Mrinal Wadhwa, is a Rich Internet Applications Consultant from Bangalore, India. He uses this blog to study the evolution of a richer Internet.
I’ll be presenting a talk on Flex 4 Component Lifecycle at the next Bangalore Flex User Group Meeting on 19th. read more
Adobe India has been running a very interesting contest these past few months called RIAthon
The idea is simple, you build some cool RIAs using Adobe technologies and if Adobe likes your work they give you some very cool prizes and a platform to showcase your work and your skills.
I was quite excited about the contest at first .. I had even thought of an idea for an app I would build, but after very little exploration I decided not to participate. Now that the contest is well underway and this blog post cannot negatively affect Adobe’s efforts in anyway since the Grand Finale of the contest is tomorrow… I think its appropriate for me to express why I made my decision … read more
I’ll be at Adobe Flash Ahead tomorrow. If you’re in Bangalore and not planning to attend this event you should .. the event will showcase the finalist’s of Adobe RIAthon and the cool applications they built…
The event will also have interesting presentations on some of the latest advancements in the Flash platform .. some of the highlights include … read more
Raghu has announced on his blog that Adobe will give out free Flex Builder licenses to everyone who attends their upcoming Flex Developer event in Bangalore. The dates of the event are still being decided, so if you want to stay informed signup on Raghu’s little flex app … he promises not to spam but trust him at your own risk 
I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to tackle them in whatever way they can. I hope they’ll enable an online store in India soon, but until then I appreciate Adobe for trying to provide new developers all the means that they need to get started with Flex development.
A special thanks to the Adobe Evangelism team in India, who I know have worked really hard towards making all this possible.
See you all at the event.
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?
