HP Labs, the IIIT, and Extension Developers in Bangalore

On Tuesday, Chofmann and I had a packed day of activity. I’ve been trying to play catch up on blogging as we are cramming our days with meetings and more meetings. Sorry this comes a bit late…next post will be about Mahiti, a terrific NGO in Bangalore that is spreading FOSS across India. We’re now in Hyderabad, so more updates coming.

I keep talking about the success I’ve had with social networking in organizing meetings, so here’s a specific example. I joined Orkut, posted a lot of information to the Mozilla Firefox (India) community and started to get some scraps to my Orkut profile from enthusiasts in India. One such enthusiast was an extension developer named Bharadwaj who asked me if we had any free time to meet. I couldn’t nail down our Tuesday morning meeting, so I invited him and his friends (all of whom are extension developers) to breakfast at our hotel, The Hotel Chancery. The next hour was an energized discussion about the contributions each of these guys has made. One extension allows you to double-click on any word on a website and a Google search for that word opens in a new tab. Another extension apparently shows a users version of Thunderbird (with personalized settings) inside a tab on Firefox. Web-based Thunderbird? Pretty cool. These three guys were so great and will likely be one of a handful of community contacts in Bangalore. We left with intentions of setting up a Mozilla day with them helping to organize and host. Finally, Sharad, one of the attendees, works for Yahoo! and called me later that afternoon to let me know that a lot of developers at Yahoo! who are contributing to various open source projects really wanted to meet with us. We arranged for a lunch meeting the next day.

After breakfast, we drove through the chaotic pace of the Bangalore traffic to visit the International Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore’s Electronic City. IIIT-B is a technical school highly connected to the industry in Bangalore, attracting many students interested in building their skills at the graduate level. It’s well known for industry collaboration and its master’s and PhD programs. Through a friend, I was able to connect with the Director of Student Placements for IIIT-Bangalore. We presented to about 40 students who are all software developers going for their masters degrees. Students were engaged and wanted to find projects where they can help. Most seemed interested in starting to play around with extension development, while a handful want deeper engagement. JT and I will probably reconnect with them when I get back to see what is possible. We are so excited that the student turnout was as good as it was and that they have some interest in helping.

Finally, we headed over to HP Labs to see what the developers there were working on and if they had any questions for us. After a brief meeting with the lab director, and then a presentation to a team of about 20 hardware and software developers, we closed the day with some interesting tours of new projects. Congratulations to the HP Labs on all they have done. In India, we seem to hear a lot about the “Bottom of the Pyramid”. Maybe you’ve read C.K. Prahalad’s essay on this topic, it’s worth a look. HP Labs is one example of an effort to find some offering to the people of India who are in that “bottom of the pyramid”. What makes the HP Labs a bit different is that they are targeting this segment as a strategic effort to create products that will help enable that emerging market of users to better access IT. One of the most interesting ideas was a gesture keyboard described here. It’s a wonderful way for non-English speakers in India to type in Hindi or other languages For gesture recognition of the keyboard, HP Labs uses The Lipit Toolkit, which is an ope src toolkit. We also discussed the W3C InkML, an open standards group where HP Labs is participating. (http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/ink) They would love to hear about any best practices or receive some guidance about creating and testing a reference implementation in the form of a Firefox extension. Then, we spoke a bit about annotating web pages with ink, and HP labs (along with a lot of other extension developers) has written an extension. They’d really like to explore some educational uses of this, perhaps on top of Wikipedia or other course material. Let me know if you are interested. Before finishing, we also saw their PrintCast technology, which allows users in India to print content that is broadcast over television. This has important implications because many people in India do not have a home PC, but TV penetration is big. This will allow people to get content and print. One example we saw showed a community in India able to print health forms while watching a broadcast informational program.