sword^fish
10-12-2005, 11:16 PM
SIMple ComPUTER (SIMPUTER)
The most significant innovation in computer technology in 2001 was not Apple?s gleaming titanium PowerBook G4 or Microsoft?s Windows XP. It was the Simputer, a Net-linked, radically simple portable computer, intended to bring the computer revolution to the third world.
The Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual, People's Computer (SIMPUTER) is a GNU/Linux-based computing device. The device was designed by professors and students at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, and engineers from Bangalore-based design company Encore Software. This computing device has garnered interest from outside India and other third-world countries.
The Simputer is built around Intel's StrongARM CPU, with Linux as the operating system. It will have 16 MB of flash memory, a monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD) with a touch panel overlay for pen-based computing, and a local-language interface. The appliance will have Infrared Data Association and Universal Serial Bus interfaces, and will feature Internet access and mail software.
The designers expect the Simputer to be used not only as a personal Internet access device, but also by communities of users at kiosks. A smart-card interface to the device will enable the use of the device for applications such as micro-banking.
On the Yahoogroups! mailing-list set up for the Simputer project, over a thousand members hopefully monitor the progress. But the inability of techies--especially techies from this part of the globe--to explain things to a non-technical audience has left everyone wondering about exactly what is going on.
The Basics
One needs to understand the Simputer's main features in order to see the full scope of the project. Those features include text-to-speech synthesis in Indian languages, a pen-based input method (called tap-a-tap), portable Palm-sized footprint, Linux powered, open hardware licensing and the smart-card interface, among others. DeepRoot Linux CEO Abhas Abhinav notes that, ?the intended use of these features (and hence the Simputer) is in rural areas.... The text-to-speech features, portable size and low power requirements are meant to be of immense use to people in these areas.? Other suggested applications are for micro-banking applications, rural commerce and micro-credit applications. So, if scale is not attained, he feels the Simputer's utility is likely to be hit by its high price and its low availability of software. But he does believe that the Simputer has an edge over other Palmtops. "Palmtops can't compute in Indian languages because they don't have text-to-speech interfaces for Indian languages", he notes. The Simputer team, however, does have a lot of focus on low-cost, mass-market computing--more than any other project or initiative. This could translate into the spawning of many more similar projects, resulting in greater innovation in this area.
Simputer's utility, therefore, is dependent upon how efficiently the Simputer group can turn the technological value of the product into something tangible for the masses as well... what we have today is a great technological base for doing these wonderful things, but no really usable applications to use it.
Most Haven't Seen One
Dietrich Mueller-Falcke is a German researcher who did his PhD on the use of ICTs in small businesses in India. Comparing a Simputer with a PDA would be unfair, he feels, because with a PDA one still would need to attach a mobile phone to get online. But, he adds that the Simputer needs to hit the market speedily, "because the PDA market is developing rapidly and with the advent of GPRS and UMTS in Europe, and new functionalities soon will be added to these devices".
The Simputer has design features that make it well-suited to be shared-use machine. The way that low-cost smartcards have been incorporated into the design, for example, means that, 1) your data is kept securely in your own card, rather than on a network, and 2) configuration settings are portable. This means that if you use the Simputer in the library, at school, in a public call booth or in another town, you will always have your own interface and data at hand.
Attention to the Simputer is coming from far and wide, although the lack of hardware in the market means that few people actually have seen a Simputer.
Taking Technology to Everyone
In a country like India, where nearly 50% of the population is unable to read or write, simply providing access to computers and the Internet just isn't enough. For the 99% of Indians that do not currently have access to the Internet, one of the most useful features is the Simputer's "smart card" port. The computer's low price still exceeds what most Indians can afford, so its creators devised a way to let many individuals share a single machine by each using their smart cards to activate their personal accounts. Simputers might even appear in country's ubiquitous public telephone kiosks, where an entire village could take advantage of Internet access."
