Live from BangaloreIT - 28th October 2006

The momentum has picked up much more on Day 2 here at BangaloreIT , just met Mr. M.N.Vidyashankar, IAS, who is Secretary to Govt, Dept. of IT, Govt. of Karnataka. He is pleased with the response and specially proud of the response to the Rural IT quiz in which close to 9,70,000 students of Class 7,8 and 9 participated across Karnataka. That is a phenomenal response compared to last year where only 65,000 students particpated. The quiz was managed by TCS.

Quillpad - Indian language transliteration
Yesterday, met this interesting company Quillpad and witnessed this very interesting product developed by founders from IIT, Madras, Ram Prakash H and Shreeram. Quillpad(http://quillpad.in) is a first of its kind predictive transliteration technology for Indian languages. Unlike in existing
transliteration schemes like Baraha, WebDunia, ITrans, etc. where in the
user is forced to stick to a strict set of rules, with quillpad typing
in phonetically is all that is needed to get indian language content. It uses Machine Learning techniques to learn different patterns in a language to predict the correct
representation for a given word in the roman alphabet. Though the predicted results may not be correct for all words, it achieves an
accuracy of more than 95% and includes a standard rule-based input interface for adding new words not predicted by the Quillpad engine. Quillpad right now supports 6 languages - Hindi, Kannada, Marathi,
Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu and the developers plan to extend support to
other major Indian languages soon. I just experienced it on their website, quillpad.in, and it is extremely powerful and fast, the best I have seen yet. Quillpad also have bagged Rediff as their first client, and you can experience in Rediff Hindi emails and messenger.

WorldPhone - Voip Company

Other interesting company that I met is Worldphone which claims to provides, "Good Quality" voice calls at unbelievably low rates. It is first company to get the ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) License from Dept. of Telecommunications, Govt of India. If offers unlimited calls to USA for approximately 130 Rs. per day , close to Rs. 4000/- per month. They also have some very interesting packages, to most countries the call rates are Rs. 2/- per minute. I think a phenomenal opportunity now for SME's to make calls to overseas clients at affordable rates.
For more info visit worldphone.in

Wep

Wep is a very interesting company coming up regulary with innovative products for the Indian and overseas market. Wep is also one of the largest employee owned companies, 60% fo the company is owned by their employees. Out of an employee base of over 600, there are more than 300 employees who own shares in the company. Very interesting model, I think we need more such companies in India, perhaps that is one easy way to tackle attrition problem. ( 40% is owned by Wipro, and the company earlier was called Wipro E-peripherals )

WeP are launching some very innovative products here at BangaloreIT such as

- Fingerprint enabled usb pen drives which ensures protection of data. They also have 2gb and 1gb pendrives which also displays the time and capacity usage.

- Retails printers which operate without the need of PC and stores data of upto 200 items, I think it should be extremely popular with first time retailers to IT enable their billing.

- Fancy Aesthetic printers with different colour bodies, made specially for retail malls

- A multi purpose UPS with CD Storage, mobile charger, aesthetically appealing, time display etc.

- WeP Print & Save Services : Offers printers for free, and charges only on usage model. So now companies can get best of printers without heavy capital expenditure.

And a lot more innovative products are on the way..The site does not display their latest products, but for your records their website is http://www.wepindia.com.

More updates to follow soon.