Aakash 2 $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate billions and transform computing as we know it, Christopher Mims -- Nell software teaching poor kids everything...: Rich Murray 2012.11.12

[Rich Murray-2]

Aakash 2 $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate
billions and transform computing as we know it, Christopher Mims --
Nell software teaches poor kids everything...: Rich Murray 2012.11.12
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/11/aakash-2-20-tablet-from-india-could.html


http://qz.com/26244/how-a-20-tablet-from-india-could-finish-off-pc-makers-educate-billions-and-transform-computing-as-we-know-it/

Aakash 2
How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate
billions and transform computing as we know it
By Christopher Mims -- a day ago

Suneet Tuli, CEO of Datawind, holds up the commercial version of his
company's new Aakash 2 tablet Datawind

Suneet Tuli, the 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup
Datawind, is having a taxing day.
“I’m underwater,” he says as he struggles to find a cell signal
outside a restaurant in Mumbai.

Two days from then, on Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab
Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer
Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to
100,000 university students and professors.
(If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.)
In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every
day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial
version of the Aakash 2.
Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.

We’re speaking over the same overtaxed cellular networks that he hopes
will enable Datawind to educate every schoolchild in India through the
world’s cheapest functional tablet computer.
But it’s a losing battle, as his connection to one of the 13 separate
cell carriers in Mumbai buckles under too much competing traffic.
He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price
university students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has
been subsidized by the Indian government.

It’s $20.

In India, that’s a quarter the cost of competing tablets with
identical specifications.
imilar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost components and
manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale.
Which means the Aakash 2 isn’t just the cheapest fully functional
tablet PC on the planet because the Indian government has decided it
should be -- it’s the cheapest, period.

In the developing world, and especially in India, a country where one
billion people have a monthly income less than $200, every rupee
matters. Aakash means “blue sky” in Hindi, and that’s a fair
description of Datawind’s goals for the tablet.
Ultimately, says Tuli, the government would like to distribute one to
each of India’s 220 million students.
India has 900 million cell phone subscriptions, but in a country where
smartphones are rare, 95% of Indians have no computing device.
Which means the Aakash, or something like it, could become the sole
computer for hundreds of millions of people in India, not to mention
elsewhere in the developing world.

Unlike the failed Aakash 1, which was supposed to roll out in 2011 but
which was so under-powered that it was virtually unusable, the Aakash
2 is no toy.
Even jaded US gadget reviewers have found it as usable as tablets
costing many times more.

It has a processor as powerful as the first iPad and twice as much RAM memory.

 It uses Google’s Android operating system, which now runs on three
out of four smartphones and four out of 10 tablets shipped worldwide.

Its LCD touchscreen displays full-screen video without hiccups, it
browses the web, and it even holds up when playing videogames.
If you’re a student with no other computing device, attaching a
keyboard to it transforms it into a serviceable replacement for a
traditional PC.

Ubislate is the commercially-available version of the Aakash 2 tablet
Disrupting the world’s largest tech companies

“The revolution will come from the developing world to the US,” says
Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and academic.
“These tablets will kill the markets for high-end players -- for
Microsoft in particular.”

Wadhwa knows Tuli and has become the Aakash 2′s champion stateside,
writing about the device and getting it into the hands of executives.
He believes that the $40 price of the tablet could drop to $25 within a year.
“I showed a Google executive [this] tablet. He suddenly realized that
his $99 tablet isn’t going to stand up to the $25 tablet from India.”

Many in Silicon Valley are suddenly fixated on cheap tablets.
“I see a lot of the PC makers and hardware companies here [in the US]
are going to build a tablet strategy,” says Jay Goldberg, a financial
analyst who was surprised to discover on his last trip to China just
how cheap functional 7″ tablets have become.
“But if there are already $45 tablets out there, even that second-tier
strategy [of replacing lost PC sales with tablets] is going to fail.”

Everyone I interviewed for this piece thought that Apple, as a company
that differentiates itself by being a high-end brand, would survive
the coming of cheap tablets.
But Goldberg and Wadhwa agreed that other manufacturers of
Android-based tablets, even Samsung, would have a hard time staying in
the hardware market.

Educating the “ignored billion”

“Our effort in all of this,” says Tuli, “Was to use technology to
fight poverty. What happens when you try to make it affordable at this
level?”

Every year, the Indian government spends $13 per student just to ship
them textbooks.
In primary schools, all texts are based on a standardized, public
domain curriculum that is easily transformed into free ebooks.
The government is considering paying the full cost of the tablet when
handing them out to primary-school-age children.
In that case, the $40 the government pays Datawind for each tablet
could be recouped over the projected three-year life of one of these
tablets, says Tuli.

But the Aakash 2 isn’t just about replacing textbooks:
It’s about bringing the full-fledged Internet to users who have never
touched it before.

In India, competition for wireless connectivity is so cutthroat that
it’s possible to get an unlimited prepaid mobile data plan for $2 a
month.

The basic Aakash 2 has wifi, but an upgraded model, available
commercially for 3,500 rupees, or about $70, includes SIM cards and
the radio required to communicate with a cellphone network.
As costs fall the company will incorporate these features into the base model.

In India there is little 3G wireless connectivity, and data speeds are
slow, using on an older technology, GPRS. Normally, browsing the web
over GPRS would be nearly impossible.
So Datawind developed a compression and acceleration technology that,
it says, makes web pages load in three seconds instead of 15 to 20.

