of education to the remotest corners of India.
Asian Window wonders who caused the hype, and why.
Skilled foreign workers in California’s Silicon Valley are increasingly getting caught in rounds of layoffs. From The Guardian:
California's Silicon Valley
It’s a small number compared with the layoffs of H-1B visa holders during the dot-com crash. But the downturn has sent a wave of concern through the community of immigrant workers who hold the visa, which companies use to hire skilled non-citizens.
Though there is no official tally of visa holders who have been laid off, “It’s happening every day,” said San Jose, California immigration lawyer Indu Liladhar-Hathi.
“If they don’t have work, they’re in trouble,” said Gabriel Jack, also a San Jose immigration lawyer. “They’ve got to get out” of the country, he said. “That’s the toughest part about being an H-1B.”
The veteran head of India’s largest IT outsourcing group Tata Consultancy Services, Subramanian Ramadorai, is trying to ease his clients’ worries after the Satyam scandal, writes Joe Leahy in The Financial Times:
Subramanian Ramadorai and his wife Mala like to show off the garden of their holiday house in Khandala, a lush hill station two hours’ drive from Mumbai.
Mr Ramadorai, head of India’s biggest information technology outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, points out the vegetable garden at one end in which he flexes his green fingers from time to time – that is, when it is not being raided by marauding monkeys.
On first inspection, the couple’s elegant home, with expansive balconies positioned to take in views of the nearby mountain peaks, could hardly be further from the high-tech, hectic world of TCS. The Mumbai-based software outsourcing group is one of India’s first true multinationals, with operations spanning 42 countries.
On February 3, the Indian government will unveil a $10 educational laptop. It will have 2GB of RAM, Wi-Fi and expandable hardware, and operate on just two watts of power.
From The Times of India:
The $10 laptop has come out of the drawing board stage due to work put in by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras and involvement of PSUs like Semiconductor Complex. “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down,” R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said. More:
From Fast Company:
The $10 laptop is a direct response to the MIT-developed nonprofit One Laptop Per Child program, that was viewed as grossly expensive in India. The OLPC devices cost about $100 each, but “hidden costs” bring that price up to around $200. OLPC has also been a victim of its own poor strategy, evidenced by recent layoffs and a failure to secure donations and orders in 2008. More:
New Delhi: How did B. Ramalinga Raju, the chairman of one of India’s largest information technology companies, carry out the biggest financial fraud in this country’s history? Apparently it does take a village.
And although the billion-dollar fraud at Satyam has been called this country’s Enron, an examination of the company’s accounting suggests the scandal may more closely resemble the fraud cases at HealthSouth and Peregrine Software.
A little over two weeks ago, Raju confessed to padding the company’s balance sheet by $1 billion in cash. But investigators now suspect he was less forthcoming than it first appeared.
“It is with deep regret, and tremendous burden that I am carrying on my conscience, that I would like to bring the following facts to your notice.”
Thus begins, in calm but painful fashion, one of the most extraordinary corporate confessions ever written, a letter sent Wednesday from B. Ramilinga Raju, the founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services, to the company’s board.
Among the startling facts that Raju proceeds to disclose is that most of the cash on the company’s balance sheet does not exist, that Satyam’s revenue has been overstated for years, and that its real profit for the quarter that ended Sept. 30 was only $12.5 million – rather than the $136 million the company had reported to investors.
Raju, in other words, had been cooking the books.
Satyam is a company I had been reading a lot about in the business papers during my recent trip to India. Raju, 54, founded the company 21 years ago, and turned it into what appeared to be one of India’s glittering technology success stories, a consulting and outsourcing powerhouse that rivaled the likes of Infosys and WiPro, with 53,000 employees, and 185 Fortune 500 companies among its roster of clients.
The BJP’s 83-year-old prime minister-in-waiting, L.K. Advani starts blogging in an attempt to reach out to a younger, more Net savvy audience ahead of this year’s summer national election. Check out the site here and tell us what you think. Meanwhile, Liz Mathew and Asit Ranjan Mishra have the story in Mint.
Two blogposts in three days—one on spirituality and the other on technology— have launched Lal Krishna Advani, the 81-year-old prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), into blogosphere, in the run up to general elections that have to be held before May.
In his first post, Advani said he had launched the blog after accepting “the compelling logic” of his “younger colleagues” who told him that “a political portal without a blog is like a letter without a signature”. The blog (blog.lkadvani.in) is part of a portal (lkadvani.in) created by the BJP.
On the investor page of Satyam Computer Services’ website on Wednesday was a box announcing results for the quarter ended September.
The box, which had not been changed since before the scandal began, kicked off with a bullish introduction from B Ramalinga Raju, the founder and now former chairman of the country’s fourth largest software group.
“I am pleased to announce a better-than-guided performance for the second quarter of fiscal year 2009,” Mr Raju said. “We achieved this in a challenging global macroeconomic environment.”
In fact, by Mr Raju’s own admission on Wednesday, the company achieved this by rigging the accounts from top to bottom – and not just in September but over the past several years. In the process he perpetrated a fraud so large, complex, and brazen that Indian business people are already calling it the country’s “Enron”.
Less than a month ago, B Ramalinga Raju, founder of Satyam Computer Services, was a regular fixture at India’s most prestigious corporate events.
The man who on Wednesday admitted to falsifying his company’s books to the tune of more than $1bn, in 2007 won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for building his information technology group into an enterprise employing more than 50,000 people.
As part of IBM's pilot project in Andhra Pradesh, India, a mechanic uses his mobile phone to create his audio website.
How cool would it be to surf the Internet by hearing it?
Researchers at the International Business Machines (IBM) India research laboratory are working on a phone-based Internet where even illiterates could create websites, link to and access information on others’ sites, through a series of voice commands, using a basic phone.
Amit Nanavati, a senior scientist at the lab and one of the lead contributors to the project, envisions the World Wide Telecom Web, a virtual mesh of so-called voicesites akin to the World Wide Web.
Dialling these voicesites is akin to calling a telephone company to download the latest ringtone. An automated voice instructs you to push buttons, or speak certain words that springboard you to various menus.
The globalization of the Web means that companies have to find ways to reach out to consumers in their native languages, a costly and time-consuming endeavor. From the New York Times:
Google workers in Bangalore worked on Indian language script. NYTimes
The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States.
The globalization of the Web has inspired entrepreneurs like Ram Prakash Hanumanthappa, an engineer from outside Bangalore, India. Mr. Ram Prakash learned English as a teenager, but he still prefers to express himself to friends and family members in his native Kannada. But using Kannada on the Web involves computer keyboard maps that even Mr. Ram Prakash finds challenging to learn.
So in 2006 he developed Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. Bloggers and authors rave about the service, which has attracted interest from the cellphone maker Nokia and the attention of Google Inc., which has since introduced its own transliteration tool.
