Moblin is short for ‘mobile Linux‘, is an open sourceoperating system and application stack for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, and nettops. Built around the Intel Atom processor, current builds are designed to minimize boot times and power consumption to create a netbook and MID-centric operating system. The netbook/desktop version of Moblin currently supports other chipsets based on the SSSE3 instruction set, such as the Core2 and some Celeron processors.
On Thursday, 22 October, 10am to 4pm, in Le Meridien, Pune, Intel will hold a free, seminar to help developers understand this platform, the surrounding ecosystem, and also to meet key players in this ecosystem. Basically, any Linux/mobile developer interested in building rich internet and media experiences on mobile devices (phones, handhelds, netbooks, nettops, in-vehicle infotainment and embedded systems) should attend to understand the Moblin ecosystem, and also to meet key players like Novell, Phoenix, Wind River and explore new business opportunities.
In addition, this event will also talk about Intel’s Atom Developer program. Here is the pitch for that program:
The netbook has become a one of the most popular consumer devices in the market today, but its true potential has been limited by applications that are not optimized for its mobility and small screen size. The Intel Atom Developer program helps developers to create innovative new applications for mobile devices using the Atom processor. The program gives developers access to multiple classes of customers, and allows them to target Moblin and Windows based devices using a single toolset. This event will also give an overview of this program, the validation procedure, the APIs and the app marketplace framework.
Details
What: Moblin v2 for Atom roadshow by Intel When: Thursday, 22 Oct 2009, 10am-4pm Where: Le Meridien, Pune Registration and Fees: This is free for all to attend. Register here.
What: Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents an overview and group discussion on Google Android with Sushrut Bidwai When: Saturday, 6th June. 4pm to 6pm Where: Synerzip. Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189, Near Mirch Masala Restaurant , Opp Vandevi Temple, Karve Nagar (Map). Registration and Fees: The event is free for all. Register here.
A Pune-based company has been running a SMS newsletter service for mobile phone owners in rural Maharashtra dedicated to local news for the last two years. This service reaches out to nearly 300 communities spread across 25 districts in the state.
And most importantly it has become a source of income for the rural youth, who call themselves ‘mobile’ journalists. They are paid Rs Rs 3,000 to Rs 6,000 per month.
“I had no job before I started this SMS newsletter in Parbhani. This venture has given me name, fame and a steady income,” said Ahmed Siddique, editorial coordinator for Parbhani district, who joined SMSONE Media Services Pvt Ltd last year.
“The concept was awarded the social innovation award by the The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) on February 11,” said said Ravi Ghate of SMSONE, who began the newsletter by training 300 unemployed youth in mobile journalism.
See the full article. The video embedded above has the founder Ravi Ghate giving a good overview of how the whole thing works.
This post is an introduction to the world of mobile and embedded software, which is a sub-discipline of software with a bunch of interesting quirks of its own. This introductory post is a first in a series of posts by Mayur Tendulkar on his Gizmos and Geeks blog, and we are reprinting selected posts here with permission.
Unknowingly in our day-to-day life, we use many devices. Right from Microwave Oven/Electric Stove, Mixer/Grinder, Heater/Geyser, Refrigerator, TVs, Calculators, Cameras, Mobile Phones and what not. And surprisingly – all of these are embedded devices 🙂
Welcome to the world of Mobile and Embedded Devices. In this world, we’re going to get introduced to embedded systems and how we can write software applications which will run on these systems. Imagine, having a device at home, which will obey your orders – say, switch off Mains Supply, Switch off Gas Supply OR as soon as I enter – open the garage door!
Yes, we can do it very well, using embedded systems.
An embedded system is a system (hardware + software combo) which is designed to perform a particular task. Unlike our desktops, which can be used for gaming, business analysis, documentation, software development, entertainment or any other task, embedded systems are built to execute a particular function. Just like cameras are used for photography and not for listening to music, while MP3 players are good for listening music & not for taking pictures.
Sometimes, these embedded systems are categorized as:
Hard Real-Time Systems : In these type of embedded systems, every second is important. If some action needs to be taken at a particular time – then it has to. Example of this system can be controller in atomic station – where, if it doesn’t operate at specified time, there can be a major havoc. Another example can be a pacemaker, which monitors patient data. If it shows data with delay of few seconds, the life of the patient will be at toss.
Soft Real-Time System : With these types of embedded systems, its totally okay if there is short delay in response – but there should be response. For example, toaster, if there is short delay, perhaps, toast will burn-out, but its okay. We can put another bread into it. But we can’t use Soft-Real Time systems in atomic station or to monitor patient data.
Just like computers, where we need Operating System or software to communicate with the hardware, we need some software which will run on-top of this embedded system and will provide its control to us. Otherwise how it will understand that – I’m at the door and that system needs to open the door. How?