The Indian government is already connecting 600 universities and 1,200
colleges with broadband and wifi, in addition to an effort to connect
250,000 villages with fiber-optic internet in the next two years, at a
cost of $4.5 billion.

Even so, says Tuli, almost all connectivity to individual devices --
the so called “last mile” connection of the internet -- will be
achieved through cellphone networks.

The world’s isolated, rural and impoverished places are just the sort
of locations where Tuli sees tablets acting as an educational
supplement.

In a recent experiment in Ethiopia, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of
the original “One Laptop Per Child” project, gave Android-powered
tablets to children in an isolated village.
Despite having never had any previous contact with high technology,
within months children had used the tablets to teach themselves the
English alphabet.
Negroponte’s ultimate goal is to see whether or not the children, who
have no teachers, can use the tablets to learn to read.

There are a number of reasons Aakash 2 could succeed where the
original OLPC project failed.
For one, Aakash is for the most part a home-grown solution to problems
identified in advance by the Indian government, where the OLPC was
initiated by western funders who lacked sufficient knowledge of local
conditions and needs.
At a price that never fell below $100, OLPC devices were also
significantly more expensive than the Aakash 2, limiting its reach.
And as a mature ecosystem, Android has many orders of magnitude more
apps available for it than the OLPC could ever command -- consumers
are much more likely to embrace devices that can already run huge
catalogs of videogames, media and other applications.

Free tablets and ubiquitous computing

“[In the US,] you will see tablets everywhere,” says Wadhwa.
“They will become disposable, and you will see thousands of new
applications within a short period of time.”

Tuli thinks he can eventually bring the Aakash 2 to the US at a $50
retail price, and if trends continue, that price will continue to
fall.

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of applications for devices
that cheap.
“If I were to start a company today, I’d say what kind of a business
can I build if the hardware is almost disposable?” says Goldberg.
“In a restaurant, if every waiter or maitre d’ has a tablet, now
someone can go build a good restaurant automation tool that links
tablets to the chef station.”

At some point, too, any company that can squeeze enough ads onto this
class of tablets will start giving the tablet away for free.
(Remember when USB thumb drives became inescapable promotional giveaways?)
The commercial version of the Aakash 2, the $70 Ubislate, affords
Datawind almost no profit margin at all.
But, like Amazon and Google, which have adopted a business model of
selling their hardware at cost and making money on content instead
(Amazon by selling e-books, and Google by selling ads), Datawind is
using Yahoo’s ad marketplace to sell advertisements on the toolbar of
apps on the Ubislate.

At home, there are plenty of reasons tablets could end up in every room.
They might control the thermostat or a home energy management system.
Stuck on a fridge, they could help keep track of the contents, saving
on food buying and trips to the grocery store.
(Samsung already offers a refrigerator with a built-in touchscreen tablet.)

The too-many-tablets problem would accelerate the trend of people
keeping all their personal data “in the cloud”, accessed the same way
from any screen.
That’s the vision of Google’s web-based operating system, Chrome OS;
Amazon’s streaming video and music libraries; and Apple’s iCloud,
which lets you use the same music, films and apps across multiple
Apple devices.
People might find themselves dedicating tablets to specific functions
or locations, and seamlessly continuing tasks on one screen that were
begun on another.

“I was at Intel this week, and like other companies in the Valley,
they’re trying to figure out what consumers really use tablets for,”
says Goldberg.
“I think most people agree we’re not going to have three laptops at
home in the future.
We’re going to have a bunch of tablets and one desktop or media server.”

From the poor in the developing world, to the poor everywhere

“Over the weekend I was at a cocktail party,” says Goldberg.
“Someone said, ‘I was just on the Silk Road in China, in a no-name
restaurant, and everyone had tablets. No menus, just tablets. What we
may see is, it comes from emerging markets first.”

One of the reasons these tablets are so cheap in China and India,
where they are made, is that production costs have now fallen so far
that shipping, distribution and customs duties have become a
significant part of their price in the rich world.
(Devices comparable to the Aakash 2 or the generic 7″ tablets of China
cost $99 and up in the US.)

This means that to make technology disposable, manufacturing needs to move.
The Aakash 2, for example, is currently assembled in Amritsar, a city
in the far north of India, near the border with Pakistan.
But, says Tuli, “We don’t rule out assembly done in the US. Labor is
not a big component to this, so if it costs me $1.50 extra and I can
put a ‘made in USA’ label on it, then it’s something we will seriously
consider.”

Inevitably, tablets will become ubiquitous in education.
Already, wealthy schools are abandoning textbooks in favor of iPads.
“I get school boards and schools from the US and Canada regularly
calling us up, asking for devices,” says Tuli.
“Inner-city schools say to us, ‘It’s not just a problem over there --
40% of our kids don’t have access to PCs and the internet.”

Why poor countries might take up tablets even faster than rich ones

In the US, smartphone adoption has only just crossed the 50% mark.
Some of that has to do with price -- even “free” smartphones are
attached to plans with recurring monthly charges -- but it’s also
behavioral.

 Meanwhile, China is projected to overtake the US by the end of 2012
by share of smartphones purchased, and by 2016 India will be in third
place.

