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Vijay Rana,
London, 14 March 2007
No! It is not a
dream. It's now a reality for hundreds of poor families in Chennai.
Children in these homes could never afford a modern PC until they
were offered a unique opportunity by a Chennai based company called
Novatium. The experiment began in January with one hundred homes
using this system and by the end of this month at least 400 families
in Chennai will be connected with this kind of NetPC.
Listen interview with Rajesh Jain
These
homes have been networked with a thin client computer system, using
a low-cost centrally managed server. It’s called Nova NetPC and
has no conventional processor, no hard-disc and yet the end
user is able to have all the essential educational and business
applications including multimedia and Internet facilities. These
applications are set up on a remote server. The client’s computer
is connected to a remote server through a cable operator or phone
company. Clients can connect to this server by paying a monthly fee
like they now pay to their Internet service provider or the cable
operator.
In
an exclusive interview with the UK’s premier NRI website, www.nrifm.com
Rajesh Jain, the cofounder of Nova NetPC said, “Our aim is to make
computing affordable and simple. We are targeting people who are at
the lower and middle end of the pyramid, who cannot afford a
conventional PC.” Rajesh Jain rose to prominence during the dot
com boom when in a record-breaking deal he sold his Indiaworld.com
to Sify.com. He is now the chairman of the Mumbai based IT company
Netcore Solutions.
The
work on NetPC began in 2003 when Jain had a chance meeting in
Bangalore with Prof Ashok JunJhunwala of the IIT Chennai. Both of
them concerned with the widening digital divide between India’s
rich and poor decided to deploy their respective skills to find a
solution and to make computing affordable to millions of poor people
in India.
The
concept of thin client computing is not new. It has been used in the
corporate world for some time, though still at a much hire product
cost.
They
decided to cut the cost further. The CPU in the Nova NetPC is
similar to a cable TV set-top box, but still able to provide
essential computing applications. Jain says that this computer can
use Microsoft and Linux based programmes. The Chennai families are,
in fact, using Microsoft Office. The NetPC will have much longer
shelf life because all the maintenance, virus protection and
software upgrade will be done centrally at the server end. Though
the user data will be stored at the remote server, the NetPC will
have a USB port so that a user will be able to store data on a
memory stick or an external hard drive.
Recently,
the Newsweek Magazine profiled Rajesh Jain: "This formula
may just change the way the average person thinks of
computing." Comparing the NetPC with the $100 laptop of MIT's
Nicholas Negroponte, the Newsweek wrote, "if the winning
formula turns out to be Jain's, or something like it, it could kill
the PC altogether.
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