India Innovates!

Read on or jump to the last para to know it firsthand.

India stands for innovation.  

Ask any teenager, any at all, particularly the ones preparing for the Engineering Institutes or just in your campus you could ask the young Manav Rachna technocrats who have been regularly bring laurels to the institute. Ask them the reason for choosing to get into those hallowed portals and pat would come the reply, “I wanna do something different. Something new, you know.” Ask them another question about how they would go on doing something different and you would be surprised like they are about loss of words to come up with innovative ways about doing something remarkable. 

Ever since Mr. Narayana Murthy, the poster boy of Indian IT, shocked his illustrious academic counterparts by choosing to open shop rather than work in one little did he realise that his single act would inspire thousands of entrepreneurs who started similar outsourcing companies. Numerous small, mid-sized and large IT outsourcing companies dot the corporate landscape of India today.

In the process, however, millions of people found another option for secure servitude: working for those outsourcing firms, earning big salaries, doing mediocre work. This has had a remarkably damaging impact on several generations of Indian talent over the past 20 years.

Today even when the world continues to stare and applaud at the daring and defiant act of Mr Murthy, the younger lot continues to look upto his labour of love, Infosys Technologies, whether they would come to their respective campus with lucrative job offers. 

So the big question is where is the Indian innovation? Where is the entrepreneurship? 

Unlike the young techie brigade of India who are more contented with secure a job in some MNCs in India or abroad, their western counterparts who start off in their garages are seen as the coolest kid in the block. At times even as geeks who would someday rule their desktops or laptops.  This lack of enthusiasm among the gen X brigade is due to a lot of factors. Lack of mentors, abysmal success rates of new start ups, lack of good incubator programs, lack of quality tech talent in India, etc, etc. 

But then the big question is, ‘are we really short of innovation and entrepreneurship?’

Not really, the country has never been short of innovation. Innovation has been running deep down in our veins since a long time. The scientific community has made the country proud with its endless number of discoveries and innovations.

Take examples of our own students who made it big in the one of the most prestigious technology innovation competition in the world. Team ‘Supersonic Tortoises’ consisting of 4 final year B.Tech students namely Tushar Chugh & Adeel Kidwai (Manav Rachna College of Engineering) and Madhav Malhotra & Anchal Arora (Faculty of Engineering & Technology, Manav Rachna International University) won the second prize in the Microsoft Imagine Cup for their project titled ‘PregnaCare System’. Another team consisting of Aman Jain, B.Tech Electronics & Communication Engineering 1st year and Rishabh Goyal, B.Tech Electronics & Communication Engineering 2nd year from Faculty of Engineering & Technology, Manav Rachna International University won the Third Prize for their project named ‘Tractrobot’.  Both ‘PregnaCare System’ and ‘Tractrobot’ are innovations for the society in large.

Pradeep Gupta, CEO of Cybermedia and president of TiE Delhi, concurs: "I have been talking on entrepreneurship at various colleges for the last two decades. I always ask a question: How many of you want to be entrepreneurs?" he says. "Earlier, maybe 5% [of] hands went up; today a quarter of the class raises their hands."

Prashant Bhalla, Senior Vice President, Manav Rachna International University, said, "At MRIU our endeavor is to promote the holistic growth of Science and Technology amongst our students so that they could apply their knowledge and produce path breaking innovations that would help the society and the country in large. Our students have been involved in lot of path breaking innovation. The need of the hour is to imbibe the spirit of entrepreneurship along with innovation."

Kunal Thadani, a venture capitalist returned to India after a successful track record in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur. He understands the innovation process and acknowledges that the eco-system is stalling. "To build a product, you need to have either easy access to customers or many members in the team who all have deep shared knowledge of the customer pain," Kunal Thadani For now, neither is in place.

Meanwhile till such innovative entrepreneurs figure out how to turn their dreams into success stories, India continues to innovate. On A4 sheets, that is.

.mydomain

Two weeks back the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to allow a new array of Internet domain endings.

First things first. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a nonprofit group that assigns addresses to Internet service providers. The organization was founded in 1998, has members from all over the world and is dedicated to "keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable," according to ICANN's website.

One of the organization's main jobs has become assigning and overseeing domain names on the Internet. They've been gradually expanding the options for years, a process which has added such top-level domain names as ".biz" and ".xxx."

As of now there are a limited number of generic top-level domains. Some of the kore recognizable ones are "com," "org," "info," "edu" and "net." As per the new rule, people will be able to apply to ICANN to register in their own language their domain ending.