The Simputer is expected to cost 9,000 rupees, or about $190; it is meant to be owned not by individual users but by village cooperatives. Each user carries a simple, tough, very cheap ??smart card,?? which will hold all his or her settings and data. No training is required; there are no upgrades, no broadband and no planned obsolescence. Powered by an Intel StrongARM processor, the Simputer runs off two AA-size pencil batteries and comes equipped with 32 megabytes (MB) or 64 MB of random-access memory.
"We expect to change the model for the proliferation of information technology in India," says Professor Swami Manohar, professor in the computer science and automation department of the IISc. "The current PC-centric model is not sustainable because of the high cost of the PC, and also because we expect that most of the users will not be literate."
A subsequent version of the Simputer will also offer speech recognition for basic navigation through the software menus, says Manohar. The speech dictionary will be customizable to support different languages. A text-to-speech system will also be developed to take the technology to India's illiterate population.
Later versions will also offer wireless technology.
The intellectual property for the device has been transferred free to a non-profit trust, called the Simputer Trust, and both the software and the hardware for the appliance have been offered as open source technology. In the open source model of development, users and developers, often unpaid, work together to update technology.
Even within South Asia, where neighbours often are often friends due to political differences, the Simputer experiment is being closely watched. M. Khalid Rahman, editor of Dawn Sciencedotcom, the weekly feature magazine of Dawn, Pakistan largest daily, is upbeat about the Simputer. He says, "the Simputer is basically a poor man's computer, and it provides all the basic functions of a computer while giving the price edge to the users."
Americans own very American computers, perfectly suited for American social and economic conditions. American machines are much like American cars: bloated, shiny and specially designed and built to serve the institutional and commercial interests of American companies. Computation, however, is just a technology. In the hands of the planet?s majority populations, it may look a lot different.
Simputer Applications
The Simputer is a mobile computer platform and will be applicable in several applications of mobile computing. The Simputer platform technology, being a cost-effective platform, can be used to develop several other products such as Thin Clients, Kiosk Computer, and Cost-effective Point-of-Sale terminal and in embedded systems. The Simputer has many of the applications found in general-purpose computers.
E-Governance
? Smart Card enabled citizen services( Voter IDs, driving license, ration card, etc. )
? Data collection and processing
? Land and revenue records
? Education, health care and information access
? e-mail device
Micro Banking
? A Smart Card pass book
? Synchronizing transactional details through modem connectivity
? Interactive multi-lingual transaction log book
? Human error eliminated, increasing the integrity of the calculations
Education
? Interactive text book
? Massive data storage at low costs compared to books
? Universal interface for education in any language at any level
? Automatic adjustment of content based on progress.
? Entertaining and engrossing medium
? Regular download of new educational data without reliance on infrastructure or additional expense
Communication
? Cost-effective communications kiosk device
? High performance communication technologies for the masses
? Data and text transmission, as well as voice
? Potential centralization of the communications network
? Simplifying usage through storage of preferences of each user on a Smart Card
? Simplifying communication by removing the barriers of language and literacy
? Universality of data transmission achieved through use of icons and text-to-speech
Market Pricing and Agriculture
? A friendly companion to know the current prices of his produce
? A trader looking for right market to sell or buy his goods
? An interactive assistant for a farmer to implement the best farming practices
? Both market and weather forecasting data instantaneously distributed
? Digitization of the barter system via organization of secure transactions using smart cards
Health
? Interactive data collection device for a health worker
? Preliminary diagnosis of common ailments via an expert system
? Health schedules, data storage, advice on livestock
? Communication barrier broken between health service workers and rural patients
? Telemedicine : remote health care advice
Technology in Everyday Life
? Usage in restaurants to automatically report orders to the kitchen
? Digital Assistant and diary options for personal home use
? Portable entertainment on a versatile platform
? Distribution network organization; Simputers carried by delivery agents
? Inventory management made easy
? Integration with Global Positioning Systems for directions and way-finding
? Voice transmission over standard telephone lines in emergency situations
? Global satellite digital broadcasts for educational and entertainment purposes
Conclusion:
Much of the Simputer's fate depends on what the final price turns out to be. Many of its advantages are premised on the fact that it would cost about one-third the price of a PC and about the same price as a colour TV set. If buyers could be convinced it's a useful tool, the Simputer could reach millions of people who previously were untouched by computing devices.
