ICTworks by Inveneo

Last year, the Canadian/Indian company Datawind, announced the $35 Aakash Android tablet computer as an ICT solution for education. While I still believe that the Aakash will fail education like OLPC did, do not take that as a mark of complete failure. The Aakash Ubislate 7 should be viewed as consumer electronics, and as such, it will be a roaring success.

Free Internet access

Just look at Datawind's core technology, which is all about squeezing waste from Internet data transfers to make even 2G bandwidth feel fast and snappy on a weak chipset.

Its Internet compression technology (18 patents issued & approved) reduces network load, and speeds delivery of content by factors of 10X to 30X. Like the Amazon Silk browser, Datawind offloads much of the browser computation to servers, so just the pertinent web content downloads to the device, not all the webpage bloat that now consumes most browsing bandwidth

During a talk at the World Bank, the Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli revealed that his goal was to use this technology to make the bandwidth usage so cheap that it became ad-supported. In effect, free to the end user. This is the modern killer app - free Internet.

Today, Internet access costs us all significantly more than hardware or software, more than electricity even. Even Intel says that bandwidth costs are the single largest barrier to ICT adoption. And Datawind has cracked that nut.

Just look at the numbers

Now a $47 tablet is exciting. I know a number of geeks who got all lustful for it, who don't even live in India. And in India... Well, let us read what the Wall Street Journal has to say:

On December 14... the Aakash [went one sale] on sale for the absurd price of 2500 rupees, or around $47, hoping to move 100,000 units over the course of 2012. That figure was seen as staggeringly optimistic, since it represented 40 percent of India’s total market for tablet computers. But as soon as the announcement went all, their call center was jammed with calls, and their website started crashing due to excess traffic, to the point where their Internet provider warned them they might be experiencing a malicious hack attack. Their initial inventory of 30,000 units sold out in three days. Within two weeks, they’d built up a backlog of 1.4 million preorders. According to CEO Suneet Tuli, that reservation pool is now over 2 million - and still going strong.

Just wait till the word gets out that $47 is close to the total cost of ownership in India! If the Ubislate 7 uses the Datawind servers when it connects to the Internet from Africa or America, expect this revolution in Internet access to spread faster than Facebook and Twitter combined!

Much has been written about India’s unveiling of the $35 tablet Aakash. There is debate about Aakash’s potential to change the educational paradigm, about its quality and specifications being up to commercial standards, about its "Made in India" tag and about its claim as the world’s cheapest tablet.

To continue this debate in a slightly different direction, I am Mustafa Naseem and I argue that Aakash has the potential to change the current scenario of limited access to computing for the majority of the world’s population outside of these discussions.

The need for context appropriate computing technologies:

When Martin Cooper placed the world’s first call from a portable cellular phone in 1973, he likely never imagined cell phones to become universally pervasive in less than 40 years. Why did the cell phone become so popular in the developing world? Take a look at Nokia 1100, the world’s best selling phone handset: it was low cost, easy to use, had a long battery life and only required a SIM card to connect its owner to the rest of the world.

To its credit, it also had a number of other features including a dust-proof rubber keypad, a flashlight accessible by a single touch and a near child-proof robust design. If we consider the primary four features listed above, the Nokia 1100 sets the standard for technology for the developing world −cost, connectivity, usability and a decent battery.

Aakash as appropriate technology:

The Aakash more or less meets these criteria. With its $60 retail price tag ($50 for the Government of India), it has come remarkably close to the $30 price point that led to widespread adoption of cell phones like the Nokia 1100. It use of a touch screen and the Android Operating System make it relatively easy to use after the initial learning curve that we all go through with new technologies.

The Akaash is equipped with a 2100 mAh battery, 2 watts of power consumption and has a solar charging option for users who are simply off the grid. The tablets are equipped with a GPRS module that supplements WiFi compatibility, which will help users connect through the maze of cellular networks. Apart from these features, the Aakash comes with 2 USB ports, a 3.5 mm audio input/output jack, and support for all popular text, audio and video formats.

Aakash has its shortfalls: a resistive touch screen, no access to the Android Market for apps, and a poor battery life to name a few. But at the given price point, I believe it is a decent piece of appropriate technology.

Market forces need to meet this demand:

In his speech at the 2011 Social Good Summit, Nicholas Negroponte said that he’d stop making low cost laptops if marketforces filled this gap. In the case of cell phones, manufacturers and providers supported the wide-scale adoption of cheap but useful phones to fill this gap.

