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Anand Parthasarathy

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Bangalore Feb. 6 At the Consumer Electronics Fair in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, visitors from India were pleasantly surprised to see content from a `desi' television channel streaming forth from a display at one of the stalls.

It was a live demonstration of `Hava', one of the hot new technologies available to customers during the Christmas 2006 season. A small box, the size of a video player, latched on to a TV set in India, `shifted' the contents — in time and place — and enabled a laptop to receive it anywhere in the world, via Internet. Hava, which was being sold in the US under the Pinnacle "PC TV to Go" brand, was the brainchild of the Noida-based development centre Monsoon Multimedia.

This is one of seven such innovative products and processes that will vie for the Innovation Awards 2006, slated to be declared on February 8 during the annual Nasscom summit in Mumbai that opens on February 7.

At the second session of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, 2005, another product of Indian ingenuity drew wide attention — especially from nations that whose language used a non-Roman script. The gesture-based keypad developed at the Bangalore unit of Hewlett Packard's HPLabs overcomes the problem that such scripts have with the QWERTY keyboard designed for Roman scripts such as English. It has already been launched for Indian languages such as Kannada — and is another finalist among over 150 entries this yearA Bangalore company, whose Intellectual Property (IT) regularly pops up in dozens of consumer electronics products worldwide, is Ittiam Systems. Its entries this year are a videophone based on the Internet Protocol and a portable media player-cum recorder... both technologies already available under the hood of many a big brand name in the business. At Las Vegas, partner companies like Texas Instruments helped to reach Ittiam's solutions to a large investor and product manufacturing community.

StrandLife Sciences has a product innovation of its own to offer: Avadis is a comprehensive data mining and predictive platform using a novel algorithm that will be of immense use in drug discovery.

Trend-breaker

The business model adopted by Bharti Airtel where it outsources all its IT-related activity to IBM has been a trend-breaker in Indian corporate practice. It is the first time anywhere in the world that a telecom player has outsourced its entire information needs and the model will vie for the award this year.

The Gurgaon-based Evalueserve offers business intelligence services across a wide industry spectrum — banking, insurance, pharma, chemicals, biotech... Indeed the company claims to have virtually coined the term KPO or Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

From Mumbai, Kale Consultants has been serving some of the top airline and travel players, with its BPO-based platform Revera, and established its brand in this vertical. Its innovative technologies will be on show this week... competing with the other six, for top honours. May the best of them win!

More Stories on : Convergence | Science & Technology

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