For this reason, we need to program a software which will run and sit on top of this embedded system and will provide communication mechanism between end-user and system.
Hence, building or designing an embedded system mainly involves two parts:
Designing of a Hardware
Designing of a Software for that Hardware (which will include Operating System, Drivers, etc…) & sometimes, if required, it also includes building specialized applications which run on these embedded operating systems.
In ensuing blog-posts we’ll get to know about these technologies and will cover Windows Mobile development in depth.
Happy Coding 🙂
About the Author – Mayur Tendulkar
Mayur Tendulkar is a student doing his 2nd Year in Electrical Engineering and a Microsoft Student Partner Lead. He likes coding applications (hmm some what), biking, trying out gizmos, doing night-outs… Basically so many things that STUDENTS enjoy. You can follow him on twitter.
Pune-based startup Maverick Mobile launched their latest product, Maverick Secure Mobile (MSM), at the DEMO conference earlier this week. DEMO is one of the premier conferences for new startups to launch their products. A video of their presentation is available from the DEMO site.
Maverick Mobile is a Pune-based mobile services and products company. Maverick develops mobile applications (for example a mobile security application, and a mobile dictionary), mobile games (about a dozen of them), and also mobile content (mp3s, music videos, ringtones, wallpapers etc.)
Maverick Secure Mobile is a security application that protects your handset as well as the data stored in it. Using MSM, one can retrieve the entire phone book remotely from the stolen / lost phone. MSM can also send thief activity reports via SMS on the reporting number. The owner of the device can lock/hang the phone remotely. MSM can be used in case of theft, or for parental control.
This product was launched at DEMOfall conference, September 2008, in San Diego.
In India, Maverick mobile is a first company to launch pre loaded memory cards containing Mp3 songs, video songs video scenes, ring tones, wallpapers, games in retail market.
Maverick has legal tie up with various film distribution houses for selling Bollywood content using through Memory cards.
In the span of 6 months maverick has built more than 50,000 customer base in different states of India.
Maverick has strong distribution network of more than 130 Distributors & 1000 retailers.
It’s the middle of the night, and your prepaid phone runs out of credits, and you need to make a call urgently. Don’t you wish that you could re-charge your prepaid mobile over the internet? Pune-based startup ApnaBill allows you to do just that. Fire up a browser, select your operator (they have partnerships with all major service providers), pay from your bank account or by credit card, and receive an SMS/e-mail with the recharge PIN. Done. They have extended this model to satellite TV (TataSky, Dish), with more such coming out of the pipeline.
PuneTech interviewed co-founder and lead developer Mayank Jain where he talks about various things, from technical challenges (does your hosting provider have an upper limit on number of emails you can send out per day?), to unexpected problems that will slow down your startup (PAN card!), and advice for other budding entrepreneurs (start the paperwork for registration/bank accounts as soon as possible).
On to the interview.
Overview of ApnaBill:
Simply put, ApnaBill.com is a online service for facilitating Prepaid and Postpaid Utility Bill payments.
Available now, are Prepaid utility bill payments like prepaid mobile recharge and prepaid vouchers for Tata Sky, World Phone, Dish TV etc.
Organizationally, ApnaBill.com is an offshoot of Four Fractions. It aims at being the single point of contact between service providers and customers, thereby minimizing transactional costs. The benefit of this is directly passed onto our customers as we do NOT charge any transaction costs from our customers. Its an ApnaBill.com policy and would be applicable to all of our product line.
Apart from regular Utility Bill Payments, we are also exploring some seemingly blue ocean verticals which have not been targeted by the online bill payment sector – yet.
Monetization strategy:
We have managed to make our business model such that despite absorbing the transactional cost, we’ll be able to make profits. They would definitely be low but the sheer amount of transactions (which we would attract because of no-transaction-charge policy) would put our figures in positive direction.
Moreover, profit generated from transactions is just one revenue source. Once we have a good traction, our advertisement revenue sources would also become viable.
We are definitely looking at a long term brand building.
Technical Challenges – Overview
Contrary to popular belief, technology is generally the simplest ingredient in a startup – specially because the startup can generally excercise full control over how it is used and deployed. And with increasingly cheaper computing resources, this space is becoming even more smoother.
However, following problems were a real challenges which we faced and solved.
Being a web 2.0 startup, we faced some major cross browser issues.
Minimizing client side internet connectivity and page display speeds
Database versioning.
Thankfully, ApnaBill.com is running Ruby on Rails under the hood – and all the solutions we designed, just got fit into the right grooves.
Technical Challenges – Details
Ruby on Rails a one of the best framework a web developer can ask for. All the solutions to the above problems just come bundled with it.
