Mrinal Wadhwa is a software developer form Bangalore, India. His interests include Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Software. These days he's working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup
In relation to what happened this weekend I met up with Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan from the evangelism team at Adobe India. While we did not talk much about the elephant in the room, we did talk about other things that really matter.
I was very happy that Ramesh reached out to have this discussion, here is some of my take away … read more
I sent an email to the Adobe India Community Champions mailing list about the direction of Adobe’s evangelism efforts in India, the email was originally intended for the 10 or so Community Champions, but since people from Adobe have started reacting in public without reacting on the list first, I feel its better to post my thoughts in public as well.
Here is how Adobe evangelist Harish Sivaramakrish chose to react to my thoughts on twitter, I feel that its unfortunate that this is Adobe’s reaction to genuine critique … read more
Its been a few days over two years since I started writing this blog and all this time it has looked the same. I started out using the Hemingway theme by Kyle Neath and really liked the way it looked …
Over time though, I became quite bored of that look and I also received some negative feedback relating to how people find it uncomfortable to read white text on a black background. Also, it was always disconcerting to see another blog use the same theme as mine so I’d been planning to make a personalized theme of my own for a while. I finally got to it and went ahead and designed this new look … read more
A few hours ago Google just abruptly disabled my primary Google Account – mrinal [dot] wadhwa [at] gmail. I can’t login and all email to that account is failing and yes I’m panicking … my life runs through that account and it has been that way for over five years.. so this is scary !
All the suggested help doesn’t seem to be working so I’ve written to Google Support and hopefully things will be back to normal soon.
Meanwhile, I can still be reached at email [at] mrinalwadhwa.com …. read more
This is slightly off topic, but I just couldn’t help but express my disappointment.
Let me start with a quote from an email I just received from iPhone@vodafone.in
Thank you for registering for your Apple iPhone 3GTM with us.
We are delighted to announce that the iPhone 3G will be available in India from August 22, 2008
It will be available in 8GB & 16GB models, priced at Rs 31,000 and Rs 36,100 respectively.
According to today’s rupee-dollar exchange rate that’s $715 for 8GB and $832 for the 16GB model. The email is not very clear if there is a contract involved or not .. contracts are not very common in India so I’m guessing not.
This is not entirely new news since the guys at tech2 had leaked the pricing a few days ago and they were bang on … but it is very disappointing. The iPhone is priced at $199 with an AT&T contract in US …
I’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone ever since it was first introduced, it is a brilliant piece of technology and I might actually still buy it even at that price, but not many will.
What’s disappointing is that Apple, Vodafone (and maybe Airtel) have missed to notice this extremely exciting opportunity that had the potential of totally changing the Internet usage landscape in India. Just yesterday Tim ‘O Reilly tweeted a link to this excellent writeup on the state of the Indian mobile space .. the article states ..
India had only 3.4 million PC broadband subscribers in early 2008, and less than 60 million people are using the stationary internet – that’s 5% of the population. But 300 million people in India have a cell phone. Since April 2008, there are more cell phone users in India than in the United States.
The whole country is making mobile a natural priority. Wherever I went, it was obvious, all the way to overcrowded and old Indian trains. My 14 hour overnight train did not have a restaurant car or a bathroom as we know it. But it did have power plugs built in at each air-conditioned seat, with a metal plate next to it. It didn’t say computer power plug or shaving power plug (which would have been appropriate for these slow-moving overnight trains), but simply and only: mobile charging points.
How can Apple, Vodafone not see the potential here? At the right price and given the ease of using the web on the iPhone, it had the potential of becoming the de facto Internet device for the masses in India.
The US price of $199 (I know it comes with a contract) or Rs. 8634 is an extremely good price for a phone in India .. I mean I’ve seen vegetable vendors and auto-rickshaw drives with more expensive phones than that. If Apple, Vodafone had priced the phone at that price (or a little over it) .. iPhone could totally have become the uber device of the masses in India .. we have a lot of masses you see, so imagine the volume of business for Apple, Vodafone, Airtel, application developers, e-commerce based service providers and many others.
Maybe I’m taking this too hard, maybe they plan to fix this by December when 3G networks arrive, what do you think?
