As anyone in the US with children of school-age can attest, technology enhanced learning has become a standard. Increasingly, that computing is embedded in the methods that children learn. Moreover, “flipped classrooms” are taking hold. Under this model, lectures and homework in a class are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. This model has proven to be quite effective. Naturally, the cost of computing has been prohibitively expensive in many developing countries, and as a result the digital divide between the developed and developing world has grown.
For all that we read about India’s rise as a technology powerhouse, the country has relatively poor infrastructure. Less than 20 percent of mobile towers deliver 3G service, and therefore, 3G data services are used by less than 5% of active subscribers. The country also has the slowest internet penetration growth in the Asia Pacific region at only 12.5 percent. Compare that to China’s rate which is over 42% or even Bangladesh’s, which is 21 percent.
It should also be noted that in India, the drop-out rates of school children remain appallingly high. 16 percent of students drop out during grades one through four, 43% drop out during grades five through eight, and 68% drop out between grades nine and 12. As a result, there are roughly 142 million children who should be in school but are not.
A few weeks ago, I spoke at a gathering of IT executives at former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s presidential library, Centro Fox. Another speaker at the conference was Suneet Tuli, an Indian who now lives in Toronto. Tuli is the founder and chief executive officer of DataWind, a Canadian wireless web access products and services developer. Having become familiar with the discouraging data regarding the digital divide, Tuli elected to do something about it. As Tuli explains it, “Although I was born in India, I grew up in Canada, and had access to Canada’s world-class public education system. But in various family trips over the years, I realized that in India the quality of education one received was in direct correlation to one’s economic class. I felt very strongly that access to the internet would level the playing field.” He developed a goal for his company to develop a tablet computer that would be affordable for the masses in India. PCs became ubiquitous in the US once the cost of the PC dropped to below 25 percent of a person’s monthly income. In order for this to work in India, Tuli realized that his tablet would need to cost $35.
Then comes the hard part: how does one create a tablet for $35? Free operating systems is part of the answer. The other part is the democratization of the central processing unit were part of the answer. In the Windows era, the CPU market was controlled by Intel and AMD, and pricing stayed high. Google ported Android to the ARM architecture which could be licensed by anybody, and about four years back over 100 different companies started making ARM based processors for Android. This has now reduced to a few dozen, but still it’s generated hyper competition between these firms (many of which are Chinese), resulting in steep price drops – in some cases over ten times in less than 18 months. So, a processor that cost $35 two years ago, is today as little as $3.50. Tuli and his team also worked to squeeze supply chain margins. The steps included making touch screens and revamping LCD production as well as implementing a disruptive business model. The business model change would entail shifting the burden of margins from hardware to recurring revenue streams such as advertising, content and subscriptions, and network services.
From a technology standpoint, Tuli needed to figure out how to change the web delivery architecture. He says, “The issue is that the average website today has greater than one megabyte of content that needs to be loaded. In India, the load speeds are at approximately three kilobytes per second. Therefore the average website takes one to six minutes to load and costs more than the equivalent of $10 per month.” Tuli developed a patented process which allows full web pages to filter through the Datawind Cloud Server to develop an image of the website with full functionality. This only requires 0.03 megabyte, which can be loaded in a few seconds and at the equivalent of $0.67 per month. This is truly a paradigm shift.
Datawind has a vision for delivering the internet for free. The idea is to take its patented technology parallel processing environment, providing six to ten times reduction processing power and memory in client devices and ten to 30 times reduction in mobile-network data consumption. Tuli says, “The result is lower-cost devices with desktop-like web experience delivered faster and with lower data costs”
The results have been staggering. Datawind has become India’s biggest tablet maker in the process.
Much of the innovation in education technology has been focused on software, in some ways taking for granted the point that users of education technology will have enough wherewithal to afford a personal computing device. Tuli has focused on the making the hardware affordable enough to ensure that the education gap stops and reverses in the process. As the educated-class in India grows, it will at least partially have Tuli to thank.
(This article is part of the IT Influencers series. To read other articles in the series, including interviews with Sal Khan, Sir James Dyson, Jim Goodnight, Yves Behar, Walt Mossberg, and David Pogue, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the "Follow" link above.)
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. Peter will provide a free video or teleconference lecture on the book for any team that purchases 30 or more copies of it. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on @WorldClassIT.
