Symbian co-founder David Wood in IIIT-B

Mr. David Wood, Executive Vice President and Head of Research at Symbian gave a talk on“Future of smart phones’ at IIIT-B today.

 

The exciting talk was interesting in more ways than one. Mr. Wood is truly the father of smart phone; he has been heading research and technology at Symbian for 10 years. Symbian completes the 10^th year exactly on May 15, 2008 and Bangalore is lucky to have David Wood kicking off the tenth anniversary celebrations for Symbian right from this city.

 

Mr. Wood talked of

Pre 2000 phase that was “voice / text dominated”

2000 – 2005 as the phase of “feature phones”, and,

post 2005 as the era of “smart phones”.

Mr. Wood can be justly proud that 300 million phones in the world are powered by Symbian today. Symbian has majority share (around 70%) of the smart phone market globally.

 

A true visionary, Mr. Wood is not happy with the dominant market share of smart phones; his eyes are set on growing the smart phone market itself – from mere 10-20% today to nearly 70-80% by 2012; of course, Mr. Wood would like to have market share of 70% in the new scenario as well! He expects more than one billion annual smart phone sales in 2012 (from the current 100+ million)

 

He talked of moving from “R & D” (Research and Development) to “C & D” (Connect and Develop) and plans to use universities in a big way in their plans to accelerate innovative research.

 

Mr. Wood also announced an “Essay Competition” for college students across the globe.

 

IIIT-B is honored to have had such a legendary person  give a talk in the Institute.

GMR starts Turkish airport venture

In the presence of her Prime Minister, Turkey saw the ground breaking ceremony for the new terminal at Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Istanbul. The new terminal will add 10 million passengers to its existing capacity of 5 million passengers. Interestingly, Bangalore-based GMR Consortium won the bid for construction and operation of the new terminal (along with the existing terminal) for 20 years. The bids were won in July 2007 during a 14.5 hour long bidding process amidst touch competition from Germany’s Fraport, Italy’s Venice Airport, USA’s Chicago Airport and Italy’s TAV.

 

GMR is building and operating the green field airport in Hyderabad; it is also maintaining and upgrading Delhi airport.

 

GMR paid 1.9 billion Euros to get 20 year operation rights; it will invest 200 million Euros in building the new terminal. The existing operator landed over control effective 00-00 hour on May 1, 2008

 

One more case of Indian companies marching successfully in the global arena; we had seen Tatas, Infosys, Birlas, Wipro and Subex quietly taking over global companies. What is happening is exactly the opposite of what our misguided communists and socialists friends have been talking of another East India Company! The self-serving politicians have fooled our countrymen about the danger of globalization and the entry of multinationals; they want the monopoly of public sector so that the private interests of politicians can be well served!