My fortnightly column A Dose of IT on healthcare ICT Kapil Khandelwal QuoteUnquote with KK www.kapilkhandelwal.com

1. c m y k c m y k
11New Delhi ●● Monday ●● 8 August 2011
Sony Corp to
launch organic
electroluminescent
monitors later this
month. Technomics
Old Twitter
version is set to
be killed this
week for a brand
new upgrade.
TCS to collaborate
with the Singapore
Management Univer-
sity (SMU) for a new
R&D facility.
SANGEETHA CHENGAPPA
BENGALURU
Aug 7: The mobile sub-
scriber base in India (870
million) that has witnessed a
sharp slowdown since April
2011, still continues to
attract new handset manu-
facturers such as the $28 bil-
lion telecom solutions
provider Huawei Technolo-
gies which is wooing Indi-
ans with its range of smart
phones and feature phones.
The company, which has
been selling its unbranded
handsets and data card don-
gles through telecom opera-
tors in India over the last
three years, is planning to
bombard the market with
Huawei branded smart
phones and feature phones,
beginning with the launch of
three Android smart phones
in June. Although a late
entrant to an already crowd-
ed market, Huawei is target-
ing to acquire 5-7 per cent of
the total handset market in
India by 2013 and 15 per
cent of the smart phone mar-
ket over the next three years.
And to make this happen, a
dedicated team of 150 R&D
engineers who are a part of
Huawei’s 2,500-strong
R&D team based in Ben-
galuru, are innovating for
the diverse Indian consumer
base from students, first-
time job entrants, style-
seekers, corporate users, to
tech-savvy professionals,
semi-rural and rural folk.
“We gained valuable
insights into the needs of
Indian mobile phone users
when we soft-launched a
select range of feature
phones/smart phones last
year. Based on those
insights, we will be launch-
ing 8-10 new smart phone
models in the Rs 8,000–Rs
15,000 price band including
cloud phone models in the
Rs 10,000–Rs 25,000 price
band by the year-end”, said
Nicolas ZhuHaifeng, head,
Huawei Devices India R&D
and Product Centre.
The cloud phones, which
will be unveiled before the
festive season begins in
October, will give users
access to 5GB free storage
on the Huawei cloud hosted
in Mumbai where users’
photos, videos, music and
phone book contacts will be
automatically stored and
updated on the cloud.
Existing Huawei handsets
users can upgrade their
phones to the cloud for a
fee. “The entire cloud phone
services spanning phone
book, media and IM syn-
chronization was developed
by our R&D team in Ben-
galuru, our second largest
team outside China. The
cloud phone will be simulta-
neously launched in the
India, US and China mar-
kets this year”, said Nicolas.
“Our five-year roadmap
for the India market also
includes the launch of the
MediaPad, a 7-inch Android
3.2 tablet and hi-speed don-
gles in October 2011 along
with 20 new handset models
next year. My team has pro-
vided for seamless integra-
tion of information and files
on phones, dongles and
tablets so that users will be
able to access information
from any of their Huawei
devices”, he added.
Unlike smartphone users
in the US, Europe and other
markets who are a fairly
homogeneous customer
base with similar require-
ments, the Indian user base
has multiple segments each
with different needs.
Huawei’s Bengaluru R&D
team has incorporated sev-
eral innovative features such
as automatic internet set-
tings incorporated in the
phone, with no need for
manual intervention. One-
touch solution to access
content on Bollywood,
cricket, stock market
updates, Panchang (Hindu
calendar), live TV stream-
ing, entertainment, gaming,
music, videos, etc., with all
these applications integrated
into the phones.
For ease of use, Huawei
has a customer care and
service app, FAQs and an
instruction manual app on
the phone to help users
access instant customer
service and instructions.
The phone book contacts are
integrated with popular
social networking sites and
Instant Messaging, which
allows users a single view
screen interface of their con-
tact’s updates on multiple
social networking sites,
instead of accessing these
sites separately.
Feature phones and dual-
SIM Android phones in the
Rs 5,000–Rs 8,000 price
range are also in the
pipeline.
