A good story of inovation and spunk....originated in Canada....
How a Montreal company won the race to build the world's cheapest tablet
IAIN MARLOW Globe and Mail Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011
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Somewhere in the sky between Amritsar and Toronto, Suneet Singh Tuli has just finished an in-flight vegetarian meal and is preparing to get some sleep. He is in first class, the only way the 6-foot-2 Brampton, Ontario-based businessman can accommodate a gruelling travel schedule that sees him require a fresh passport every 18 months. Before he drifts off, though, he picks up his copy of The Economic Times of India to catch up on the news.
And there, buried in its pink pages, is where he sees it: A tiny news brief announcing the Indian government’s extension of a contract tender to build an ultracheap tablet computer for the masses. Suneet, the 43-year-old CEO of a small Canadian wireless device maker called Datawind, knows immediately what this means. India, a country of 1.2 billion people, has the fastest-growing mobile market on the planet. More than 800 million people in India have mobile phones and more than 10 million are signing up each month. Yet the number of Indians with regular access to the Internet is shockingly low: about 10%. The Indian government is banking on a nationally subsidized mobile tablet to help pull millions of its disconnected citizens online and into the modern economy. For entrepreneurs like Suneet, who focus on low-cost digital products for the disenfranchised, markets like India (and China, Asia, Africa and Latin America) are what’s referred to as the “next billion.” And they are huge.
As soon as his plane touches down in wintry Toronto, Suneet flips open his laptop to Google the Indian state’s desired specifications. They are almost identical to those found in a super-affordable tablet that Datawind is designing at its Montreal office. “It was eerie,” Suneet recalls. “The specs were so close.”
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How a Montreal company won the race to build the world's cheapest tablet
IAIN MARLOW Globe and Mail Thursday, Dec. 29, 2011
Article Link
Somewhere in the sky between Amritsar and Toronto, Suneet Singh Tuli has just finished an in-flight vegetarian meal and is preparing to get some sleep. He is in first class, the only way the 6-foot-2 Brampton, Ontario-based businessman can accommodate a gruelling travel schedule that sees him require a fresh passport every 18 months. Before he drifts off, though, he picks up his copy of The Economic Times of India to catch up on the news.
And there, buried in its pink pages, is where he sees it: A tiny news brief announcing the Indian government’s extension of a contract tender to build an ultracheap tablet computer for the masses. Suneet, the 43-year-old CEO of a small Canadian wireless device maker called Datawind, knows immediately what this means. India, a country of 1.2 billion people, has the fastest-growing mobile market on the planet. More than 800 million people in India have mobile phones and more than 10 million are signing up each month. Yet the number of Indians with regular access to the Internet is shockingly low: about 10%. The Indian government is banking on a nationally subsidized mobile tablet to help pull millions of its disconnected citizens online and into the modern economy. For entrepreneurs like Suneet, who focus on low-cost digital products for the disenfranchised, markets like India (and China, Asia, Africa and Latin America) are what’s referred to as the “next billion.” And they are huge.
As soon as his plane touches down in wintry Toronto, Suneet flips open his laptop to Google the Indian state’s desired specifications. They are almost identical to those found in a super-affordable tablet that Datawind is designing at its Montreal office. “It was eerie,” Suneet recalls. “The specs were so close.”
More on link