Prof. Swami Manohar, CEO of the Bangalore-based PicoPeta Simputers Pvt Ltd, told that progress is at a hectic pace these days. "The primary challenge is funding. However, we are hopeful of solving that problem. The good news is with the Simputer licensing model, there are now two companies competing to provide Simputers: PicoPeta and Encore. So there is now a challenge to keep prices down and improve quality," he said.
?Trial sales have already been made to a number of countries including Sweden, Australia, France, United States.?, said Deshpande, an engineer educated at Stanford University in the U.S. Encore plans to cater to overseas sales of the Simputer through a separate company based in Singapore.
This is computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it. India has already largely succeeded in localizing cinema, satellite communications, cable television and radio. The Simputer is meant to do the same for the Internet.
References:
John Ribeiro, IDG News Service, ?Simputer Aims at the Developing World?, June 23, 2000.
Frederick Noronha, ?Simputer to help tribal students learn?, September 01, 2001.
BRUCE STERLING, The New York Times, ?Simputer?, December 9, 2001.
Frederick Noronha, ?Simputer, Hovering between Hope and Impatience?, August 06, 2002.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3605609.htm
http://www.ncoretech.com/simputer/
http://www.picopeta.com/simputer/applications.php
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Saumen
[Course: CEG100]
Date: Nov 27, 2003
CEG Department, NSU.
[mailto: saumen@gmail.com]
http://swordfish.nsuers.com ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S: This paper has been submitted to FAm in Course CEG100. on 27th Nov, 2003.
The most significant innovation in computer technology in 2001 was not Apple?s gleaming titanium PowerBook G4 or Microsoft?s Windows XP. It was the Simputer, a Net-linked, radically simple portable computer, intended to bring the computer revolution to the third world.
The Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual, People's Computer (SIMPUTER) is a GNU/Linux-based computing device. The device was designed by professors and students at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, and engineers from Bangalore-based design company Encore Software. This computing device has garnered interest from outside India and other third-world countries.
The Simputer is built around Intel's StrongARM CPU, with Linux as the operating system. It will have 16 MB of flash memory, a monochrome liquid crystal display (LCD) with a touch panel overlay for pen-based computing, and a local-language interface. The appliance will have Infrared Data Association and Universal Serial Bus interfaces, and will feature Internet access and mail software.
The designers expect the Simputer to be used not only as a personal Internet access device, but also by communities of users at kiosks. A smart-card interface to the device will enable the use of the device for applications such as micro-banking.
On the Yahoogroups! mailing-list set up for the Simputer project, over a thousand members hopefully monitor the progress. But the inability of techies--especially techies from this part of the globe--to explain things to a non-technical audience has left everyone wondering about exactly what is going on.
The Basics
One needs to understand the Simputer's main features in order to see the full scope of the project. Those features include text-to-speech synthesis in Indian languages, a pen-based input method (called tap-a-tap), portable Palm-sized footprint, Linux powered, open hardware licensing and the smart-card interface, among others. DeepRoot Linux CEO Abhas Abhinav notes that, ?the intended use of these features (and hence the Simputer) is in rural areas.... The text-to-speech features, portable size and low power requirements are meant to be of immense use to people in these areas.? Other suggested applications are for micro-banking applications, rural commerce and micro-credit applications. So, if scale is not attained, he feels the Simputer's utility is likely to be hit by its high price and its low availability of software. But he does believe that the Simputer has an edge over other Palmtops. "Palmtops can't compute in Indian languages because they don't have text-to-speech interfaces for Indian languages", he notes. The Simputer team, however, does have a lot of focus on low-cost, mass-market computing--more than any other project or initiative. This could translate into the spawning of many more similar projects, resulting in greater innovation in this area.
