Tag: infrastructure

A for-publishers stack and the symmetry of globalisation

Journalism as the fourth estate has been noticeably empowered in the Information Age, with technologies like the WWW, broadband connectivity and smartphones in (almost) everyone’s pockets. However, the opportunities to responsibly exercise the resulting power have been coming at a disproportionately greater cost: to be constantly fast, constantly smart and constantly vigilant. Put another way: in journalism until the early 1990s, there were the journalists and then there were the readers. Today, there are the journalists, there’s a tech stack and only then the readers. Many newsrooms often forget that this stack exists and often dictates what news is produced and how.

I received a very sudden reminder of this when I opened my browser a few minutes ago. If you use Pocket and have the Chrome extension installed, you’ll likely have seen three recommendations from the app every time you opened a new tab:

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The article in the middle – ‘The 7 Biggest Unanswered Questions in Physics’ – pertains to topics something I’ve repeatedly discussed in my stories, although I’ll concede they may have been more detailed than is desirable for an article like that to become a hit. However, the details/nuance/depth all notwithstanding, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article published by an Indian publication – or even non-American/British publication – among the Pocket recommendations. This of course is a direct reflection of where the app was made and people from which part of the world use it the most.

Where the app was made matters because nobody is going to build an app in location A and hope that it becomes popular in faraway location B. Pocket itself is San Franciscan and the bias shows: most recommendations I’ve received, or even the non-personalised trending topics I’ve spotted, are American. In fact, among all the tools I use and curation services I follow, I’ve come across only two exceptions: the heartwarming human-curated 3QuarksDaily and Quora. I’m not familiar with Quora’s story but I’m sure it’s interesting – about how a Q&A platform out of Mountain View came to be dominated by Indian users.

Circling back to the ‘7 Unanswered Questions’ article: Its creator is NBC News, a journalistic outlet, while its contents are being published via Google Chrome and Pocket – a.k.a. the stack. And the stack powerfully controls what I’m discovering, what thousands of people are discovering, and how easily they can save, consume and/or share it. Because Pocket and NBC – rather, app P and app Q – are both American products, there is an increased likelihood that P and Q will team up to promote content and distribute it worldwide; the likelihood is relative to that of an app and a publisher from two different regions teaming up, which is lower. This breaks the symmetry of globalisation.

Of course, the biggest exception to this would be an app that is truly global, like Facebook. Then again such exceptions are also harder to come by – nor do they always neutralise the advantage of having a cut-above-the-rest ecosystem of apps and app-makers that provide a continuous edge to homegrown publishers. Though don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a flavour of protectionism. I like many of Pocket’s recommendations and appreciate how the app has helped me discover a variety of publishers I’ve come to love.

Instead, it’s a quiet yearning (doped with some wishful thinking): Will my peers in India have been farther along in their careers had there been an equally influential Indian for-publishers stack?

Featured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Reaching for the… sky?

This article, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on December 4, 2012.

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The Aakash initiative of the Indian government is an attempt to bolster the academic experience of students in the country by equipping them with purpose-built tablets at subsidised rates.

The Aakash 2 tablet was unveiled on November 11, 2012. It is the third iteration of a product first unveiled in October, 2011, and is designed and licensed by a British-Canadian-Indian company named DataWind, headed by chief executive Suneet Singh Tuli.

On November 29, the tablet received an endorsement from the United Nations, where it was presented to Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon by India’s ambassador to the UN, Hardeep Singh Puri, and Tuli.

DataWind will sell Aakash 2 to the government at Rs. 2,263, which will then be subsidised to students at Rs. 1,130. However, the question is this: is it value for money even at this low price?

When it first entered the market, Aakash was censured for being underpowered, underperforming, and just generally cheap. Version one was a flop. The subsequently upgraded successor, released April, 2012, was released commercially before it was remodelled into the Aakash 2 to suit the government’s subsidised rate. As a result, some critical features were substituted with some others whose benefits are either redundant or unnecessary.

Aakash 2 is more durable and slimmer than Aakash, even though both weigh 350 grams. If Akash is going to act as a substitute for textbooks, that would be a load off children’s schoolbags.

But the Ministry of Human Resource Development is yet to reveal if digitised textbooks in local languages or any rich, interactive content have been developed to be served specifically through Aakash 2. The 2 GB of storage space, if not expanded to a possible 32 GB, is likely to restrict the quantity of content further, whereas the quality will be restrained by the low 512 MB of RAM.

The new look has been achieved by substituting two USB ports that the first Aakash had for one mini-USB port. This means no internet dongles.

That is a big drawback, considering Aakash 2 can access only Wi-Fi networks. It does support tethering capability that lets it act as a local Wi-Fi hotspot. But not being able to access cellular networks like 3G, such as in rural areas where mobile phone penetration is miles ahead of internet penetration, will place the onus on local governments to lay internet-cables, bring down broadband prices, etc.

If the device is being envisaged mainly as a device on which students may take notes, then Aakash 2 could pass muster. But even here, the mini-USB port rules out plugging in an external keyboard for ease of typing.

Next, Aakash 2’s battery life is a meagre 4 hours, which is well short of a full college day, and prevents serious student use. Video-conferencing, with a front-facing low-resolution camera, will only drain the battery faster. Compensatory ancillary infrastructure can only render the experience more cumbersome.

In terms of software, after the operating system was recently upgraded in Aakash 2, the device is almost twice as fast and multi-tasks without overheating. But DataWind has quoted “insufficient processing power” as the reason the tablet will not have access to Android’s digital marketplace. Perhaps in an attempt to not entirely short-change students, access to the much less prolific GetJar apps directory is being provided.

Effectively, with limited apps, no 3G, a weak battery and a mini-USB port, the success of the tablet and its contribution to Indian education seems to be hinged solely on its low price.

As always, a problem of scale could exacerbate Aakash 2’s deficiencies. Consider the South American initiative of the One Laptop Per Child program instituted in 2005. Peru, in particular, distributed 8.5 lakh laptops at a cost of US $225 million in order to enhance its dismal education system.

No appreciable gains in terms of test scores were recorded, however. Only 13 per cent of twelve-year olds were at the required level in mathematics and 30 per cent at the required reading level, the country’s education ministry reported in March 2012.

However, Uruguay, its smaller continent-mate, saw rapid transformations after it equipped every primary-school student in the country with a laptop.

The difference, as Sandro Marcone, a Peruvian ministry official, conceded, lay in Uruguayan students using laptops to access interactive content from the web to become faster learners than their teachers, and forming closely knit learning communities that then expanded.

Therefore, what India shouldn’t do is subsidise a tablet that could turn out to be a very costly notebook. Yes, the price is low, but given the goal of ultimately unifying 58.6 lakh students across 25,000 colleges and 400 universities, Aakash 2 could be revised to better leverage existing infrastructure instead of necessitating more.