|
|
|
|
|
       
|
TECHNOLOGY Please Buy Me Products supporting Indian languages promise to take computing to the masses. Problem is, are the masses ready?
It's a mantra the hardware guys have pursued for a long time: build a computing device that's as cheap as a colour television and can talk the language of the local kirana store owner. It does appear this could happen as increasingly cheap devices hit the market. Early this month, Pune-based I2IT Ltd launched Nicetop, with the hope that the Rs 20,000-a-unit device will be the mass computing machine that India is looking for. No monitor, keyboard, or mouse. But it comes with licensed Windows software, and an inteface in four India languages (more are being added). Says Vijay Bhatkar, advisor to I2IT: ''We expect the price to come down to Rs 15,000 when the volumes pick up and it is manufactured in India (it's made in Taiwan now).''
Bangalore-based iNabling Technologies has cut down costs even further for its anytime, anywhere email device, called i-Station. At Rs 6,900 plus an annual subscription of Rs 1,200, the device hopes to be the answer to the email needs of rural India. However, it is available only in Kannada and English interface, something which is being addressed by the company. ''These are uniquely Indian solutions for Indian needs,'' says Vinnie Mehta, Director, Manufacturing Association of Information Technology, the association for hardware manufacturers in India. But for every device that hits the market, there are admittedly innovative cousins that are struggling along. Innomedia Technologies, headed by Mohan Tambe, formerly a government technocrat, dreamed of converting the television into an interactive medium. Result? Chois, an advanced set-top box really, that allows you to demand pay-per-view films, music, or other content from the cable operators. With an investment of Rs 6,000 at the subscribers' end, and another Rs 5 lakh in a Chois server by the cable operator, it could work. Only, in the last four years-a lifetime in the tech world-the device hasn't moved beyond some suburbs in Bangalore. The well-publicised Simputer, a hand-held computing device developed by the Simputer Trust in Bangalore, is still looking for a company willing to manufacture the device. It works great-the trust has demonstrated how it can be used by farmers for agricultural information-and is likely to cost no more than Rs 9,000, but for now, its makers are wondering how to get it to market. -Ashutosh Sinha OPPORTUNITY
Don't be surprised if Indian pharmaceutical companies sponsor a 'Schumer for President' campaign. For, US Senator Charles Schumer has called for ciprofloxacin, the generic form of Cipro, to be made available in the US, despite German pharma-giant Bayer AG holding a US patent for the drug till December 9, 2003. Anthrax can also be cured by other antibiotics like penicillin, tetracycline, and doxycycline, but ciprofloxacin is the preferred choice. Schumer in fact took the trouble of calling up the US office of Ranbaxy Laboratories, one of over 80 Indian companies that have been manufacturing and selling Ciprofloxacin in India for a decade, thanks to the country's lenient patent laws. ''We told him that we could supply 20 million tablets a month starting December this year,'' says a Ranbaxy spokesperson. The company, incidentally, is only Indian company armed with a tentative approval from the US Federal Drug Authority for the generic version of the drug. Ranbaxy is not actively lobbying its case, but another Indian company is. Yusuf K. Hamied, the chairman of Cipla-the same company that created ripples with its low-priced aids medicines-has openly pitched an opportunity to supply ciprofloxacin in the US. And the Indian government has made a gift of $1 million worth generic Cipro to the US. Indian companies sell Cipro formulations in India at less than 5 per cent of the American price of the drug. At the moment, though, it looks unlikely that the US will allow generic Cipro-sales of the drug in the US exceeded $1 billion last year-anytime soon. A CNN report quoted a spokesman for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the nation's drug stockpile, as saying: ''We'll certainly take a look at the senator's proposal, but we don't see the need right now... Right now we have enough Cipro and other antibiotics for the contingencies before the American public.'' Meanwhile, Bayer plans to reopen one of its plants in Germany in November to increase its production of Cipro by 25 per cent. It has already increased the workweek from 40 hours to 168 hours in its Connecticut facility and moved more machines to the Cipro line to meet demand, which has swelled some 80-90 per cent this past fortnight. Last fortnight, Canada first over-rode Bayer's patent and ordered a million tablets of a generic ciprofloxacin from a Canadian company before deciding to respect Bayer's patent. And US Federal laws do have a provision under which the government can override patents. In the 1960s, it did so in the case of a tranquilliser, meprobamate, preferring a Danish generics manufacturer over Carter-Wallace, which held the US patent for the drug simply because the former charged 95 per cent less than the latter. But a repeat of that with Cipro could encourage several countries, especially in the third world, to cite cost constraints to repeal patents on drugs used to treat aids or tuberculosis. -Suveen K. Sinha Celebrity
Chick
This isn't one of those sententious pieces that seeks to display chagrin over how two marketers could pick Fardeen Khan, a man nabbed by Mumbai's Narcotic Control Bureau with some coke on him. Rather, it is about the Indian marketing fraternity's new-found maturity in its choice of models. Post the match-fixing controversy, most marketers dropped hot-tubers Mohammed Azharuddin and Hansie Cronje. And Michael Jackson did lose out on some deals post a child-abuse scandal. But if Pepsi and Provogue have signed on Khan, there's a reason. ''In India it is the 'celebritiness' of the individual that is being leveraged by brands, not the celebrity as a person, as is the case in the West,'' explains Santosh Desai, Executive Vice President, McCann Erickson. Surely, Indian celebs have reason to cheer at the distinction between personal and professional lives our marketers have been able to define. -Shailesh Dobhal MEDIA VEHICLE
You are not alone; not even in the relative privacy of an ATM outlet. ICICI Bank, which boasts 610 of the 3,800-odd ATM outlets in the country, and hopes to account for two of the six that will be installed every day in the next one year plans to garner some extra income by leveraging the advertising potential of the teller machines. Thus, ICICI Bank's media agent Quantum has sold screen-space to companies like Hyundai, IBM, GM, Cadbury's, and Essar Cellphone. ''It is the subliminal kind of message that works as the customer is fully focused on the screen,'' says B.V.R. Subbu, Director (Sales & Marketing), Hyundai. The numbers may seem inconsequential-each of ICICI Bank's ATM's does 281 transactions a day on an average-but Quantum and ICICI Bank are hoping advertisers will be attracted by the quality of audience they can reach. Still, it remains to be seen whether the costs -ICICI's advertising rates range from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10 lakh, depending on the number of ATMs chosen and the frequency of the message-will pay-off for advertisers in the long run, or whether this trend will go the way of banner advertising. -Moinak Mitra
|
|
Issue Contents Write to us Subscription Syndication INDIA
TODAY | INDIA
TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS
TODAY | © Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
