‘Hyperlocal’: How Community Information is Shared in Rural Societies
Last week I was in a village in the rural hinterlands of West Bengal in India on a field research. I observed that they use a certain interesting method to share the local community information. It is done in a way that uses 'Public Information Landmarks' to distribute and disseminate knowledge. Every village [...]
Clouds for the Masses?
Lately many parallel streams of development in Cloud Computing are making significant progress to bring about a new way of information processing impacting a large number of users, including enterprises and communities around the world. Gartner predicts that "Cloud Application Infrastructure Technology Needs Seven Years to Mature." Gartner said that technologically aggressive application development organizations [...]
Document Format War: Who’s Listening to Those Rants from Users!
The recent debate on the open data standards (between OXML, proposed by Microsoft and ODF from Sun and IBM) has generated many interesting response worldwide particularly from the ‘open source’ proponents. In the age of social protocols for information exchanges & service oriented architecture, this discussion seems more relevant than anything else. Typically in a [...]
Can Television Revolution in India be the Solution to Mass Market Affordable Computing!
In a country that has a very strong media culture, millions of people with their own views, burgeoning TV reality show audiences, it is hardly surprising that the television industry is going through a major digital revolution and opening up exciting design spaces for a truly ubiquitous, interactive and popular medium. It may not [...]
Is ‘Piracy in the Developing World’ taking a leaf out of U.S. history?
Despite many regulatory and institutional crackdown, Intellectual Properties often do not hold fort in the mass markets of the developing world. Products that have been designed with millions of dollars and countless man-hours of investments, get completely broken apart and fed into huge thriving ‘technology flea markets’ of the developing worlds like India and China. [...]
