Blackle

All you google worshippers - try Blackle. No , its not a different search engine but your favorite one wrapped in an energy saving blanket. I think this idea in itself may not amount to much but it could be a trigger for rationalizing energy consumption on the internet. On a sombre note , all your Googling amounts to 450,000 servers ( @ conservative 200 Watt per server) burning close to 100 MW just at the data center. Now start adding the communication costs and the end user terminal power and numbers become frightening.

Stanford India Bio-design

SIB is offering a two year fellowship for medical technology innovation - the program is conducted by Stanford in association with AIIMS and IIT-Delhi.

I think this is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs and other players in the Indian biomedical industry. Please do check it out here.

The great Indian electronics opportunity

When I stepped into my first job after college, the one tag I never wanted from ignorant friends and relatives was that of an "IT engineer". IT is different, I claimed - Java,C++, blah blah. Every Tom,Dick and Harry could do "IT" but I was into "VLSI" - a priviliged domain. It was a tough task to explain the difference. After all these years, I have finally managed to convince my parents that I make ( rather , design but explaining that subtlety is not worth the effort) chips of the non-edible variety, and have nothing to do with website software.

Compared to giant leaps in software services of the Infosys/Wipro/TCS variety , the semiconductor industry in India has been relatively anonymous. But if Frost and Sullivan's report on Indian electronics opportunity is to be believed, the electronics consumption is at the cusp of an explosion - reaching a staggering 363 billion dollars , and still growing, in 2015. The majority of this demand would be fueled by cellphones, PCs, media players and consumer electronics. This translates into 40 billion USD worth of semiconductor opportunity starting from 3 billion in 2005 - a ten fold increase in 10 years.

Today , almost 80% of the revenues and workforce in Indian semiconductor industry fall in the embedded software domain. I suspect this percentage will persist or even increase as we move to 2015 , simply because chips are becoming smarter, more complicated to design, yet cheaper to manufacture due to increased wafer sizes, increasing yields and ultra efficient super-fabs. This paradox works well for those with deep pockets. Scale is everything in the chip design industry and those who don't achieve it either disappear or get gobbled up no matter how superior their design is on any number of parameters.

The biggest opportunities in the next 10 odd years would be
a) electronics equipment manufacturing ( 150 billion USD)- local production more cost effective, customisation for local consumption.
b) embedded software (30 billion USD)- endless supply of smart software engineers , customisation for local consumption.

EDA,VLSI and board design would also continue to grow but opportunity would be relatively limited at <10 billion USD. More importantly, newer players would find it more and more difficult to enter these markets.

As for chip fabrication, lets just say we are late into the game, notwithstanding SemIndia's persistence. After all, if one wants to speak Mandarin fluently, the age to start is 5 , not 25. Incidentally, the Chinese entered this game in early 1980's.