Hardware Update: 21/05/09

COMMUNICATION IS BECOMING MORE PERSONALISED AND TARGETED IN INDIA
Surabhi Agarwal
The Financial Express

Only 3-5 percent of the world’s printing market is digital. The figures for the Asia region are even lesser. Companies like Hewlett-Packard (HP) are at the forefront of the shift towards digital driving its adoption among larger enterprises and SMBs. Though the global economic crisis has put a spanner in the adoption rate, India continues to be a high growth rate market for HP, says VS Hariharan, vice-president, graphic solutions business, imaging and printing group, HP APAC & Japan. In a chat on the sidelines of HP Graphics Odyssey event in Beijing, Hariharan talks about how companies are going increasingly digital in marketing and branding.

Excerpts:

India and China are clear growth markets for you. What are the major trends that you see in this space?

One of the biggest trends is that people are moving towards short-runs as they are doing more targeted communication. Secondly, Web is being aggressively used. In India, we have been talking about digital for the last several years. If I break-out by category, signage is already very digital in India. All the billboard, posters that you, except for some in the villages, are all printed out of large-format machines. However, on the consumer side, India is pretty much offset. The US has converted a lot to digital, China has also seen the shift towards digital in the last few years. But, the trend in India in the last one-two years is very encouraging. This year, we have sold a lot more Indigo presses in the first few months, than we sold last year.

How much of the world’s printing market is already digital?

On an average, between 3-5 percent is digital. So, there is a long way to go. Asia is only two-thirds of that. India and China are far behind the US. Roughly, 95 percent of the market is non-digital, which is basically our potential market. In value terms, the worldwide market is around $800 billion. And for Asia, that number is roughly around $250-280 billion. So, Asia becomes 30 percent of the worldwide printing market.

What is driving the adoption in the Asia market?

Personalisation is the key demand in the market. The more it is all-pervasive, the growth of digital will be higher. For instance, everybody needs to print a lot of business cards today. And if you are working for a SMB, you need fancy business cards, which stand out. Today, mass campaigns are becoming less and less. People are trying to be more personalised and targeted.

How are sales figures looking in the backdrop of the global meltdown?

In the first half, our Indigo business grew by double digits. The impressions on Indigo grew by 40 percent. We think that we will do better in the second half. We see things stabilising now. Sentiment has gone away and it is more about what is real now. Some of the new presses, new printers that we are launching are going to be more productive, more cost efficient. So, HP will share results for the Q2 very soon, but the last one and one and half months has been very good for us. We are positive about the coming months. We see a clear recovery in China, India, Australia, New Zealand and some parts of South East Asia.

 

HP LAUNCHES NEW DESKTOP
Bangalore
Deccan Herald

HP on Wednesday announced its latest consumer desktop innovation with the launch of its new HP Pavilion p6000 PC.

Powered by Intel Core2 Duo Processor, this desktop has monitor with features like Backlit OSD, aqua-white LED indication and EasyClip that command your attention, the company said.

Announcing the launch Ketan Patel, Country Category manager Consumer Desktops, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett-Packard India said, “The Pavilion p6000 PC encapsulates digital entertainment, opening doors for the family to live it up - with photographs, music, video and surfing, all rolled into one.”

Priced at Rs 29,990, this PC is designed for essential tasks and available with advanced technology options.           

 

QUALCOMM'S MANTRA: ALWAYS-ON WIRELESS ACCESS AT LOW COST
Shyamal Majumdar, Mumbai
Business Standard

Kanwalinder Singh, president, India and South Asia, of the world’s largest CDMA (Code division multiple access) chipset maker, Qualcomm, has reasons to feel happy. Despite late entry into Indian market, CDMA 2000 has over 92 million subscribers and enjoys a quarter of the market share. In recent months, CDMA 2000 has averaged subscriber net additions of over 2.7 million per month.

But Singh says the time has come to go beyond voice. “Indian mobile companies have been obsessed with the voice subscription game. It’s time to look at value-added services that can significantly transform society,” Singh says, adding 3G wireless broadband is an opportunity coming their way to make high-speed wireless Internet access more widely available and affordable. According to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), for every one percent increase, Internet connectivity has twice the impact of voice on GDP growth.

Singh says globally 2G (GSM) is rapidly transitioning to 3G and Qualcomm will drive a similar trend in India and bring in “affordable tiered solution” to stimulate mass-market adoptions. Reasons: 3G feature phones will bring better voice clarity and multimedia experience to users, opening new services revenue streams for wireless operators; 3G USB modems, dongles and data cards will bring ‘always on’ wireless broadband connectivity to laptops and desktops that are already experiencing accelerated growth; and affordable 3G smart phones will bring in a new dimension to enterprise connectivity.

Affordability is the key word here. Singh says computing devices are getting smaller (last year, 2 million laptops were sold in India compared to 3 million smart phones) and the San Diego-based company is ready with technologies that can change people’s lives, particularly in emerging markets like India. For example, Qualcomm-powered wireless Internet devices can remove the need to carry a mobile phone, if the computing device is small enough.

For example, the Kayak platform developed by the company Kayak, is essentially a portable computing device that leverages 3G chipsets and can also be connected to the internet even in small villages where connectivity is difficult to access or is unaffordable. Kayak fills the niche that exists between desktop PCs, which normally require landlines or separate accessories for connectivity, and internet-capable wireless devices.

Qualcomm will not make the Kayak PCs, but will offer the software specifications and reference design to device manufacturers. Devices based on the Kayak design will offer a full-featured Web 2.0-capable browser to perform at desktop resolutions; access via the browser to Web 2.0 productivity applications; support for both television sets and computer monitors to be used as displays and/or for a built-in display; compatibility with a standard keyboard and mouse for input; and music player and/or a 3D gaming console functionality.

While a laptop usually measures 15 inches or more, that on Qualcomm's snapdragon platform would be mostly in the range of nine to 12 inches. There will be pocket devices also.

One of the major advantages will be that these devices will be low-powered. The small computing devices when embedded with a snapdragon chipset platform can make them run even on mobile phone batteries. In a country like India where power supply in villages has been a problem, this can be a game-changer, says Singh.

A proud Singh says over 1,000 engineers based in the company’s Research & Development (R &D) centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad developed the Kayak platform. Web-based applications open up new possibilities for people in emerging markets for whom packaged software can be expensive, says Singh, adding that the prices of 3G entry-level handsets will come down sharply.