“It’s taken the [digital video recorder] 13 years to reach about 50%
penetration,” says Rakesh Agrawal, who advises technology companies on
product strategy.
“Consumer behavior just takes a long time to change.
Even if the price point is there, it will take a while unless
something is completely revolutionary.”

In other words, people will start buying something in large numbers if
it solves a big problem for them.
But most first-world problems -- needing an easier way to record your
favorite TV programs or keep track of what’s in your fridge -- just
aren’t that pressing.
In developing countries, on the other hand, technology can transform lives.

For example, to avoid racking up cellphone charges, the poorest
communicate with one another by calling and allowing the recipient’s
phone to ring a given number of times -- one ring for “come home” and
two for “I’m fine,” for example.
Cell phones help husbands and wives, separated by the migration to
cities for work, keep in touch.

“Now, not only can they hear each other, they could Skype each other,”
says Wadhwa.
“They could send money electronically. There’s ecommerce developing in
India. They can go online to check the price of products, the weather
forecast, local newspapers. This is going to be revolutionary for the
developing world. We don’t understand in the West what a dramatic
change lies ahead because of this connectivity.
It’s going to boost the growth of the developing countries for sure.”

Enabling that revolution will require many more manufacturers than Datawind.
The company is scrambling to meet its current obligations, and Tuli
says that in six to nine months Datawind will be making 500,000
tablets per month -- half again as many units as Google’s hit Nexus 7
tablet has been shipping every month.
China’s unbranded 7-inch tablets are widely available, but bringing
them to other countries at a price comparable to the Aakash will
require setting up factories and supply chains in every country in
which tablets will be sold.

“You will see regional tablets,” says Wadhwa.
“There’s no magic here -- you can buy components all over world and
build locally, and voilà, you have a tablet.”
Eventually, in other words, we might think as much about the maker of
our tablets as we think about the printers of our books or the
manufacturers of our paper.
As a medium, tablets and their successors could become the ultimate commodity.


http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

EDUCATION • HACKING • OLPC
190
By Evan Ackerman
5:57PM on Oct 30, 2012

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to
Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five
months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing
the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled
hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering
technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no
education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve
traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the
last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really
not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell
"neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing
facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn
by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead,
OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is
what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets
plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with
teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely
different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in
Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey
kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like,
the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No
books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or
goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect;
there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to
zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet
computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these
people how to use them, right?

But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed
up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages
(nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom
English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software
on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down,
as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology
Review's EmTech conference last week:

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction,
no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within
four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off
switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within
five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two
weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And
within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our
organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they
figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to
see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English.
Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't
even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no
schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for
the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it
has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too,
since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their
computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is
incredibly amazing and awesome.

If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain
well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal
Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the
OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example
of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids
learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized
lessons and traditional teaching methods:

Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel
turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to
her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?"
She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl
has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess
is named "Rahel" like she is and that she likes to wear blue -- but
for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her
and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you
trace the R?" As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across
the screen. "Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug.
Roger has a dog named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess
asks, "Can you find something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to
photograph a berry on a nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red
here. Can you find something big and red?"

As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole
words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks
them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the
time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and
sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her
about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and
programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle
to draw different shapes).

Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with
her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and
her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what
she's learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used
to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running
inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of
rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book,
and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him
learn to count.

Read more about Nell in this paper, and if you haven't read The
Diamond Age, do so at once.

Via MIT

Share this:  http://qz.com/26244

Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy
C. Scott Ananian Chris J. Ball Michael Stone

One Laptop Per Child Foundation
222 Third Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
{cscott,cjb,mstone}@laptop.org
ABSTRACT
Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children
in the developing world. A novel modular narrative sys-
tem guides learning, even for children far from educational
infrastructure, and provides personalized instruction which
grows with the child. Nell’s design builds on experience with
the Sugar Learning Platform [17], used by over two million
children around the world.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User
Interfaces—narrative interfaces; K.3.1 [Computers and
Education]: Computer Uses in Education—computer-man-
aged instruction
General Terms
Design, Human Factors
Keywords
Narrative interfaces, tablet computing, education, Nell

"The interaction design of the Nell system described above
is inspired by the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” in the
Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age, from whose pro-
tagonist Nell takes its name.1

Nell’s design embodies four key ideas:
it is a Narrative interface
using Direct Inter-action
which Grows with,
and is Personalized for, the child."

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

Dear Rich,

Let me explain how this "scam" works

1) Bribe a Mininster to buy about 20,000 subsidised tablets at US$20
each. The Minister for Science & Tech (India) gets a lot of publicity
about this "made-in-India" wonder. Nobody looks closely at all the
lowest quality/spec parts outsourced from everywhere else or that
India doesn't actually manufacture anything (except babies) because of
faulty government policies (and leaky condoms made in govt factories
which aren't shut due to Communist Trade Unions).

2) Now take bookings for 4 million (?) tablets at US$45 (?) each.
Invest the money in the stock market, real estate, private lending,
currency trading  etc.

3) With money in hand go find some cheap Chinese manufacturer and
order 100,000 tablets deliberately designed to fail in 2 months. Pump
the media with stories of production problems at Datawind.

4)  After 3 months prime the media with stories of disastrous quality
of devices and how punters will be lucky to get their money back.

5) After about 6 months the punters queue up to get their money
refunded. 30% of the punters fail to cash in their advances.

