Saturday, December 22, 2007
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Gujarat Scientists Achievement - Possibility of Optical Computers Soon
Indian physicists trap light in 'nano' soup
India News Science/Health By K.S. Jayaraman, IANS
Bangalore : Indian scientists have demonstrated how to trap and retrieve light using a soup of micro and nano sized magnetic spheres - a major milestone in the path toward developing optical computers.The researchers claim that their unique mixture of tiny particles works at room temperature, holds photons - the particles of light - for far longer than other systems, and can also be tuned with a magnet to store any wavelength of visible light. The discovery made by a team led by Rasbindu Mehta at Bhavnagar University in Gujarat was first announced in the November issue of the Current Science journal published by the Indian Academy of Science in Bangalore.
Now, a report published in the latest issue of the Royal Chemical Society of London's journal Chemistry World says the discovery could pave the way for photonic 'microchips' that use photons for processing optical information in the same way electrons are manipulated in silicon chips in today's electronic devices and computers.For over a decade, scientists have been working towards light-based computing that could be many times faster than electronics as light travels at a speed of approximately 300,000 km per second.
Any microchip designed to process optical signals has to store photons, perhaps by slowing or trapping light in carefully designed crystals. Mehta's team coated micron-size magnetite spheres with oleic acid and dispersed them through a ferrofluid, which is a suspension of much smaller magnetic nanoparticles.When an external magnetic field was applied to the fluid, which was held in a glass cell, laser light passing through the medium was trapped inside. Photons escaped when the field was switched off.
"It is fantastic," said Hema Ramachandran, who heads the photonics unit at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, and was one of several physicists who witnessed the demonstration. "It was a chance discovery," said Mehta's colleague Rajesh Patel.
While investigating the optical properties of their transparent fluid, the researchers noticed that in a certain magnetic field range, light scattering - both forward and backward - became zero.
"We thought the light got trapped inside," said Patel. "So, we switched off the laser (which was shining light through the system) and then the magnetic field, and there it was - a flash of colour lighting up our dark room."
Mehta told IANS that his group is yet to develop a theory to explain this novel phenomenon. He believes that the spheres are aligned by the magnetic field and form micro cavities - filled by the ferrofluid - in which the photons get trapped, resonating back and forth. Changing the external magnetic field alters the refractive index of the cavities that in turn decides which wavelength of light is trapped by the system.
And what is more, according to Mehta, photons can be stored for as long as the magnetic field is switched on. "This is the first visual evidence of storage and retrieval of light for a long and controllable duration. In all other reports, storage time of photons is restricted to a few nanoseconds," he said .Experiments by physicists in the US have involved stopping light altogether by using a gas of sodium or rubidium atoms chilled to near absolute zero, though that system is too complex and not practical for microchips.
Although Mehta's team seems to have chanced on a method for taming light that is simple, inexpensive and unsophisticated, its practical application is still years away.
India News Science/Health By K.S. Jayaraman, IANS
Bangalore : Indian scientists have demonstrated how to trap and retrieve light using a soup of micro and nano sized magnetic spheres - a major milestone in the path toward developing optical computers.The researchers claim that their unique mixture of tiny particles works at room temperature, holds photons - the particles of light - for far longer than other systems, and can also be tuned with a magnet to store any wavelength of visible light. The discovery made by a team led by Rasbindu Mehta at Bhavnagar University in Gujarat was first announced in the November issue of the Current Science journal published by the Indian Academy of Science in Bangalore.
Now, a report published in the latest issue of the Royal Chemical Society of London's journal Chemistry World says the discovery could pave the way for photonic 'microchips' that use photons for processing optical information in the same way electrons are manipulated in silicon chips in today's electronic devices and computers.For over a decade, scientists have been working towards light-based computing that could be many times faster than electronics as light travels at a speed of approximately 300,000 km per second.
Any microchip designed to process optical signals has to store photons, perhaps by slowing or trapping light in carefully designed crystals. Mehta's team coated micron-size magnetite spheres with oleic acid and dispersed them through a ferrofluid, which is a suspension of much smaller magnetic nanoparticles.When an external magnetic field was applied to the fluid, which was held in a glass cell, laser light passing through the medium was trapped inside. Photons escaped when the field was switched off.