Prototype javascript library solves a lot of common cross browser issues. To completely eradicate them, an additional PNG hack from Pluit Solutions and IE7.js which lets IE6 browser render PNG images which have transparency. Once you have sanity in terms of cross browser issues, you can actually start focussing on feature development.
To overcome mail capping limits for shared hosts, we devised our own modules which would schedule mails if they were crossing the mail caps. However, we later discovered that there’s a great Ruby gem – ar_mailer to do just that. We are planning to make the shift.
Minimizing client side page load speeds was an interesting problem. We used Yahoo’s YSlow to detect where we lagged interms of page load speeds, introduced the necessary changes like moving JS to bottom of pages, CSS to the top, etc. which helped us alot in reducing the load time. Yahoo also has a JS minifier – YUI Compressor – which works great in reducing javascript files to upto 15%. We also deployed a dumb page-name based JS deployment scheme which simply blocks any javascript to load up on some particular pages (for example the homepage). This helps us in ultra fast page loads.
If you see our homepage, no JS loads up when the page is loading up. However, once the page is loaded, we initiate a delayed JS load which renders our news feed in the end.
Database versioning is an inbuilt feature in Rails. We can effectively revert back to any version of ApnaBill.com (in terms of functionality) with standard Rails framework procedures.
Non-technical challenges:
Integrating various vendors and services was visibly the biggest challenge we overcame during the (almost) 9 months development cycle of ApnaBill.com.
Getting the organization up and running was another big challenge. The paperwork takes a lot of valuable time – which if visioned properly, can be minimized to a manageable amount.
Payment Gateways are a big mess for startups. They are costly, demand huge chunks of money for security deposits and have very high transaction costs. Those who are cheap – lack even the basic courtesy and quality of service. Sooner or later, the backbone of your business becomes the single most painful factor in your business process – specially when you have no control over its functioning.
Thankfully, there are a few payment gateways which are above all of this. We hope to make an announcement soon.
The founders of ApnaBill - from left, Mayank, Sameer and Sandeep.
The process of founding ApnaBill:
When and how did you get the idea of founding ApnaBill? How long before you finally decided to take the plunge and start in earnest? What is your team like now?
In June 2007, one of the founding members of Four Fractions saw a friend of his, cribbing about how he cannot recharge his prepaid mobile phone from the comforts of his home. He had to walk about 1 km to reach the nearest local shop to get his phone connection recharged.
This idea caught the founder’s attention and he, along-with others formed Four Fractions on 20th December ’07 to launch ApnaBill.com as one of their flagship products.
ApnaBill.com was opened for public transactions on 15th June 08. The release was a birthday present to ApnaBill.com’s co-founder’s mom.
Our team is now 5 people strong, spread across New Delhi and Pune. As of now, we are self funded and are actively looking for seed funding.
What takes most of the time:
As I mentioned earlier, getting various services integrated took most of the time. If we had to just push out our own product (minus all collaborations), it would have taken us less than 3 months.
There was this funny thing that set us back by almost 1 month…
We applied for a PAN card for Four Fractions. First, our application somehow got lost in the process. Then someone in the government department managed to put down our address as 108 when it was supposed to be 10 B (8 and B are very similar looking).
None of us ever envisioned this – but it happened. We lost a precious month sorthig this issue out. And since all activities were dependent on official papers, other things like bank accounts, payment gateway intgrations etc also got pushed back. But I am glad, we sorted this out in the end. Our families supported us through this all the way.
Every process like creating Bank accounts, getting PAN cards etc are still very slow and manual in nature. If we can somehow improve on them, the ecosystem can prove very helpful for budding startups.
About the co-founders:
There are 3 CoFounders for ApnaBill.com
Sameer Jain: Sameer is the brain behind our revenue generation streams and marketing policies. He is a Post Grad from Delhi University in International Marketing.
Sandeep Kumar: Sandeep comes from billing (technical) background. With him, he has brought vast knowledge about billing processes and solid database knowhow.
Myself (Mayank Jain): I come from desktop application development background. I switched to Ruby on Rails almost 18 months ago – and since then, I am a devoted Ruby evangelist and Rails developer.
Luckily, we have a team which is just right. We have two polarizing ends – Sandeep and Sameer. One of them is constantly driving organization to minimizing costs while the other is driven towards maximizing revenue from all possible sources. I act as a glue between both of them. Together, we are constantly driving the organization forward.
About selection for proto.in:
Proto.in was the platform for which we were preparing for from almost 2 months. We had decided our launch dates in such a way that we would launch and be LIVE just in time for Proto.in.
Being recognized for your efforts is a big satisfaction.
Proto.in was also a huge learning experience. Interacting directly with our potential users gave us an insight on how they percieve ApnaBill.com and what they want out of it. We also came across some interesting revenue generation ideas when interacting with the startup veterans at Proto.
