Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Mobile technology companies
I’ve come across these mobile technology companies in the last few weeks:
- Tantra Telecom is a brand new Bangalore-based startup, barely a couple months old. Entrepreneur Rajiv Poddar hopes to build a business around an open source architecture for cellular handsets, for both hardware and software. He expects an alpha prototype to be ready by August. Rajiv is also actively involved with the Bangalore chapter of Mobile Monday, a community of mobile professionals. A Mumbai chapter recently opened.
- Xtend Technologies is a Cochin-based developer of telecom hardware and software. They’ve been around a decade. Partners Jayakrishnan K and Kurian Thomas first gained notoriety for ShellSock, their replacement driver for Windows TCP/IP that allowed graphical browsing over then-monopoly ISP VSNL’s shell accounts. It may not seem much today, but caused significant tremors in its time. Xtend’s primary offerings today are developer toolkits for SMS reception and Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS; must check how they compare against Asterisk), and hardware to hitch mobile phones to office phone exchanges or bill printing machines.
- Hasta Solutions is a Bangalore-based developer of Indian language interfaces for Palm PDAs and Java-enabled phones. CEO N S Vaidyanathan said he got into this space initially working on the Simputer. The technology’s nifty, but Mr Vaidyanathan got shifty when I asked about Unicode compliance. He tried downplaying Unicode’s importance and the difficulties in building an implementation from scratch. Unicode’s not a simple 16-bit character stream. There are 17 “planes” of 16-bit characters each, the common encodings UTF-8 and UTF-16, the processor-specific byte order and Byte Order Mark (BOM) header in UTF-16, rules for complex character sequences, particularly for Indic scripts, and font-specific interpreters for these sequences. No wonder the world is littered with flawed implementations. While Mr Vaidyanathan would not confirm the encoding used by his current software, he suggested it was ISFOC compatible. ISFOC is the render-only encoding for ISCII. It is not suitable for storage. Here’s hoping he gets his Unicode compliance quickly. There’s a glaring gap in Indian language support for handheld devices.
Any others you can add to the list?
Rajiv — Jul 3, 2006 3:00:18 AM — # ↩
some more..
I recently came across <a href="mangommi.com/"> Mango MMI. They are also based in Bangalore.
There are few older companies as well (eg. TeliBramha, WDC Solutions, Quasar Innovations).
BTW, my prototype is going to be ready by August. The alpha is around a year down the line!
Shiv Kumar — Sep 8, 2006 3:14:08 PM — # ↩
About initiators of Mango MMI
Though the company is a new one, the initiators of this firm are experienced hands in telecom domain. They have expertise in handling and providing solutions on mobile handset, easy payment solutions and other such telecom related applications. With the kind of domain expertise they have, I guess they should take an upper hand in telecom domain in the shortest possible span.
TechGeek — Apr 24, 2009 3:17:04 PM — # ↩
About Mango MMI
Good to know about the startup Mango MMI. Just curious to know, how many phones in market are using their solutions and what is so special and different about there MMI.
Anuj — Apr 24, 2009 3:18:28 PM — # ↩
Mango MMI
Where is the office of Mango MMI in Bangalore ?
TechGeek — Apr 24, 2009 3:21:55 PM — # ↩
About Initiators of Mango MMI
Hey Shiv Kumar, can you please tell me how many products they have released in market till date. And what is their core expertise, because their website is confusing. It talks about almost everything in the UI area of all kind of devices.
TechGeek — Dec 17, 2009 3:32:22 PM — # ↩
Hey Shiv Kumar, you shouldn’t advertise something when you don’t have all the details. Seems like Mango Techno was more a hype rather than really cool product. Got my answer when nobody answered about the product range of the Mango.
TechGeek — Jan 21, 2010 2:46:42 PM — # ↩
Dear Shiv Kumar, How much money you were paid by Mango Technology for writing this comment ?? As you said “ I guess they should take an upper hand in telecom domain in the shortest possible span” . Seems like they have not yet taken the upper hand. I am not even sure if the company is still operating…
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jan 21, 2010 3:35:26 PM — # ↩
What’s your problem with Mango, TechGeek? Are you a disgruntled former employee? Why do you use a different email address each time?