Simputer's utility, therefore, is dependent upon how efficiently the Simputer group can turn the technological value of the product into something tangible for the masses as well... what we have today is a great technological base for doing these wonderful things, but no really usable applications to use it.
Most Haven't Seen One
Dietrich Mueller-Falcke is a German researcher who did his PhD on the use of ICTs in small businesses in India. Comparing a Simputer with a PDA would be unfair, he feels, because with a PDA one still would need to attach a mobile phone to get online. But, he adds that the Simputer needs to hit the market speedily, "because the PDA market is developing rapidly and with the advent of GPRS and UMTS in Europe, and new functionalities soon will be added to these devices".
The Simputer has design features that make it well-suited to be shared-use machine. The way that low-cost smartcards have been incorporated into the design, for example, means that, 1) your data is kept securely in your own card, rather than on a network, and 2) configuration settings are portable. This means that if you use the Simputer in the library, at school, in a public call booth or in another town, you will always have your own interface and data at hand.
Attention to the Simputer is coming from far and wide, although the lack of hardware in the market means that few people actually have seen a Simputer.
Taking Technology to Everyone
In a country like India, where nearly 50% of the population is unable to read or write, simply providing access to computers and the Internet just isn't enough. For the 99% of Indians that do not currently have access to the Internet, one of the most useful features is the Simputer's "smart card" port. The computer's low price still exceeds what most Indians can afford, so its creators devised a way to let many individuals share a single machine by each using their smart cards to activate their personal accounts. Simputers might even appear in country's ubiquitous public telephone kiosks, where an entire village could take advantage of Internet access."
The Simputer is expected to cost 9,000 rupees, or about $190; it is meant to be owned not by individual users but by village cooperatives. Each user carries a simple, tough, very cheap ??smart card,?? which will hold all his or her settings and data. No training is required; there are no upgrades, no broadband and no planned obsolescence. Powered by an Intel StrongARM processor, the Simputer runs off two AA-size pencil batteries and comes equipped with 32 megabytes (MB) or 64 MB of random-access memory.
"We expect to change the model for the proliferation of information technology in India," says Professor Swami Manohar, professor in the computer science and automation department of the IISc. "The current PC-centric model is not sustainable because of the high cost of the PC, and also because we expect that most of the users will not be literate."
A subsequent version of the Simputer will also offer speech recognition for basic navigation through the software menus, says Manohar. The speech dictionary will be customizable to support different languages. A text-to-speech system will also be developed to take the technology to India's illiterate population.
Later versions will also offer wireless technology.
The intellectual property for the device has been transferred free to a non-profit trust, called the Simputer Trust, and both the software and the hardware for the appliance have been offered as open source technology. In the open source model of development, users and developers, often unpaid, work together to update technology.
Even within South Asia, where neighbours often are often friends due to political differences, the Simputer experiment is being closely watched. M. Khalid Rahman, editor of Dawn Sciencedotcom, the weekly feature magazine of Dawn, Pakistan largest daily, is upbeat about the Simputer. He says, "the Simputer is basically a poor man's computer, and it provides all the basic functions of a computer while giving the price edge to the users."
Americans own very American computers, perfectly suited for American social and economic conditions. American machines are much like American cars: bloated, shiny and specially designed and built to serve the institutional and commercial interests of American companies. Computation, however, is just a technology. In the hands of the planet?s majority populations, it may look a lot different.
Simputer Applications
The Simputer is a mobile computer platform and will be applicable in several applications of mobile computing. The Simputer platform technology, being a cost-effective platform, can be used to develop several other products such as Thin Clients, Kiosk Computer, and Cost-effective Point-of-Sale terminal and in embedded systems. The Simputer has many of the applications found in general-purpose computers.
