Thursday, March 31, 2011

Ban! Pretty much an un-Gandhian way




It seems here in India, there is a fad, to BAN.

Recently, many state governments banned a book on Gandhi, proclaiming that it has insulting statements on the father of our nation. The Law ministry is even considering changing the law to make such statements a crime! The bureaucrats and politicians who even think of doing this of course don't seem to have an iota of idea what Gandhiji represented.

When I started writing this post, I thought how can anyone even think of such absurd idea a 'ban'. Let's be quite clear: we are a democratic and intellectual society where the word 'ban' and an associated 'authoritarian' behavior of the people in power has absolutely no place. You can never enforce respect towards a person or a nation or a place, it has to come from within. That is but human mind.

I was quite relived to see that I was not alone to have similar feelings, descendants of Gandhi seem to have much more sense towards what to say, than our learned bureaucrats and government.

My only thoughts at the end of this post: I wish, if the respected law ministry were as sensitive to more real issues like that of Dr. Binayak Sen (http://www.binayaksen.net/) than going down the un-Gandhian way of protecting Gandhiji himself, Bharat would be a far better place to live in!

Note: Any view expressed here are solely my personal views, and have nothing to do with my employer or organizations I am associated with.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

HCL Launches ME Tablets

Now, I am not a tablet fan as such, though I do own and heavily use a tablet PC.

But as a mass consumer product, I think, this has a large potential if the price points are right, especially in a market like India, where PC penetration is not that great.

So, I was quite excited almost an year ago when Notion Ink announced their plans to come up with a tablet. And actually delivered couple of months back (http://notionink.wordpress.com/). However, I still don't have a first hand look and feel of it (missed the first pre-order and then the second preorder invite :( ..)

While Notion Ink is quite innovative in what it has designed and continue to do so with their quite open development process, there are other Indian companies that might just get the critical mass in selling tablets, without innovating a lot. Or to say it in other words, provide what a user needs, not necessarily always the "wow" factor.

This is where the news of HCL ME Tablets comes in. And it is not just news, but you can buy the real product online (http://www.hclstore.in/ME_tablet). Of course, this one is not as good in "specs" department as the Notion Ink. But do users really care about specs of a tablet? Steve Jobs wants all of us to believe this, rt? Quite frankly, I think that is true. I don't really care about specs of these devices, if I get a smooth experience and get my job done.

HCL has a history of disrupting the Indian market with low price with pretty high quality products. In fact, my first laptop (or netbook) was from HCL. It was simply the best piece of portable hardware that I could afford back then. And this time around HCL has again come up with a similar strategy. The only difference this time is that in coming months there will be many other players in this space, particularly big Indian mobile manufactures like Micromax.

With all this, I am a bit concerned that NotionInk would actually become a small player, unless they do something radical. Just hope that Rohan is thinking along these lines, or at least reading this post of mine ;-)

Thursday, March 24, 2011

speech, html5 and chrome

Now this is cool (http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/03/talking-to-your-computer-with-html5.html). Putting speech in browser has just reduced dependence on the PC OSes a bit more. What would be more cool is if it could support more than just English.

So now, the ChromeOS is looking more and more complete. Now when is handwriting recognition coming into picture ;)