PURE PROFIT !!!

This scam, has been played out many times before with many
products..There's a new sucker born everyday and also a new idiot who
promotes their Ponzi schemes on mailing lists.

Sarbajit

NATIONAL CONVENOR
India Against Corruption
www.indiaagainstcorruption.net.in

On 11/13/12, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Aakash 2 $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate
> billions and transform computing as we know it, Christopher Mims --
> Nell software teaches poor kids everything...: Rich Murray 2012.11.12
>
> Aakash 2
> How a $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate
> billions and transform computing as we know it
> By Christopher Mims -- a day ago
>
> Suneet Tuli, CEO of Datawind, holds up the commercial version of his
> company's new Aakash 2 tablet Datawind
>
> Suneet Tuli, the 44-year-old CEO of UK/Canadian/Indian startup
> Datawind, is having a taxing day.
> “I’m underwater,” he says as he struggles to find a cell signal
> outside a restaurant in Mumbai.
>
> Two days from then, on Sunday Nov. 11, the president of India, Pranab
> Mukherjee, will have unveiled the seven-inch Aakash 2 tablet computer
> Tuli’s company is selling to the government for distribution to
> 100,000 university students and professors.
> (If things go well, the government plans to order as many as 5.86 million.)
> In the meantime, Tuli is deluged with calls from reporters, and every
> day his company receives thousands of new orders for the commercial
> version of the Aakash 2.
> Already, he’s facing a backlog of four million unfulfilled pre-orders.
>
> We’re speaking over the same overtaxed cellular networks that he hopes
> will enable Datawind to educate every schoolchild in India through the
> world’s cheapest functional tablet computer.
> But it’s a losing battle, as his connection to one of the 13 separate
> cell carriers in Mumbai buckles under too much competing traffic.
> He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price
> university students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has
> been subsidized by the Indian government.
>
> It’s $20.
>
> In India, that’s a quarter the cost of competing tablets with
> identical specifications.
> imilar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost components and
> manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale.
> Which means the Aakash 2 isn’t just the cheapest fully functional
> tablet PC on the planet because the Indian government has decided it
> should be -- it’s the cheapest, period.
>
> In the developing world, and especially in India, a country where one
> billion people have a monthly income less than $200, every rupee
> matters. Aakash means “blue sky” in Hindi, and that’s a fair
> description of Datawind’s goals for the tablet.
> Ultimately, says Tuli, the government would like to distribute one to
> each of India’s 220 million students.
> India has 900 million cell phone subscriptions, but in a country where
> smartphones are rare, 95% of Indians have no computing device.
> Which means the Aakash, or something like it, could become the sole
> computer for hundreds of millions of people in India, not to mention
> elsewhere in the developing world.
>
> Unlike the failed Aakash 1, which was supposed to roll out in 2011 but
> which was so under-powered that it was virtually unusable, the Aakash
> 2 is no toy.
> Even jaded US gadget reviewers have found it as usable as tablets
> costing many times more.
>
> It has a processor as powerful as the first iPad and twice as much RAM
> memory.
>
>  It uses Google’s Android operating system, which now runs on three
> out of four smartphones and four out of 10 tablets shipped worldwide.
>
> Its LCD touchscreen displays full-screen video without hiccups, it
> browses the web, and it even holds up when playing videogames.
> If you’re a student with no other computing device, attaching a
> keyboard to it transforms it into a serviceable replacement for a
> traditional PC.
>
> Ubislate is the commercially-available version of the Aakash 2 tablet
> Disrupting the world’s largest tech companies
>
> “The revolution will come from the developing world to the US,” says
> Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and academic.
> “These tablets will kill the markets for high-end players -- for
> Microsoft in particular.”
>
> Wadhwa knows Tuli and has become the Aakash 2′s champion stateside,
> writing about the device and getting it into the hands of executives.
> He believes that the $40 price of the tablet could drop to $25 within a
> year.
> “I showed a Google executive [this] tablet. He suddenly realized that
> his $99 tablet isn’t going to stand up to the $25 tablet from India.”
>
> Many in Silicon Valley are suddenly fixated on cheap tablets.
> “I see a lot of the PC makers and hardware companies here [in the US]
> are going to build a tablet strategy,” says Jay Goldberg, a financial
> analyst who was surprised to discover on his last trip to China just
> how cheap functional 7″ tablets have become.
> “But if there are already $45 tablets out there, even that second-tier
> strategy [of replacing lost PC sales with tablets] is going to fail.”
>
> Everyone I interviewed for this piece thought that Apple, as a company
> that differentiates itself by being a high-end brand, would survive
> the coming of cheap tablets.
> But Goldberg and Wadhwa agreed that other manufacturers of
> Android-based tablets, even Samsung, would have a hard time staying in
> the hardware market.
>
> Educating the “ignored billion”
>
> “Our effort in all of this,” says Tuli, “Was to use technology to
> fight poverty. What happens when you try to make it affordable at this
> level?”
>
> Every year, the Indian government spends $13 per student just to ship
> them textbooks.
> In primary schools, all texts are based on a standardized, public
> domain curriculum that is easily transformed into free ebooks.
> The government is considering paying the full cost of the tablet when
> handing them out to primary-school-age children.
> In that case, the $40 the government pays Datawind for each tablet
> could be recouped over the projected three-year life of one of these
> tablets, says Tuli.
>
> But the Aakash 2 isn’t just about replacing textbooks:
> It’s about bringing the full-fledged Internet to users who have never
> touched it before.
>
> In India, competition for wireless connectivity is so cutthroat that
> it’s possible to get an unlimited prepaid mobile data plan for $2 a
> month.
>
> The basic Aakash 2 has wifi, but an upgraded model, available
> commercially for 3,500 rupees, or about $70, includes SIM cards and
> the radio required to communicate with a cellphone network.
> As costs fall the company will incorporate these features into the base
> model.
>
> In India there is little 3G wireless connectivity, and data speeds are
> slow, using on an older technology, GPRS. Normally, browsing the web
> over GPRS would be nearly impossible.
> So Datawind developed a compression and acceleration technology that,
> it says, makes web pages load in three seconds instead of 15 to 20.
>
> The Indian government is already connecting 600 universities and 1,200
> colleges with broadband and wifi, in addition to an effort to connect
> 250,000 villages with fiber-optic internet in the next two years, at a
> cost of $4.5 billion.
>
> Even so, says Tuli, almost all connectivity to individual devices --
> the so called “last mile” connection of the internet -- will be
> achieved through cellphone networks.
>
> The world’s isolated, rural and impoverished places are just the sort
> of locations where Tuli sees tablets acting as an educational
> supplement.
>
> In a recent experiment in Ethiopia, Nicholas Negroponte, founder of
> the original “One Laptop Per Child” project, gave Android-powered
> tablets to children in an isolated village.
> Despite having never had any previous contact with high technology,
> within months children had used the tablets to teach themselves the
> English alphabet.
> Negroponte’s ultimate goal is to see whether or not the children, who
> have no teachers, can use the tablets to learn to read.
>
> There are a number of reasons Aakash 2 could succeed where the
> original OLPC project failed.
> For one, Aakash is for the most part a home-grown solution to problems
> identified in advance by the Indian government, where the OLPC was
> initiated by western funders who lacked sufficient knowledge of local
> conditions and needs.
> At a price that never fell below $100, OLPC devices were also
> significantly more expensive than the Aakash 2, limiting its reach.
> And as a mature ecosystem, Android has many orders of magnitude more
> apps available for it than the OLPC could ever command -- consumers
> are much more likely to embrace devices that can already run huge
> catalogs of videogames, media and other applications.
>
> Free tablets and ubiquitous computing
>
> “[In the US,] you will see tablets everywhere,” says Wadhwa.
> “They will become disposable, and you will see thousands of new
> applications within a short period of time.”
>
> Tuli thinks he can eventually bring the Aakash 2 to the US at a $50
> retail price, and if trends continue, that price will continue to
> fall.
>
> It doesn’t take much imagination to think of applications for devices
> that cheap.
> “If I were to start a company today, I’d say what kind of a business
> can I build if the hardware is almost disposable?” says Goldberg.
> “In a restaurant, if every waiter or maitre d’ has a tablet, now
> someone can go build a good restaurant automation tool that links
> tablets to the chef station.”
>
> At some point, too, any company that can squeeze enough ads onto this
> class of tablets will start giving the tablet away for free.
> (Remember when USB thumb drives became inescapable promotional giveaways?)
> The commercial version of the Aakash 2, the $70 Ubislate, affords
> Datawind almost no profit margin at all.
> But, like Amazon and Google, which have adopted a business model of
> selling their hardware at cost and making money on content instead
> (Amazon by selling e-books, and Google by selling ads), Datawind is
> using Yahoo’s ad marketplace to sell advertisements on the toolbar of
> apps on the Ubislate.
>
> At home, there are plenty of reasons tablets could end up in every room.
> They might control the thermostat or a home energy management system.
> Stuck on a fridge, they could help keep track of the contents, saving
> on food buying and trips to the grocery store.
> (Samsung already offers a refrigerator with a built-in touchscreen tablet.)
>
> The too-many-tablets problem would accelerate the trend of people
> keeping all their personal data “in the cloud”, accessed the same way
> from any screen.
> That’s the vision of Google’s web-based operating system, Chrome OS;
> Amazon’s streaming video and music libraries; and Apple’s iCloud,
> which lets you use the same music, films and apps across multiple
> Apple devices.
> People might find themselves dedicating tablets to specific functions
> or locations, and seamlessly continuing tasks on one screen that were
> begun on another.
>
> “I was at Intel this week, and like other companies in the Valley,
> they’re trying to figure out what consumers really use tablets for,”
> says Goldberg.
> “I think most people agree we’re not going to have three laptops at
> home in the future.
> We’re going to have a bunch of tablets and one desktop or media server.”
>
> From the poor in the developing world, to the poor everywhere
>
> “Over the weekend I was at a cocktail party,” says Goldberg.
> “Someone said, ‘I was just on the Silk Road in China, in a no-name
> restaurant, and everyone had tablets. No menus, just tablets. What we
> may see is, it comes from emerging markets first.”
>
> One of the reasons these tablets are so cheap in China and India,
> where they are made, is that production costs have now fallen so far
> that shipping, distribution and customs duties have become a
> significant part of their price in the rich world.
> (Devices comparable to the Aakash 2 or the generic 7″ tablets of China
> cost $99 and up in the US.)
>
> This means that to make technology disposable, manufacturing needs to move.
> The Aakash 2, for example, is currently assembled in Amritsar, a city
> in the far north of India, near the border with Pakistan.
> But, says Tuli, “We don’t rule out assembly done in the US. Labor is
> not a big component to this, so if it costs me $1.50 extra and I can
> put a ‘made in USA’ label on it, then it’s something we will seriously
> consider.”
>
> Inevitably, tablets will become ubiquitous in education.
> Already, wealthy schools are abandoning textbooks in favor of iPads.
> “I get school boards and schools from the US and Canada regularly
> calling us up, asking for devices,” says Tuli.
> “Inner-city schools say to us, ‘It’s not just a problem over there --
> 40% of our kids don’t have access to PCs and the internet.”
>
> Why poor countries might take up tablets even faster than rich ones
>
> In the US, smartphone adoption has only just crossed the 50% mark.
> Some of that has to do with price -- even “free” smartphones are
> attached to plans with recurring monthly charges -- but it’s also
> behavioral.
>
>  Meanwhile, China is projected to overtake the US by the end of 2012
> by share of smartphones purchased, and by 2016 India will be in third
> place.
>
> “It’s taken the [digital video recorder] 13 years to reach about 50%
> penetration,” says Rakesh Agrawal, who advises technology companies on
> product strategy.
> “Consumer behavior just takes a long time to change.
> Even if the price point is there, it will take a while unless
> something is completely revolutionary.”
>
> In other words, people will start buying something in large numbers if
> it solves a big problem for them.
> But most first-world problems -- needing an easier way to record your
> favorite TV programs or keep track of what’s in your fridge -- just
> aren’t that pressing.
> In developing countries, on the other hand, technology can transform lives.
>
> For example, to avoid racking up cellphone charges, the poorest
> communicate with one another by calling and allowing the recipient’s
> phone to ring a given number of times -- one ring for “come home” and
> two for “I’m fine,” for example.
> Cell phones help husbands and wives, separated by the migration to
> cities for work, keep in touch.
>
> “Now, not only can they hear each other, they could Skype each other,”
> says Wadhwa.
> “They could send money electronically. There’s ecommerce developing in
> India. They can go online to check the price of products, the weather
> forecast, local newspapers. This is going to be revolutionary for the
> developing world. We don’t understand in the West what a dramatic
> change lies ahead because of this connectivity.
> It’s going to boost the growth of the developing countries for sure.”
>
> Enabling that revolution will require many more manufacturers than Datawind.
> The company is scrambling to meet its current obligations, and Tuli
> says that in six to nine months Datawind will be making 500,000
> tablets per month -- half again as many units as Google’s hit Nexus 7
> tablet has been shipping every month.
> China’s unbranded 7-inch tablets are widely available, but bringing
> them to other countries at a price comparable to the Aakash will
> require setting up factories and supply chains in every country in
> which tablets will be sold.
>
> “You will see regional tablets,” says Wadhwa.
> “There’s no magic here -- you can buy components all over world and
> build locally, and voilà, you have a tablet.”
> Eventually, in other words, we might think as much about the maker of
> our tablets as we think about the printers of our books or the
> manufacturers of our paper.
> As a medium, tablets and their successors could become the ultimate
> commodity.
>

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Rich Murray-2]

Dear Sarbajit Roy,

I see you know a lot about some pretty tough streets -- thanks for the
sobering assessment.  Here's the volunteer activism I've been doing
since January 1999:

pack cigarettes gives same methanol as liter aspartame diet drink, 60
mg, which ADH1 enzyme makes into highly reactive acidic hydrated
formaldehyde inside cells of blood vessel walls at base of brain,
perivascular loci for first MS lesions: Rich Murray 2012.11.12


This explains why people who never drink suffer more from many chronic
diseases than those who drink about one alcohol drink daily - Ethanol
(ordinary alcohol)  prevents harm from methanol (wood alcohol)
sources, including many dark wines and liquors - aspartame (E951) -
smoke from wood peat cigarettes - fruits juices vegetables, sealed wet
in cans - fermented smoked spoiled foods - fresh tomatoes, black
currants - jellies jams marmalades - some fresh coffees - chewing gum
(often have aspartame) - bacteria in the colon - genetic flaws in
metabolism - vehicle fumes - processed wood products of all kinds -
factories making leather, paper, particle board and plywood, or using
solvents - mobile homes - As long as ethanol is in the blood, the ADH1
enzyme is preempted from turning methanol into formaldehyde right
inside cells in 19 specific tissues - WhileScienceSleeps 745 free
online full text medical research references by Prof. Woodrow C.
Monte, Arizona State University, retired 2004.