"It is fantastic," said Hema Ramachandran, who heads the photonics unit at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, and was one of several physicists who witnessed the demonstration. "It was a chance discovery," said Mehta's colleague Rajesh Patel.
While investigating the optical properties of their transparent fluid, the researchers noticed that in a certain magnetic field range, light scattering - both forward and backward - became zero.
"We thought the light got trapped inside," said Patel. "So, we switched off the laser (which was shining light through the system) and then the magnetic field, and there it was - a flash of colour lighting up our dark room."
Mehta told IANS that his group is yet to develop a theory to explain this novel phenomenon. He believes that the spheres are aligned by the magnetic field and form micro cavities - filled by the ferrofluid - in which the photons get trapped, resonating back and forth. Changing the external magnetic field alters the refractive index of the cavities that in turn decides which wavelength of light is trapped by the system.
And what is more, according to Mehta, photons can be stored for as long as the magnetic field is switched on. "This is the first visual evidence of storage and retrieval of light for a long and controllable duration. In all other reports, storage time of photons is restricted to a few nanoseconds," he said .Experiments by physicists in the US have involved stopping light altogether by using a gas of sodium or rubidium atoms chilled to near absolute zero, though that system is too complex and not practical for microchips.
Although Mehta's team seems to have chanced on a method for taming light that is simple, inexpensive and unsophisticated, its practical application is still years away.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Your personal tutor is just a click away
In an age when knowledge commands a premium and time is money, what better way than a person who can teach to do it over long-distance communications and reach more people, do it in an easy way and make more money? And what better way for a student to save on real-world tution fees?
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Your personal tutor is just a click away
In an age when knowledge commands a premium and time is money, what better way than a person who can teach to do it over long-distance communications and reach more people, do it in an easy way and make more money? And what better way for a student to save on real-world tution fees?
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Your personal tutor is just a click away
In an age when knowledge commands a premium and time is money, what better way than a person who can teach to do it over long-distance communications and reach more people, do it in an easy way and make more money? And what better way for a student to save on real-world tution fees?
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Online tutoring, the business of using telecommunications or the Internet to make teaching and learning convenient, is a bit like a call centre offering support to a customer. But here, the customer is a student and the person at the other end is a qualified teacher imparting skills.
With online portals offering affordable educational support for students, it is a win-win situation for students, their parents as well as teachers working for these portals.
Launched a month ago, Delhi-based Extramarks.com Private Limited is a call centre that caters to NCERT course related queries of students of 6th to 12th standard students. Apart from students, parents and teachers can also register for free and access the community and share their queries and concerns with other members. Unlike a typical call centre in which phoning in is the normal way of getting queries resolved, at Extramarks a pupil can post her queries or doubts and get them answered by expert teachers.
Extramarks uses a points-based system for students and teachers earn on the basis of what they do on its website. For instance, asking a query from a teacher costs you 30 points whereas you earn 5 points if you log in to the website daily.
One can also buy 300 points for Rs 99, which means you can get 10 questions solved for Rs 100. It is a bit like asking an astrologer questions and paying according to the number of queries.
The same number of questions solved with a tutor at home would take more than an hour, costing almost eight-nine times the money. Extramarks.com's future plans include introducing virtual classrooms using white board technology within the next three months and starting their services in the US and UK markets by next six months. "We are also creating our own content," Rohit Jain, CEO, Extramarks.com told Hindustan Times.
Leading education content provider company Educomp Solutions, which is a stock market listed company, currently serves over 3.6 million users across India, US and Singapore. It launched its online learning initiative through a portal, www.mathguru.com in July last year. The portal also addresses students studying in standards 6 to 12 and helps them solve their maths-related queries. However, the payment model involves an annual subscription of Rs 2,023.
"We have 15,000 registered users on Mathguru and are expecting the number to reach 25,000 by March 2008," Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp India Private Limited told Hindustan Times.
While Mathguru is specific for one subject, students looking for guidance on solving queries related to physics, chemistry, general science and French and competitive examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), IIT's entrance exam or medical college entrance exams have www.learninghour.com. Here, a six-month course for medical entrance costs Rs 7,500. For other subjects, the cost varies between Rs 1,000, Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,500 per month for 10 sessions (of one hour each) per subject depending on whether a student wants to study in a group of three, two or individually.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The Next Wave of Globalization: Offshoring R&D to India and China
Stephanie Overby, CIO
October 31, 2007
Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa is up front about his use of offshoring and importing foreign talent in a previous professional life as founder and CEO of two technology companies. "I was one of the first to outsource software development to Russia in the early '90s. I was one of the first to use H-1B visas to bring workers to the U.S.A.," Wadhwa says. "Why did I do that? Because it was cheaper."