Aakash gets us one step closer to the truly affordable and useful laptop than “specialty” educational machines (like the Simputer and XO) or full-powered Netbooks whose price hovers around $199 in most retail stores. India’s gigantic companies like Reliance are following this trend, and are manufacturing tablets like the Reliance 3G tablet in the $250-300 range. However, with Aakash’s release, things are bound to change – it’s a potentially powerful pricing function.

Government is seeding the change

By encouraging Data Wind to manufacture the Aakash for the educational market, the Government of India has encouraged competition at the lower end of the market, thereby unknowingly regulating the market for low cost computing devices. In an interview with NDTV, the CEO of Data Wind talked about an Aakash 2.0, which could have a capacitive touch screen, a 3G modem, a faster processor and an increased battery life at a similar price point.

We will now have to see if big giants like Reliance respond and how the quest continues for the truly commercially competitive, low cost computing device.

This week, India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) announced the Aakash, a "$35" Android tablet computer they are boastfully claiming is the world's cheapest tablet for education. This claim is an ICT4Edu red herring - a deliberate attempt to divert attention from what really matters in ICT interventions in education.

The $35 price point claim

First, a cheap Android tablet is no great feat. Last year, Indian companies were showing off $35 tablet prototypes and the joke in the computer hardware industry is that with an order for 100,000 units anyone walking off a plane in China can get a cheap Android tablet.

Yet, this Indian tablet isn't actually $35. The Washington Post reports its actually about $45 each, and Engadget says its actually a $60 Ubislate 7 from Datawind. Regardless of cost, government subsidies are required to get to a $35 price point for students and teachers.

But how long will the government be able to subsidize this tablet? According to The Economic Times coverage of the Aakash, HCL Infosystems first won the tender to make the tablets, but then walked away from the deal after the company realized that it could not meet the price expectations of the government - and HCL Infosystems is India's premier hardware and ICT systems integration company.

Stop with the hardware focus

If OLPC taught us anything it was that the price of hardware is but a small percentage (5-15%) of the overall cost of a real ICT in education intervention. In their TCO study, Vital Wave Consulting found that:

Support and training are recurrent costs that constitute two of the three largest costs in the total cost of ownership model. They are greater than hardware costs and much higher than software fees.

So just on the technology side, we should not focus on the hardware or its price point, but the support that should come with any technology intervention and the training and change management that will make it a success.

Concentrate on the real success factors

Let us step back and acknowledge that we really need a three-legged stool of content, technology and people for ICT success in education. There should be equal (if not greater) focus on comprehensive teacher training and quality digital content versus the hardware and its support ecosystem.

If we look at Plan Ceibal arguably the largest and most successful ICT in education activity to date, there is an obvious concerted effort to engage the entire educational ecosystem - from teachers, to students, to parents, to administrators, to the community, and private sector, in a coordinated national program. The actual hardware played a catalytic, yet still small role.

So thanks for pushing the hardware price point envelope in India. That should be good for a few press headlines. But I'll join Michel Trucano in criticizing the often single minded focus, even obsession, on the retail price of ICT devices alone. This is a great distraction, a red herring, from more important issues.

Are you an Android application developer? Google challenges all Android developers to showcase the most innovative and original Android application they designed. Each winner will receive a $25 000 prize. More information can be found on the following page :

http://code.google.com/android/adcafrica/

Iyinoluwa Aboyeji has just delivered a great opus on the future of software development in African markets, with a focus on Nigeria. His Google needs Android to succeed in Africa is well worth a read:

The gospel truth is this, Google needs a hardware solution to win.

Yea, Baraza and Google Trader are cool tools, but Google will only win the internet war if Africans can access the internet with google as their gateway and Africans are loyal customers. And if Africans still have to depend on Windows dominated hardware, Google might as well be prancing around with their carnivals and flashmobs.

More cause for worry for Google should be Nokia and Windows new partnership. Both of them are the leading mobile and desktop players in Africa right now. Working together means they can unleash a plague of incomensurable damage on Africans and eat up market share like no man's business at Google's expense.

So how can Google change the game?

One word. Android.

Android is google's beautiful, versatile and opensourced weapon against Microsoft's onslaught on Africa. Since Android is open-sourced, it can be deployed on any hardware including cheaper and locally made hardware. This allows it to undercut Microsoft's hardware advantage on the one competitive advantage that actually matters in Africa; price.

Also given it would be much easier and legal to engineer than pirating Microsoft, we can shift the creative energies of the innovative engineers of the Alaba Market from cracking microsoft DRM locks to building software they can put their name and Nigeria behind.

Thanks to Erik Hersman's tweet for the tip.