About affordable computing, enterprise messaging and blogging…

I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Rajesh Jain who is running Netcore these days. Most of the talk revolved around what Netcore was up to. Which is a lot. After all, Rajesh is a person brimming with ideas.

Affordable computing is a wonderful idea that Netcore is focusing upon, and it has a lot of potential in a country like India. The concept is a simple extension of Moore’s Law. Given that processor speeds are expected to double every 18 to 24 months, you can gain access to old computers for almost throw away prices (the monitor costing the bigger portion.) Now this relatively slow computer is used as a thin client while a much better computer acts as the thick server, and does all the number crunching. This is a bit like of combining Larry Ellison’s ‘Network Computer’ with Jeff Raskin's original dream of the Macintosh. And what Ellison will really like about this, is that it runs a non-Microsoft OS.

In fact, the entire system leverages Open Source technologies to the maximum. It runs on Linux, uses openOffice and similar open source applications. So for around Rs. 20,000 ($400) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can have an completely integrated solution.

But Rajesh sees the main potential in delivering this technology to India's large rural population. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at rural India (a lot of them conducted by Media Lab Asia) but none have really made the difference. Could this be the one to?

The other thing that Rajesh is passionate about is blogging. We talked a bit about developments at sixapart and shared our favorite blogs. Rajesh also runs blogstreet, a site that keeps a track of blogs and links to and from it. It uses this information to rank blogs and create blog neighborhood information. So when you search for a blog on blogstreet, you’ll also get information on all the people who blog-roll it. There is also a visual view to all this information, which is really cool.

And finally there was the Linux based, blog aggregator. Very cool stuff. I’ve put Rajesh’s Blog on my must read list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next…

Posted by Navneet at April 27, 2003 05:28 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam