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A cheap, desi wireless technology lets you call your home AC from your car, start the washing, heat water-and more.
Take a trial run and the first thing you say is: ''Oh! It is so simple.'' It looks like a TV remote, but it can control your airconditioner, washing machine, geyser, and microwave oven. All they need is to be wired with a little circuit. Home networking just a got a boost from the Telecontroller. From what we could see, this short-range wireless device looks technically sound. And international white goods manufacturers are already talking to Sonia Shrivastava, 29, director of a small Delhi company called Third Eye Solutions, whose 15-member team worked on the remote for a year. Running the home out of one remote from anywhere is one of the holy grails of consumer electronics. It's not just a remote though. Shrivastava put together a smorgasboard of software that will let you call up home while driving back from office. A voice response system (like the railways or telephone services) allows you to switch on the air-conditioner, set its temperature, start the washing machine, or boil water for coffee. Some wireless-enabled refrigerators in the West cost more than Rs.1.5 lakh. The input cost to add the basic Telecontroller to a white goods product is Rs 195 (approximately $4). With its present design, eight devices can be controlled through the Telecontroller. But with applications being worked in lighting, security, and other areas, it will soon be compatible with more devices. ''A customer who buys a telecontroller-enabled product, would like to buy the next product which is similarly enabled. That also helps promote brand loyalty,'' says Shrivastava, a science graduate. The idea first came to Shrivastava while reading about wireless technologies. Among the first things she did was file for a patent in India. Separate patents have been filed in the US and Europe. While looking for guidance, Shrivastava landed at IIT , Delhi, where she met Prof Rajendar Bahl, an expert in signal processing. Bahl helped her with the design of the product and is now both an advisor to and a shareholder in the company. ''With no infrastructure required, this product has a good potential,'' says Prof Bahl. Watch this page. -Ashutosh Sinha GLOBALISATION
Instep may sound like a training programme for aspiring ballerinas; it is Infosys' two-year old effort at going multi-cultural. Every year, for the past two, the software major has visited schools in the US and Europe-this year, for instance, it did Wharton, MIT, Amherst, and Essec Business School (where Sandrine Rol is a MBA-student)-and hired interns for two-three month projects. This year, it picked 22 interns from 800 applicants. Rol sees herself moving to Australia for a specialised qualification in finance, and ''maybe work for Infosys' Australian operations later''. Employment isn't the only thing Infosys has in mind, though. ''In the long-term Instep will help us build a brand with customers, investors, and potential employees,'' says Infosys Managing Director Nandan M. Nilekani. Just in case Rol becomes an investment analyst, then, we all know what she'll have to say about Infosys. Members of parliament, whose last salary-hike was in 1998, have given themselves a 20 per cent increase in pay. That doesn't take into account the value of the prime real-estate they occupy, 27 free air-tickets on IA, unlimited journeys on Indian Railways, free power and water, and 100,000 free telephone calls a year. And even if parliament were to be dissolved, these perquisites stand for the rest of the year. Now, that's job security for you. STEALTH SUCCESS
Bharti, Hutchison, and Batata are wearing bikinis, while we are in a saree. We can't beat them on the ramp.'' The speaker is a despondent Manoj Kohli, the CEO of Escotel Mobile Communications, and he is upset that no one is speaking about his company even though it bagged four (fourth operator) cellular licences in North India, Uttar Pradesh (East), Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan. To most analysts, it was a surprise that Escotel, with three licences, Haryana, Kerala, and Western Uttar Pradesh managed to avoid being taken over in Round I of the cellular consolidation. But if Kohli is disappointed with public perception, he should be thrilled with the sudden interest investors, and investment bankers are displaying in the company. Partner First Pacific, a Hong Kong-based investment company, is reviewing its 49 per cent stake in the company favourably. That comes as manna to a company that needs money (roughly Rs 730.35 crore) to pay fourth operator licence fees, and set up operations in a markets where it will face competition from at least one entrenched rival. The equity route is still open to Escotel. It doesn't boast the multi-tiered investment company structure most cellular operators have adopted to raise money. But the stockmarket is dead, and global telecom investors aren't really looking at India. Indeed, not one transnational TELCO thought it worth its while to participate in the bidding for fourth cellular operator licences. And most large investors in the telecom sector in Asia-IFC, New York Life, Warburg Pincus, and Singapore Telecom-are aligned with Bharti. Fact is, telecom, and Escotel, are the Nandas' great white hope. Once one of India's foremost business groups, Escorts has seen its empire shrink some by its divestment of interests in Escorts Yamaha, a motorcycle manufacturer, and Goetze, an auto components company, to its erstwhile partners. Escotel, with close to 300,000 subscribers in its three existing circles isn't in the same league as Bharti, or the BPL-Birla-AT&T-Tata combine, but it does make operating profits (Kohli won't say how much). ''The company's always considered itself as a serious telecom player,'' says an investment banker. ''Nothing has come of it, but, they have, at some stage of discussion or the other, been part of most recent telecom deals that have happened in India.'' If Escotel manages to find interested investors, there's no reason why it shouldn't continue to be a small (not in real terms but in relative ones) but significant player in the cellular business. If not, well, some analysts are already talking of what a fine takeover target it will make for the BPL-AT&T-Birla-Tata combine. -Suveen K. Sinha TELECOM I will not let it happen so long as I have my job,'' vows a lobbyist determined to prevent a fixed service provider armed with Wireless in Local Loop (WiLL) from offering long distance telephony services. If he keeps his job, it will push private WiLL services a step closer to irrelevance. Early this year, riding on the back of basic telephony, WiLL seemed a passport for easy entry into mobile telephony. The licence fees were low; and the share of long distance revenue to be remitted to DoT for interconnection was 40 per cent against 95 per cent for cellular.
Better still, with a tariff of Rs 1.20 for a three-minute outgoing call and zero for incoming ones, there seemed to be a sea of waiting customers out there. No wonder, 132 applications were received for 21 basic circles in March 2001. That was then. Now, Bharti Enterprises is keeping only half of its eight LoIs (Letters of Intent); Tata Teleservices no more than eight of its 15. Cash-strapped HFCL and Aircell Digilink may opt out of the race altogether. That leaves Reliance Industries, which has taken licences for all its 15 LoIs. But the company doesn't seem too bullish on a service with excessive retail interface. It may choose to become primarily an infrastructure provider, capitalising on its 115-city optic fibre backbone project. Ironically, changing regulation, which had made WiLL such a rage, is only unmaking it. The interconnect percentage has been raised to 95 per cent. And WiLL phones won't be allowed to roam out of the short distance calling area. To put things in perspective, Punjab has 55 SDCAs (or early areas). Sans sops, the capital-intensive WiLL, with its long gestation, cannot be viable at the projected tariff. Not when pitted against superior GSM networks and a Bharat Sanchar Nigam supplementing its fixed network with will. If the WiLL operator also operated long distance services, the interconnect regime will have no bearing and one service could subsidise the other. But if the services were to be run by two separate companies, at least one will be deep in the red even though the two together could achieve overall profitability. And to raise funds for the one in red will be quite a task, especially since not much of it is available for telecom projects these days. -Suveen K. Sinha
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