That tactic is even more lucrative for corporations today, says Wadhwa: "When you have a person on H-1B waiting for a green card, you have them captive for six to 10 years."
Wadhwa, who was addressing an audience at Harvard University, where he is now a Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School's Labor and Worklife Program , says outsourcing work to lower-cost countries and importing temporary foreign workers is all part of a larger globalization transformation that is happening "an order of magnitude faster than the industrial revolution." According to Wadhwa, the ramifications of globalization will be much greater than the industrial revolution. "It will impact our standard of living here in the U.S. in the next five to 10 years."
For better or worse? That depends on whom you ask, says Wadhwa. And it may be beside the point. "Globalization is the reality," Wadhwa says. "Whether you like it or not, it's happening."
It's no longer just "low-end" work like call center positions or data entry or even midlevel programming that's being shipped to China and India. High-value research and development work also is moving offshore, says Pete Engardio, a BusinessWeek senior editor who has been writing about globalization for 20 years in addition to being a Harvard Law School Wertheim Fellow. And while cost is still the major driver, it's also about where talent and capabilities are available - and where they are available in mass.
Challenging Conventional Wisdom About Engineering Talent, Visa Arguments
In fact, globalization is happening so fast, academics like Wadhwa (also an executive in residence at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering can't keep pace. Inspired by his students, Wadhwa decided to fill the void with some research of his own. "I had four or five students come up to me one week and ask, 'What courses can we take that will make us outsourcing-proof?'" says Wadhwa. "These students were paying megabucks to study there and should be very well sought after and yet they were worried about their jobs. That didn't make sense to me." He and his students began to explore what he describes as commonly accepted misinformation about graduation rates around the globe and the "skills shortage" forcing U.S. companies to go abroad.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, America matriculates 70,000 students with undergraduate degrees in engineering every year, versus 350,000 produced by India and 600,000 produced by China. But China's numbers, which Wadhwa calls "propaganda," include "short cycle" degrees and rely on a looser definition of engineering. "The Chinese government told the provinces they had to produce more engineering degrees," Wadhwa says, "and the provinces gave them what they wanted."
India's numbers also include two-year diplomas. As a result, India and China can promote themselves as engineering-degree machines but "the vast majority of the graduates are unemployable," he says. (Wadhwa is currently getting a mix of cheers and jeers for his BusinessWeek.com column from Oct. 26, "The Science Education Myth", in which he cites an Urban Institute study that claims that U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering graduates than the job market can support.)
As for the talent crunch argument that Bill Gates and others employ when lobbying for more foreign worker visas, Wadhwa also pushes back. He and his students surveyed 78 leaders at U.S. companies that were outsourcing high-tech work. The majority said they had trouble finding qualified candidates in the U.S. However those same respondents recorded job acceptance rates of greater than 60 percent, with those rates either remaining constant or increasing, and time to fill an open position of four months or less. There's a shortage all right, says Wadhwa, but it's "a shortage of engineers below market price that work day and night like slave labor."
When asked about issues like the productivity and quality of Indian and Chinese employees versus their American counterparts, there was little debate among respondents to Wadhwa's survey. Eight-seven percent said U.S. workers were as productive as or more so than Indian or Chinese workers, and 96 percent said that their U.S. locations produced equal or higher quality work than their centers in China and India. The advantage with U.S. workers, according to survey respondents, included communication skills, understanding of U.S. industry, business acumen, education and proximity. Chinese workers were valued for their low labor cost and willingness to work long hours, while Indian workers were sought after for their low labor cost, work ethic, English skills and technical knowledge.
The View from India, Where R&D is Rising
In spite of the survey respondents' praise of American workers, the offshoring of engineering and IT work to China and India continues for a variety of reasons, including the availability and cost of labor, and its proximity to new product markets.