Eva A. Schernhammer cites Woodrow C. Monte methanol-formaldehyde
paradigm in brave, cautious Harvard team study that confirms more
cancers in aspartame diet soda users over 22 years -- full plain text:
Rich Murray 2012.10.27
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/10/eva-schernhammer-cites-woodrow-c-monte.html

Ethan Evers gives crisp summary of landmark study linking leukemia and
lymphoma in over 100,000 people using just 1.5 cans aspartame diet
soda daily for 22 years, Eva A. Schernhammer, Harvard expert team:
Rich Murray 2012.11.01
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/11/ethan-evers-gives-crisp-summary-of.html

informative, exciting 90 minute video sharing by Joseph Mercola and
Prof. Woodrow C. Monte about methanol-formaldehyde toxicity from
aspartame and cigarettes: Rich Murray 2012.10.28
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/10/informative-exciting-90-minute-video.html

http://www.whilesciencesleeps.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS_gCcevZqY
Published on Oct 12, 2012 by mercola 1:29:46

pack unfiltered cigarettes gives 60 mg methanol, which the ADH1 enzyme
makes into highly reactive acidic hydrated formaldehyde right inside
cells in 19 specific tissues,  Prof. Woodrow C. Monte paradigm, 745
free full text references WhileScienceSleeps.com: Rich Murray
2012.11.10
http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2012/11/pack-unfiltered-cigarettes-gives-60-mg.html


Rich Murray,
MA Boston University Graduate School 1967 psychology,
BS MIT 1964 history and physics,
254-A Donax Avenue, Imperial Beach, CA 91932-1918
[hidden email]
505-819-7388  cell
619-623-3468  home
http://RMForAll.blogspot.com

Did you know about any of this?

Rich Murray




On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 10:19 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dear Rich,
>
> Let me explain how this "scam" works
>
> 1) Bribe a Mininster to buy about 20,000 subsidised tablets at US$20
> each. The Minister for Science & Tech (India) gets a lot of publicity
> about this "made-in-India" wonder. Nobody looks closely at all the
> lowest quality/spec parts outsourced from everywhere else or that
> India doesn't actually manufacture anything (except babies) because of
> faulty government policies (and leaky condoms made in govt factories
> which aren't shut due to Communist Trade Unions).
>
> 2) Now take bookings for 4 million (?) tablets at US$45 (?) each.
> Invest the money in the stock market, real estate, private lending,
> currency trading  etc.
>
> 3) With money in hand go find some cheap Chinese manufacturer and
> order 100,000 tablets deliberately designed to fail in 2 months. Pump
> the media with stories of production problems at Datawind.
>
> 4)  After 3 months prime the media with stories of disastrous quality
> of devices and how punters will be lucky to get their money back.
>
> 5) After about 6 months the punters queue up to get their money
> refunded. 30% of the punters fail to cash in their advances.
>
> PURE PROFIT !!!
>
> This scam, has been played out many times before with many
> products..There's a new sucker born everyday and also a new idiot who
> promotes their Ponzi schemes on mailing lists.
>
> Sarbajit
>
> NATIONAL CONVENOR
> India Against Corruption
> www.indiaagainstcorruption.net.in
>
> On 11/13/12, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> Aakash 2 $20 tablet from India could blindside PC makers, educate
>> billions and transform computing as we know it, Christopher Mims --
>> Nell software teaches poor kids everything...: Rich Murray 2012.11.12

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Owen Densmore]

Sarbajit  thank you for the insight.  We've heard a lot of incredibly inexpensive devices, but reading the story shows issues:

- $20 is cost after subsidizing by Indian gvt:

He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price university students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has been subsidized by the Indian government. It’s $20.

- $45 apparently is an available price elsewhere w/o subsidizing: 

In India, that’s a quarter the cost of competing tablets with identical specifications. Similar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost components and manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale. Which means the Aakash 2 isn’t just the cheapest fully functional tablet PC on the planet because the Indian government has decided it should be—it’s the cheapest, period.

- So its not the break-through after all.  Its cost is apparently $50, and $35 to students:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/18/hands-on-with-the-35-aakash-2-tablet-i-want-one/

- Also, who's paying for the network?  They are initially WiFi only.  What if you get a cell version? Cell data is pretty expensive in Europe, not sure about India.

Ubislate tablets — the commercial version of Aakash — with SIM (data and smartphone functionality) will have a retail price of Rs.2,999 ($54.52) for the GPRS version and Rs.4,499 ($81.80) for the 3G version. The Aakash and Ubislate tablets are also billed as the only Adroid tablets to feature DataWind’s UbiSurfer browser, which is supposed to accelerate web pages load times by factors of 10 – 30x. The UbiSurfer technology is covered by 18 U.S. patents that allow it to deliver web pages on GPRS in about 5 to 7 seconds (compared to many minutes if web pages are accessed on GPRS using traditional means). On 3G, the speed improves to 2 to 3 seconds. GPRS network coverage is available to over 80 percent of the 1.2 billion population of India. Through a special agreement with a network operator, DataWind offers Rs.98 ($1.78)/month for unlimited internet on GPRS.

It could be the tech-for-everybody folks have been hoping for, but my guess is the plain old market will build it, not a country.  We saw the same for cell phones and now you can buy dirt-cheap "feature phones" with pay-as-you-go SIMs.

   -- Owen

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 11:19 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Rich,

Let me explain how this "scam" works

1) Bribe a Mininster to buy about 20,000 subsidised tablets at US$20
each. The Minister for Science & Tech (India) gets a lot of publicity
about this "made-in-India" wonder. Nobody looks closely at all the
lowest quality/spec parts outsourced from everywhere else or that
India doesn't actually manufacture anything (except babies) because of
faulty government policies (and leaky condoms made in govt factories
which aren't shut due to Communist Trade Unions).

2) Now take bookings for 4 million (?) tablets at US$45 (?) each.
Invest the money in the stock market, real estate, private lending,
currency trading  etc.