Now the catch or rather the surprise which you weren’t expecting at all. It is nice to have your domain name as per your wish or whims, but are you ready to pay $185,000 per domain application (more in the case of buyers who want one all to themselves)? So till you can shell out that figure this privilege is reserved for corporations, and maybe some governments. It also will cost money to set up and maintain the domain, so something like .google or .ibm will a lot more likely to happen than, say, .deepakpatel. 

But this does not mean that there is only negativity without any positivity. Clearly, the biggest benefit will be for retailers who would open the windows wide open for their brand. Possessing a domain could lend a sense of legitimacy on the web as the tough procedures applied by ICANN a personalized domain ending will be an authenticity watermark of sorts.

However for the usual Web user, it could cut down on phishing and other online scam attempts. If you knew that only domains with your banks' names in the suffix were legitimate, it would make it harder for scammers to trick you by steering you to a fake site.

ICANN is scheduled to begin reviewing applications early next year and says we should start seeing new domains in July 2012. Several organizations have announced plans to file for particular domain endings. Prominent among them are – .unicef, .paris, .nyc, .canon and .hitachi.

Official CWG 2010 'Delhi United' Volunteer Theme Song By Manav Rachna International University

IN SYMPHONY WITH LIFE -SYMPHONY 2011

"We participated in 5 events and bagged the 1st prize in Collage Making, 2nd prize in Debatte, 3rd prize in Photography and Rangoli making. Winning is one very small part of  our trip to Mumbai, the larger part lies in the learning that took place. A wise thinker once said 'we’ve not lived a day if  we haven’t grown from yesterday ,' " say the students from the Bio-tech department who represented Manav Rachna at SYMPHONY 2011 at  K.J.Somaiya College of Engineering, Mumbai.

The Festival at the  K.J.Somaiya College of Engineering, Mumbai truly lived up to its name. 'SYMPHONY 2011' brought colleges and universities from across the county under one roof. And for us, the students from FET, it was a dream come true and participation brought symphony into our lives and we shall cherish our memories to Mumbai for a long time. 

We began with hurdles to cross and had a difficult time convincing the Management that we would make a mark at the cultural festival. That this was going to be a good opportunity and we were granted official permission to participate in the cultural festival 'Symphony 2011.'

We boarded our train for Mumbai on the 2nd of February 2011, and arrived on the Mumbai platform on 3rd February. The fest was scheduled to be held from 4th February to 6th February and we had registered for five events i.e. Debate, Photography, Rangoli making, Collage making and Model United Nations.

We participated in 5 events and bagged the 1st prize in Collage making, 2nd prize in Debate, 3rd prize in Photography and in Rangoli making. Winning is one very small part of our trip to Mumbai, the larger part lies in the learning that took place. A wise thinker once said ”we’ve not lived a day if we haven’t grown from yesterday” And rightly it has been said, we’ve also grown in many ways. We stayed in Mumbai for four days and every day brought us a new learning experience, every little moment or incident taught us a new lesson and made us wiser.

Sonali Khera, one of the participants from our team said, “being all by ourselves in a new city does certainly sound fun, but its equally difficult”, while Sumit Kharbanda of 4th sem BT said “waking up every morning, sharp on time, and all by ourselves is one hell of a task, because we always had to be on time.” Mansi Sharda put it correctly, “we now know how to manage money (laughs)”, and Sutirtho Ghosh says “this trip taught me tricks for regularity.”

This trip to Mumbai certainly taught us regularity, punctuality, discipline,  social awareness;  socialising and we’ve made some very good friends for life. We learnt how to adapt to new people and places, it made us come out of our comfort zones and explore new horizons. Golden opportunities do not walk up to you, you have to look for them and this was one such example that we certainly could not leave to chance.

The credit for this learning and winning is not ours; we owe this to our Management for being supportive and having faith in us. We could not have gone a step ahead if our HOD Dr .Sarita Sachdev would not have agreed to send us. We thank our Director, Dr.Soni, our HOD, Abhishek sir (D.R), and Nidhi ma’am for supporting us at every step. And the personality behind it all could have been none other than Dr Amit Bhalla, Vice President MRIU without whose support just nothing would have been possible. 

THANK YOU MANAGEMENT!
 

NATASHA SHARMA, BT 4th year

STUDENTS SHARE THEIR PROJECT IDEA

Is 3D the future?  Can it be an interesting teaching option for  ‘LEARNING IN A FUN FILLED MANNER? 

A world of 3D

Our vision is to employ the state-of-art 3D motion sensing  technology being currently used  in creating virtual scenarios/interfaces,  to be used  for  education and specifically vocational teaching purposes. Through 3D  motion sensing technology, the lack of materials and the physical absence of educators will no longer pose a problem. Standing in front of a screen and holding a “virtual chisel” a child can learn 10 or 100 or 1000 times to create a beautiful sculpture  of  his  own  imagination. He/she can learn carpentry, craftsmanship, pottery and many more to learn and live with dignity and earn his/her own piece of bread and butter. As like a child plays game on Kinect, on similar track there will be an interface, where he will choose which technology or work he wants to learn.