BusinessWeek's Engardio described for the audience what he saw on his latest trips to Asia. Bangalore, the capital of India's IT industry, is home to Motorola's R&D lab, where employees designed 40 percent of the value of company's latest RAZR models. Next door at NXP (a company spun off from Philips Semiconductors), workers are designing the chip sets for high definition televisions. General Electric's campus, called the Jack Welch Technology Center, features lovely low-slung buildings, first-class gyms and food courts-and much of GE's product design work. "When I talk to economists or I read a lot of the public discussion of outsourcing, they still draw a lot of distinctions between what's being done 'here' and what's being done 'there,'" says Engardio. "They'll say the high-end stuff is done here (in the U.S.). The low-end, repetitive stuff is done 'there.'" That's not true, says Engardio. GE and Motorola aren't just employing coders or call center workers abroad, "they're employing scientists."
North of Bangalore, Hyderabad has a booming biotech industrial zone, says Engardio, that stretches for miles, housing 37 contract research organizations. "Three years ago, you could not get a major pharmaceutical company to say they would shift R&D to India," Engardio says. "Today they're doing it. Big pharma is gearing up big time."
The same day Wadhwa and Engardio conducted their seminar at Harvard, General Motors announced its plans to build an advanced research center in Shanghai to develop hybrid and other leading-edge car technologies. "There are great quantitative and qualitative leaps in what is being doing in Asia," Engardio says.
And it's not just massive multinational corporations setting up R&D shops in Asia. Top-tier Indian IT service providers, once known for pure software development, are going after R&D business too, says Engardio. Satyam has set up a huge, industrial engineering facility. HCL Technologies is doing avionics work for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner .
How is all this high-end work getting done if the vast majority of engineering undergraduates in India are indeed "unemployable" out of school and India produces fewer than 1,000 PhDs a year (compared to nearly 8,000 in the U.S.)?
For one thing, says Wadhwa, the multinationals and third-party contractors are more than happy to train local graduates who may not be ready to hit the ground running. Some have set up their own six-month "finishing schools" to do just that. The problem with post-graduate degree production in India is proving to be no barrier, says Wadhwa, because many of the researchers and scientists currently working there were educated in the U.S. Due to the difficulty of obtaining work visas or green cards in the United States, these workers have sought greener pastures in India, China and elsewhere, he says.
For its part, China is actually working on improving its educational system the way it improved its manufacturing processes over the last two decades, according to Wadhwa. But India doesn't have to produce its own post-graduate degrees, says Engardio. "We're talking about chemists and molecular biologists with master's degrees or PhDs coming from U.S. to India where it's not doom and gloom," Engardio says. "There's a lot of opportunity."
While R&D Goes Offshore, Innovation Stays. For Now.
When you're talking about offshoring, Engardio says, the conversation is no longer just about costs. It's also about where talent and capabilities are available. Though cost-cutting remains the driver behind offshoring, Engardio says this work won't come back to the U.S. as India's wages or other costs rise. "The shift is permanent," Engardio says.
In other words, American workers may be terrific. But they're expensive. And there aren't enough of them, according to Engardio. If the U.S. held on to more of the foreign-born students awarded advanced degrees, there might not be as many of them available in India or China either, according to Wadhwa.
One of the drivers of this R&D shift overseas is the rise of virtual prototyping. That ability to design and test machines on a computer has made design work more mobile. And engineers trained in the necessary software are plentiful in India. That's good, says Engardio, because these companies need "lots and lots of engineers."
Also integral to the shift of product R&D offshore is the focus on embedded software. Fifty percent of the value in new cars, for example, is in the dashboard, Engardio says. "There's a tremendous need for engineering and software expertise," he says, "and the Indian IT services companies like Wipro and Tata have that. They are now the biggest industrial design companies in the world."
The dynamic turns R&D offshoring into a slightly different numbers game. "If you want to keep up and have to introduce this kind of innovation and the myriad services you need to offer, it would be very difficult to do in the U.S. just due to workforce capacity issues," Engardio says.
Then there's the other reason R&D is increasingly headquartered in India and China: proximity to emerging markets. Cisco now has 2,000 people doing R&D in India. "The head of that center sits in an office and looks like a modern day Pharaoh with the scale of building under way around him," says Engardio. "He says in five years, they will have 10,000 people. And by the way, I'm not looking for average engineers. I want innovators. These are no cheap bodies." Why? He's not looking at the U.S. as his major market for product sales. He's looking at emerging technology greenfields markets like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. "All the new developments outfitted with next generation telecom networks we'll never see in the U.S.," says Engardio. "The next generation of services is going to be in Asia." So Cisco is situating the design work in India. "Is it going to work out?" asks Engardio. "Who knows? But it seems like the right bet."