There are a lot of people who are currently doing a job somewhere, but who harbor a desire to start something on their own. Since you have already gone that route, what suggestions would you have for them?
Some tips I would like to share with my peer budding entrepreneurs…
Focus, focus and focus!
If you are an internet startup, book your domain before anything and get the right hosting partner.
Start the paperwork for firm/bank accounts registration as soon as possible.
Write down your financial/investment plan on paper before you start. Some plan is way better than a no plan!
Adopt proper development process for the tech team. With a process in place, development activities can be tracked rationally.
Get someone to manage your finances – outsourcing is a very attractive option.
The most important factor for a startup besides anything else – is to keep fighting during the adverse scenarios. Almost everything would spring into your face as a problem. But a team which can work together to find a solution for it – makes it to the end.
Just remember, more than the destination, it is the journey that would count.
Azingo, a mobile platform development company, which provides a full Linux-based mobile stack, as well as services, (and which has a development center in Pune), is planning to raise Rs 200 cr in a Series-B funding from US-based private equity firm Garnett Helfrich Capital and a few other VCs.
Azingo, one of the core members of UK-headquartered LIMO Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to creating an open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices, helps the foundation’s 55 members, including nine tier-I operators like Verizon, Orange, SK Telecom and Soft Bank Mobile, to develop, integrate and tests its Mobile Linux software platform.
“Our Mobile Linux operating system is currently in the beta stage and we are in the process of commercialising the technology. The funds will be utilised to build applications for service and delivery to large operators and vendors, besides scaling up our workforce in India through the inorganic growth route,” Azingo’s chief executive officer Mahesh Veerina told Business Standard.
Veerina said they had identified a couple of companies in India and abroad that could bring in engineering talent, mobile application development, intellectual property IP or customer relations. It expected to wrap up the buyout deal in the next six to nine months. Azingo currently has 300 engineers working out of its Hyderabad and Pune centres. It will add close to 700 engineers in the country in the next one year.
MultiEyeVision Observer is a product for remote monitoring and remote observation. The Observer is a pre-configured mobile phone, which in addition to functioning as a normal mobile phone, can also be used at any time as a remote observation camera. High quality image stream captured by the Observer is viewable in real-time from anywhere over the internet.
The Observer can be used for a wide range of business and consumer applications. For example, keep the Observer at home, and keep an eye on your kids while you are at work. Or place the Observer in your office / workshop, and supervise your staff when you are travelling.
The biggest advantages of the MultiEyeVision Observer are its simplicity of use and mobility. There is no cabling / wiring or installation. It can be moved at any time to the place you want to monitor. And all you do is press a button on the mobile to start monitoring.
Remote Data Exchange (RDX) is an interesting Pune-based company that builds a number of products based either on GPS devices, or based on idea of using SMS for achieving things remotely. They have recently released a product called Jai Kisan which is essentially a setup that allows farmers to remotely manage their motor pump sets.
The Jai Kisan Hardware
How the Jai Kisan system works
This system has the following features:
Allows you to start or stop the motor pump set from anywhere
Works with any kind of GSM/CDMA Mobile handset
Gives you feedback about whether the motor actually started or not
Tells you if power is present on the field or not
Automatic charging of mobile handset
Ultra low cost, INR 1250/- only
This is just one of the products they have up their sleeve. There are a number of other little products based on these technologies. For example, there is the sms-based car security system which:
Allows you to figure out the the location of your car from your mobile at any time by giving your car a missed call
Turn ON or OFF Car Engine from your Mobile. (I wonder whether I can use it to remotely turn on the AC!)
Car immobilization via SMS message
Intrusion SMS message alert – if the door is opened in your absense.
ARM/DISARM the security system via SMS message
Lowest recurring cost per month: based mainly on simple sms messages (and in some cases missed calls!)
Then they get into “Big Brother” management techniques. The person tracking system which is a small GPS device that can be given to an employee, and will then send detailed reports about the whereabouts of the employee to the supervisor. A similar thing can also be achieved by simply giving the employee a GSM mobile phone. Apparently to be given to employees who have a tendency to lie about whether they actually visited a customer or not.
See the full punetech profile for more such mini-products from RDX. Like the sms-updatable LED displays. And GPS based clocks (always exact time.) And GPS based Passenger Information System. This is installed, for example, in some AC coaches in Indian Railways and gives the passengers video clips with local information (i.e. about the station they are going to soon reach) based on where the train currently is.
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Unknowingly in our day-to-day life, we use many devices. Right from Microwave Oven/Electric Stove, Mixer/Grinder, Heater/Geyser, Refrigerator, TVs, Calculators, Cameras, Mobile Phones and what not. And surprisingly – all of these are embedded devices 🙂![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=fd3e5094-3eaa-4b2d-af6d-bc350054edeb)
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The Jai Kisan Hardware
How the Jai Kisan system works