Interactive platform will read the  child’s  response  and  will teach the child the step by step process  parallel  reading  child’s motion.

It  is when you  feel..that you dream…  and  it  is  when  you dream..that  you  achieve.  This technology is for children to see and realize the infinite potential hidden inside each one of themand make use of current technol
ogy to enable young minds of the future. 

Gaming is one area in which technology has jumped by leaps and  bounds.  Faster  processors, next-gen controllers...they have it all. All these have completely transformed  how  we  interact with media and computers. And in here lies the potential - the potential  for  creating  learning  of pure fun, the potential for creating  meaning  and  impact  and adding value through the otherwise meaningless entertainment and free time.

We need to enlighten human mind  to  make  change  in  the world and the best way to do it is to spread knowledge and awareness and we are integrating technology with education. Motion Detection Webcam has just been used in the field of Gaming for making it more interesting. We are proposing to make education more interesting by developing an interactive platform. This will specially help in teaching illiterate kids.

We propose the idea of using a platform  based  around  a  webcam-style add-on peripheral with the PC which enables the user to interact using gestures and spoken commands.

The Motion detection Webcam with a 3D Sensor will enable the user to input its command without  using  any  external  device. Developing all simple lessons to hardest one using this technology will make  learning  far more simple and interesting. This has infinite  number  of  usage,  not only for teaching illiterate kids, life risking surgeries can be practiced by medical students using this technology.

The present of gaming... The future of education.... 

By:  Sachi  Bansal,  Anuraag Gupta, Apoorva Jain

THE YOUNG MINDS AT WORK

Android vs Symbian – which is the better option? Read on to find out

I’m a typical mobile phone user in India. And like to be updated about the latest technology. Something made me think “Which operating system is better, Android or Symbian?”. This question was asked by my classmate, Shrisha S. Bhat. As I usually prefer Nokia N-series mobiles my answer was Symbian. But when he asked me on what basis I told him theanswer, I was stumped. That led me to search over the internet, asking different guys who know more about the topic. Finally I reached the point where I realized that I was wrong. The fact is Android overcomes Symbian in many ways. The points written below should illustrate the many ways in which Android surpasses Symbian.

Great processing power based on modern processors. Androids use Cortex-A8 based processors which deliver a much better performance than Symbians with Arm 11 CPUs. Excellent examples are HTC Snapdragons (currently with 2nd generation) and Samsung Hummingbirds, both running at 1 GHz speed (versus 680MHz speed in Symbians). The gap in processing power is even larger with the newest dual-core CPUs based on Cortex- A9 architecture (like in Motorola Atrix). That makes Symbians to fall even farther behind Androids.  

Screen resolution. Androids use higher screen resolutions with 800(854)x480 compared to Symbians (640×360). This allows more details to be displayed on screen, which is especially handy with web browsing (the extra information on screen saves the trouble to scroll too much). Furthermore, the recently announced Atrix brings even a higher qHD resolution (960×540)! That means 2.25 times more pixels on the phone display than those found in Symbian phones.

Memory (RAM). Everyone hates when the applications in a phone start to crash because of low memory. While 512MB RAM is normal for Androids, Symbians have to leave with 256MB RAM. Despite Nokia trying to optimize the memory usage, “out of memory” messages still happen in Symbian phones. On the contrary, some Androids reward you with even more RAM (768MB in Desire HD, 1GB in Atrix).

Graphics and games. Symbian devices  use  the  Broadcom  BCM2727 GPU, which while seems to perform pretty well against  the old Adreno 200 chips (Nexus One), it falls behind the newest Android GPUs. Current Android devices come with powerful GPUs based on Adreno 205 (Desire HD) or PowerVR SGX540 cores. Furthermore, the newest Nvidia Tegra 2 chips  bring  even  further  boost  in graphics performance, that is said to show 3-4 times better performance than Adreno 205 or SGX540! Nvidia has  opened  a  special  portal  called Tegra Zone, where the owners of Android Tegra 2 devices can enjoy high quality gaming (as Nvidia describes the chip: “capable of extreme multitasking with  the  first mobile dualcore CPU, hardware accelerated Flash, and console-quality gaming with an ultra-low power GeForce GPU).