3) With money in hand go find some cheap Chinese manufacturer and
order 100,000 tablets deliberately designed to fail in 2 months. Pump
the media with stories of production problems at Datawind.

4)  After 3 months prime the media with stories of disastrous quality
of devices and how punters will be lucky to get their money back.

5) After about 6 months the punters queue up to get their money
refunded. 30% of the punters fail to cash in their advances.

PURE PROFIT !!!

This scam, has been played out many times before with many
products..There's a new sucker born everyday and also a new idiot who
promotes their Ponzi schemes on mailing lists.

Sarbajit

NATIONAL CONVENOR
India Against Corruption
www.indiaagainstcorruption.net.in

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

Hi Owen

Firstly, all the pricing is speculative - because its not sure when
the units will actually be delivered to ALL customers who booked.

Secondly, In India this business model is a regular scam. For
instance, "Tata Motors" took in bookings for millions of their "worlds
lowest price car" the Tata Nano. They then engineered a labor dispute
at their factory (by paying off some local politicians) and delayed
the delivery by 2 years. Holding on to that huge pool of money they
went and took over Land Rover in UK and refinanced that deal 3 times
on the stock market and put up 2 new factories. Today hardly anyone
wants to buy that car. Everything is a pyramid deal if we follow the
money.

Thirdly, Rs.98 (US$2) here is a pretty standard pricing for unlimited
(very slow 20 kbps - marketed as 156kbps) GPRS access which is
tolerable for very basic web searches/email, facebook updates and
twittering.

Sarbajit

On 11/13/12, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Sarbajit  thank you for the insight.  We've heard a lot of incredibly
> inexpensive devices, but reading the story shows issues:
> - $20 is cost after subsidizing by Indian gvt:
>
> He has to repeat himself when he tells me the ultimate price university
> students will pay for his tablet, after half its cost has been subsidized
> by the Indian government. It’s $20.
>
> - $45 apparently is an available price elsewhere w/o subsidizing:
>
> In India, that’s a quarter the cost of competing tablets with identical
> specifications. Similar tablets in China, the world champion in low-cost
> components and manufacturing, go for $45 and up, wholesale. Which means the
> Aakash 2 isn’t just the cheapest fully functional tablet PC on the planet
> because the Indian government has decided it should be—it’s the cheapest,
> period.
>
> - So its not the break-through after all.  Its cost is apparently $50, and
> $35 to students:
>
> http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/18/hands-on-with-the-35-aakash-2-tablet-i-want-one/
>
> - Also, who's paying for the network?  They are initially WiFi only.  What
> if you get a cell version? Cell data is pretty expensive in Europe, not
> sure about India.
>
> Ubislate tablets — the commercial version of Aakash — with SIM (data and
> smartphone functionality) will have a retail price of Rs.2,999 ($54.52) for
> the GPRS version and Rs.4,499 ($81.80) for the 3G version. The Aakash and
> Ubislate tablets are also billed as the only Adroid tablets to feature
> DataWind’s UbiSurfer browser, which is supposed to accelerate web pages
> load times by factors of 10 – 30x. The UbiSurfer technology is covered by
> 18 U.S. patents that allow it to deliver web pages on GPRS in about 5 to 7
> seconds (compared to many minutes if web pages are accessed on GPRS using
> traditional means). On 3G, the speed improves to 2 to 3 seconds. GPRS
> network coverage is available to over 80 percent of the 1.2 billion
> population of India. Through a special agreement with a network operator,
> DataWind offers Rs.98 ($1.78)/month for unlimited internet on GPRS.
>
>
> It could be the tech-for-everybody folks have been hoping for, but my guess
> is the plain old market will build it, not a country.  We saw the same for
> cell phones and now you can buy dirt-cheap "feature phones" with
> pay-as-you-go SIMs.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 11:19 PM, Sarbajit Roy <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> Dear Rich,
>>
>> Let me explain how this "scam" works
>>
>> 1) Bribe a Mininster to buy about 20,000 subsidised tablets at US$20
>> each. The Minister for Science & Tech (India) gets a lot of publicity
>> about this "made-in-India" wonder. Nobody looks closely at all the
>> lowest quality/spec parts outsourced from everywhere else or that
>> India doesn't actually manufacture anything (except babies) because of
>> faulty government policies (and leaky condoms made in govt factories
>> which aren't shut due to Communist Trade Unions).
>>
>> 2) Now take bookings for 4 million (?) tablets at US$45 (?) each.
>> Invest the money in the stock market, real estate, private lending,
>> currency trading  etc.
>>
>> 3) With money in hand go find some cheap Chinese manufacturer and
>> order 100,000 tablets deliberately designed to fail in 2 months. Pump
>> the media with stories of production problems at Datawind.
>>
>> 4)  After 3 months prime the media with stories of disastrous quality
>> of devices and how punters will be lucky to get their money back.
>>
>> 5) After about 6 months the punters queue up to get their money
>> refunded. 30% of the punters fail to cash in their advances.
>>
>> PURE PROFIT !!!
>>
>> This scam, has been played out many times before with many
>> products..There's a new sucker born everyday and also a new idiot who
>> promotes their Ponzi schemes on mailing lists.
>>
>> Sarbajit
>>
>> NATIONAL CONVENOR
>> India Against Corruption
>> www.indiaagainstcorruption.net.in
>>
>>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org