Last November, US-headquartered Qualcomm announced it was working on a low-cost personal computer (PC) alternative project, codenamed ‘Kayak’ — a sleek, simple yet very fast boat used by American Indians.
Ever since, India has been on the company’s radar because of the low PC penetration and opportunity for selling low-cost PCs to price-sensitive consumers. The company is now set to test-sail the Kayak ‘PC alternative’ model in India, which is expected to be priced under Rs 10,000.
“We hope to undertake trials by the end of this year. The reference design is ready. We are talking to various original equipment manufacturers and they, in turn, are talking to operators. We are also talking to application developers to allow wide applications to ride on the Kayak,” explains Kanwalinder Singh, president, Qualcomm India and South Asia.
The PC alternative leverages 3G wireless broadband (in India, auctions for 3G spectrum are slated to take place in January, 2010) to bring internet connectivity to markets where wired internet access is expensive or difficult to access.
The Kayak PC includes a reference design and recommended software specifications that will be made available to device manufacturers. It uses Qualcomm’s dual-core (Mobile Station Modem 7000 series) chipsets which offer a full-featured Web 2.0-capable browser from Opera, support for both TV sets and computer monitors to be used as displays and/or for a built-in display, compatibility with a standard keyboard and mouse for input, and music player and/or a 3D-gaming console functionality.
The PC will have very little in-built storage, as it intends to leverage the cloud computing (hosting data on the internet) model. One key difference compared to the XO laptop or Intel Classmate PC is that Qualcomm’s chipset includes wireless wide-area networking — both on CDMA2000 and WCDMA networks.
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“Though not an Indian name, Kayak is very focused on emerging markets. It offers a very simplified means of travel, hence the word to describe our emerging market strategy to create an alternative computer that is suited not only for rural folk but also the urban youth who seek just infotainment,” says Singh.
Qualcomm hopes that the Kayak PC will be used for applications starting from education, to farming to e-governance. Since the education sector is going to be a big focus area for the company, Qualcomm is talking to the Azim Premji Foundation — a not-for-profit organisation run by Wipro Chairman Azim Premji with proven working experience in the education sector, for content specific to the education sector.
“Increasingly, local governments in India are beginning to use social networking sites as a means to communicate with the citizens. While e-governance today is basically about government content on the web, the e-governance of tomorrow will increasingly use the social networking platform. The Kayak is designed to take advantage of the social networking platform,” says Singh.
India has been a trial-bed for many of Qualcomm’s developing market initiatives. Its partnership with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in Tamil Nadu, for instance, resulted in fishermen in the region getting (on their Tata Indicom mobile phones) data on wave heights, the best fishing zones for various types of fish and retail prices in various neighbouring markets. The fishermen would earlier rely on loudspeaker announcements to get information about the current weather conditions, wave heights and other safety information before venturing out into the sea.
With a strength of about 1,000 people across its centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad, Qualcomm India has played a pivotal role in designing single-chip handsets which have been responsible for reducing the cost of mobile phones to sub-$20 from about $80 almost five years back.