UI and customization. It has been pointed out by many analysts that Nokia UI is not modern enough to compete with Android/iOS. The limited  customization  of  the  homescreens and deep menus are all weaknesses of Symbian. On contrary, Androids offer huge customization of homescreens,  menus,  launchers, widgets that will satisfy vast majority of tastes. Either go with manufacturer customized UI (like HTC Sense with its 7 homescreens and widgets) or create a new one completely suited to your  tastes. Popular launchers  like Launcher Pro or ADW Launcher are handy to create customized UIs.

Web Browser. The Android stock browser is the most popular out there because it does the job nicely. Starting form  Android  2.2,  it  can  support Adobe 10.1 full flash, that  is being used in many websites. This enables full  browsing  experience,  enables flash  video  streaming  and  playing flash games from websites like Kongregate. Symbian browser at this moment is a headache to use. For that reason, some users have jumped to use  Opera,  but  it  doesn’t  support flash.

Multimedia. Thanks to powerful hardware and abundance of multimedia applications, playing videos, listening  to music or playing with photos  is  fun  on Android  devices. Large screens (up to 4.3″), great displays (Super Amoleds), huge amount of media players, support for all popular audio/video formats, HDMI connectivity, DLNA media streaming – all these contribute  to  the media  fun. Symbians have to  limit themselves with lesser displays, rely on default media player (because there are hardly any good alternative applications) and miss DLNA connectivity.

Applications Store. While Symbian OVI Store has grown recently (258% in 2010),  it’s growth  is  lower compared  to Android market  (544%  in 2010). The number of applications is also much higher in Android Market (200,000) compared to OVI (40,000). However, what the user notices most is how these app stores integrate with their phones. While OVI seems to be just a disconnected place to download  applications, Android Market will synchronize your installed applications, will notify you of almost daily updates, will auto update them all if  you wish  (even  simultaneously) and offer similar apps. Some alternative client applications for Android Market, like AppBrain, take it even further by allowing you to browse the applications on PC and schedule auto installs on your phone or allow customized selection of apps suitable for your needs.

Applications. As pointed above, there are more Android apps available than Symbian Apps. But what does this give us? For one, you can do more things that you can’t do with Symbian, because Symbian doesn’t have similar application. For example, I’m using at least 5 Dutch Android apps that have no Symbian equivalents. Next, there is the variety of applications. Thanks to more developers being involved with Android, we get a huge choice of applications. Try to count  the  number  of  applications available for Android and Symbian in a particular interest, say how many music  or medical  applications  are available in each platform.

When we look at the applications outside  the  Apps  Stores,  they  are most easy to install on Androids: just copy them to the phone and run it there. With Symbian, you have  to deal with the complicated Symbian signing  procedure.  DailyMobile’s Symbian forum has probably a few thousands posts with desperate questions on this matter. Finally, sharing apps on Androids is a breeze thanks to Apps Sharing applications and QR codes. There are multiple ways to do this, including Dropbox sharing and Barcode scanning. 

Custom ROMs and Modding. This is a special area where Androids shine above other platforms. Professional modding  communities  like Cyanogen, XDA-World, or Modaco are  immensely popular by creating new firmware with either new OS versions or improving those that come built-into the devices or by adding new features. For people who love to scqueeze the best out of their phones, Android truly offers the best possibilities.

OS updates. On average, every 6 month there is a new OS version in Android. While manufacturers have different ideas about updating their phones (HTC does an excellent job updating their phones), you can almost always update your phone to latest  version  thanks  to  custom ROMs. The fist Android phone (G1) that was released in 2008, was updated  to Android 2.2 Froyo via Vodaphone and via custom ROMs. Symbian jumped from S60V5 to S^3 for touch  devices,  but  none  of  those S60V5 devices was updated (probably because the hardware was crap).

Market trends.Some trends are obvious,  like  declining  popularity  of Symbian  devices,  falling  Symbian and  rising  Android market  shares, other  manufacturers  abandoning Symbian at all (like Samsung and SE), disposal  of  Symbian  foundation, etc… It has come now to “One versus Many”  where  Symbian  is  alone (Nokia)  against  a  team  of  players (Google, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, SE, LG, etc…).  In  January,  the CES 2011 electronics show was all about Android devices (now even stronger with  tablets  invading  the market), while  Symbian was nowhere  to be found. Maybe in MWC in February? Maybe… Taking too much time between announcing a phone and releasing it doesn’t help Symbian at all (typical examples are Nokia N8  and  E7).  Contrary  to  this  Androids keep it short, between 1 to 3 months (see DHD or Nexus S or LG Optimus 2X).

Many thanks to Shrisha for asking me a question which enlightened me on this topic. 

FASHION IS ALL ABOUT LOOKING GOOD AND FEELING GOOD.