Anything that a company's customer touches and feels will remain harder to offshore to India, China or anywhere else, says Engardio. And perhaps, most important, so too the innovation itself. The product ideas happen at headquarters and are executed elsewhere.
"The only thing (India) isn't doing is owning the intellectual property. The multinationals are pulling the strings and staying at the top of the food chain, which is why the debate over whether this is good or bad for the United States is very, very murky," says Engardio, "The American companies have India working for us, in a way."
© 2007 CXO Media Inc.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
SMART MONEY FOR INDIA'S RURAL POOR
India’s Finance Ministry and Planning Commission are looking into ways of using electronic smart cards to transform the distribution of relatively small amounts of government money to India’s 220 million people who live below the poverty line, and maybe to 200-300 million more who are only marginally better off. This would make it much more difficult for bureaucrats, politicians and middlemen to siphon off the funds as they move down the distribution chain.
“We already have the technology today to do this and it would be feasible to use it for putting money in the pockets of the rural poor within 18 to 24 months,” K.V.Kamath, managing director of ICICI Bank, a leading Indian financial institution, said in Delhi last week.
The Smart card system would not have been possible a few years ago because there was not sufficient telecom connectivity. But India now has 190 million cell phone users - rising by more than six million a month - plus 40 million fixed lines. This increased connectivity to remote areas opens up various possibilities for smart card use.
In a parallel technological development, ICICI is introducing biometric smart cards that enable people to identify themselves by their thumbprints at ATM and other terminals. It expects to have 220,000 cards in use by next March (justifying a claim Kamath sometimes makes about ICICI really being a technology company that’s into banking).
Other banks, including Citibank, are experimenting, but are not so far advanced. Adding to the potential network, state governments are opening 100,000 internet kiosks in rural areas, often linked by cell phone circuits, by the end of this year. India’s electorate, totaling 650 million, voted electronically in the 2004 general election, which demonstrated the practical potential of information technology, and national identity and social security numbers are being progressively issued, which could be used to access digitized data.
Put all that together, and India is on its way to transforming banking for the 70% of its 1.1 billion population who live in rural areas, once ways of ensuring security for mobile phone and smart card transactions have been worked out. Ideas about how the government could use the technology to improve what the experts call the “social delivery mechanisms” of poverty programs emerged in Delhi last week, when the debate at the launch of a book on economic reforms switched to India’s most crucial problem – how to deliver hand-outs and development aid without a large proportion leaking.
Lord Meghnad Desai, a professor at the London School of Economics, suggested a dollar a day could be delivered via smart cards – he later amended that to a more modest dollar a week, which would add about 14% to low-paid laborers’ weekly wages. N.K.Singh, a former top bureaucrat, whose collection of Indian Express newspaper articles was being launched as a book called “The Politics of Change,” later suggested that the cards should not just be used for the odd dollar, but for all government payments to the poor.
Currently billions of dollars a year are distributed by elected village officials and low level bureaucrats, who routinely take some of the money for themselves, sometimes denying money to authorized recipients. In some states, as an experiment, 200-rupee monthly payments are being credited to destitute old age pensioners’ post office accounts, reducing the opportunity for leakage. The idea now is that aid recipients would be allocated smart cards credited with the handouts. The cards would be swiped through small electronics terminals and authorized officials would hand out the money. That would still leave room for the officials to bully recipients and deny them their full allocations, maybe demanding a commission, but it would be simpler to administer than post office accounts and far less leakage-prone than the current system.
Palaniappan Chidambaram, the Finance Minister, agreed at last week’s meeting that smart cards could be used in this way. Yesterday he told me that a good starting point could be to issue smart cards for the government’s popular Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which has been allocated a minimum of $3 billion this year. “The technology is proven. We should quickly move to implementation,” he said. Some senior officials are concerned about how to persuade tens of thousands of bureaucrats, who gain by administering current programs, to give up their lucrative work. Chidambaram is not sure that this is a problem, but some of his officials tell me the process could take several years. The technology, it seems, is almost ready, but the bureaucrats may not be so keen.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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