E-Governance
? Smart Card enabled citizen services( Voter IDs, driving license, ration card, etc. )
? Data collection and processing
? Land and revenue records
? Education, health care and information access
? e-mail device
Micro Banking
? A Smart Card pass book
? Synchronizing transactional details through modem connectivity
? Interactive multi-lingual transaction log book
? Human error eliminated, increasing the integrity of the calculations
Education
? Interactive text book
? Massive data storage at low costs compared to books
? Universal interface for education in any language at any level
? Automatic adjustment of content based on progress.
? Entertaining and engrossing medium
? Regular download of new educational data without reliance on infrastructure or additional expense
Communication
? Cost-effective communications kiosk device
? High performance communication technologies for the masses
? Data and text transmission, as well as voice
? Potential centralization of the communications network
? Simplifying usage through storage of preferences of each user on a Smart Card
? Simplifying communication by removing the barriers of language and literacy
? Universality of data transmission achieved through use of icons and text-to-speech
Market Pricing and Agriculture
? A friendly companion to know the current prices of his produce
? A trader looking for right market to sell or buy his goods
? An interactive assistant for a farmer to implement the best farming practices
? Both market and weather forecasting data instantaneously distributed
? Digitization of the barter system via organization of secure transactions using smart cards
Health
? Interactive data collection device for a health worker
? Preliminary diagnosis of common ailments via an expert system
? Health schedules, data storage, advice on livestock
? Communication barrier broken between health service workers and rural patients
? Telemedicine : remote health care advice
Technology in Everyday Life
? Usage in restaurants to automatically report orders to the kitchen
? Digital Assistant and diary options for personal home use
? Portable entertainment on a versatile platform
? Distribution network organization; Simputers carried by delivery agents
? Inventory management made easy
? Integration with Global Positioning Systems for directions and way-finding
? Voice transmission over standard telephone lines in emergency situations
? Global satellite digital broadcasts for educational and entertainment purposes
Conclusion:
Much of the Simputer's fate depends on what the final price turns out to be. Many of its advantages are premised on the fact that it would cost about one-third the price of a PC and about the same price as a colour TV set. If buyers could be convinced it's a useful tool, the Simputer could reach millions of people who previously were untouched by computing devices.
Prof. Swami Manohar, CEO of the Bangalore-based PicoPeta Simputers Pvt Ltd, told that progress is at a hectic pace these days. "The primary challenge is funding. However, we are hopeful of solving that problem. The good news is with the Simputer licensing model, there are now two companies competing to provide Simputers: PicoPeta and Encore. So there is now a challenge to keep prices down and improve quality," he said.
?Trial sales have already been made to a number of countries including Sweden, Australia, France, United States.?, said Deshpande, an engineer educated at Stanford University in the U.S. Encore plans to cater to overseas sales of the Simputer through a separate company based in Singapore.
This is computing as it would have looked if Gandhi had invented it. India has already largely succeeded in localizing cinema, satellite communications, cable television and radio. The Simputer is meant to do the same for the Internet.
References:
John Ribeiro, IDG News Service, ?Simputer Aims at the Developing World?, June 23, 2000.
Frederick Noronha, ?Simputer to help tribal students learn?, September 01, 2001.
BRUCE STERLING, The New York Times, ?Simputer?, December 9, 2001.
Frederick Noronha, ?Simputer, Hovering between Hope and Impatience?, August 06, 2002.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/3605609.htm
http://www.ncoretech.com/simputer/
http://www.picopeta.com/simputer/applications.php
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Saumen
[Course: CEG100]
Date: Nov 27, 2003
CEG Department, NSU.
[mailto: saumen@gmail.com]
http://swordfish.nsuers.com ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S: This paper has been submitted to FAm in Course CEG100. on 27th Nov, 2003.