Bell Labs India Flexes Its Apps

With a clear mandate of "innovating for the emerging markets," Bell Labs India is currently engaged in creating applications that specifically address the unique problems of a developing country.

So what sort of applications has the company been developing? Dr. Viswanath Poosala, the head of Bell Labs India, gave Light Reading Asia the lowdown on three that are likely to be commercialized soon:

Teleport
Teleport offers information on traffic-free routes for commuters. Although the initial catalyst for the development was the daily struggle encountered by commuters in India, Bell Labs believes Teleport is equally as suited to users in developed nations, from where initial interest has come.

"Teleport uses a Bluetooth sensor and a data card, which are placed at different traffic intersections across the city," explains Poosala. Information about the distance vehicles are travelling, and the speed at which they are going, is collected on the data cards that then feed the data to a central server.

Mango
The second application project that's near commercialization is Mobile Audio-video Networks to Go (Mango). Poosala explains: "A lot of people are downloading data on mobile and we wanted to find an efficient way of delivering that. Mango basically finds out the best way and time to push the data on the system of the subscriber. It will detect the time when the network is not loaded or when, for instance, the subscriber is near a Wi-Fi hotspot."

Mango solves a problem for operators whose networks might not be able to support simultaneous multimedia content downloads. Mango is currently in beta mode and will be released as a commercial product later this year.

Like Teleport, Mango was developed with the Indian market in mind, but again Poosala believes it's applicable to developed markets as well.

Social Web
With Social Web, Bell Labs is trying to create a social networking platform for the next billion Internet users. Social Web is being developed so it can be used by those who are illiterate, and is "task led."

"This has a visual interface [so that] somebody who doesn't speak English or even doesn't write local language can still use it. For instance, we click on 'Like' on Facebook, but [in Social Web] there is a smile detector," says Poosala.

Again, thinking from the perspective of developing world, Social Web will go beyond the entertainment value of social networking, as it can also be used to reward subscribers. It will include a subscriber data tool that, for instance, will enable companies interested in carrying out surveys identify those it wants to target. Then, if a mobile subscriber completes the survey using the visual interface, they can be rewarded with free services such as additional talk time.

Development work on Social Web began about 18 months ago. "The project is at the research stage right now. The interface is almost ready but the cloud through which the tasks will be disseminated is at a prototype stage. While we may wait for a year or longer for the Social Web for the next billion, some of the applications, such as the smile detector, are immediately applicable [in developed markets]," says Poosala.

As well as these applications, Bell Labs India is working on core network developments too. One of the ambitious projects being worked on is called Village Net. Most of India's villages, which still suffer from last-mile connectivity problems, are separated by 10-20 kilometers, making connectivity between them an additional issue.

"We took Wi-Fi and modified it to reach 10 to 20 kms based on point-to-point [connectivity]. It is a very low-cost solution to connect the villages," explains Poosala.

Gagandeep Kaur, India Editor, Light Reading