“In a predominantly pre-
paid user scenario, dual-
SIM phones are in great
demand in India where mul-
tiple sims from telcos are
used to avail of low-cost
plans. Feature phones are
also in demand for various
user needs such as chat,
music, FM Radio etc; we
will be launching these
soon” said Nicolas.
Huawei Devices including
mobile phones, set top
boxes and data card dongles
sold through the major tel-
cos garnered $490mn in
India in 2010 which is 10
per cent of the company’s
$4.5 billion global revenue
from devices.
The India Product Centre
in Bengaluru is focused on
bringing out products for the
domestic market where the
entire design, software and
testing will be carried out.
However, manufacturing
of all devices will continue
to happen out of China.
The company is bullish
about the India market and
has invested $120 billion on
a 20 acre R&D campus in
Whitefield, which will
accommodate 4,000 R&D
engineers over 1 million sq
ft of office space and is
scheduled to be ready in the
first quarter of 2014.
At a hacker conference, plenty of friendly FedsLas Vegas, Aug 7: There
was a whole lot of hacking
going on in Sin City this
weekend — and right under
the noses of federal agents.
But in a sign of a time
when cybersecurity is at the
forefront of national security
concerns, the feds were not
lurking in the shadows to
keep a watchful eye. They
came as invited guests at the
Defcon hacker convention in
Las Vegas, which drew more
than 10,000 attendees in its
19th year.
At Defcon, computer wiz-
ards test their skills against
each other for bragging
rights and prizes. No name
tags are issued and hackers
identify themselves only by
one-word handles.
High-profile attacks on
government and corporate
computer systems disclosed
this summer have pushed
hackers increasingly into the
public eye. Meanwhile, gov-
ernment agencies are woo-
ing hackers to join them in
fighting such intrusions.
The Defcon crowd made
for an interesting mix. It had
its fair share of mohawk
haircuts that would make a
rainbow proud, along with
tattoos and piercings but it
mostly looked like a campus
of geeks let loose in a Las
Vegas hotel to do what they
consider fun: decipher mind-
bending puzzles, starting
with the convention badge.
Made of titanium — organ-
isers say they depleted the
country’s stock of the raw
material — the badge had a
cut-out of the Egyptian
mathematical symbol the
Eye of Ra, and a letter and
number. It offered a clue to a
puzzle.
Other clues were contained
in a large decoder wheel on
the floor where a golden
pyramid with symbols was
encircled by letters coupled
with numbers. More clues
were salted in the program
booklet and strewn through-
out the convention center.
A hacker who goes by the
moniker “LosT” designed
the game and offered some
helpful hints: 10 people had
badges with a Z and a num-
ber. “I pulled in so many dif-
ferent disciplines that no sin-
gle person can really do it by
themselves unless they are a
weirdo like me,” said LosT,
an engaging mathemati-
cian/engineer with blue hair
and a goatee.
The game illustrates the
intellect of the attendees,
who see hacking as a skill
for problem-solving and do
not welcome the notoriety
generated by some bad
apples breaking laws.
Hackers are “people who
like a challenge. We don’t do
crime, we’re not criminals,”
said “mournewind” from
West Virginia. “People have
this opinion that hackers do
illegal things and that’s not
really a good thing.”
Hacking, for example, can
help improve commercial
products, he said. “We break
an iPhone to make Apple
make it better.”
Hackers pointed out that
criminals exist in all profes-
sions and they should not all
be painted by that broad
brush.
“I think hackers have
always gotten a bad name,”
said “pwrcycle,” whose busi-
ness card labels him an “Eth-
ical Hacker.” “Those are the
people who think outside the
box. The epitome of free
thinkers.”
He objected to the term
“cyber wars,” saying there
was danger in calling what
was essentially a crime in
which no one died a war,
with its suggestion that mili-
tary might could be used on
basically thugs, bullies and
mobsters.
“What most people are try-
ing to say is we want to stop
espionage,” he said. “He’s
not trying to kill you, he just
wants to pick your pocket.”
At the start of a panel of
cyber investigators from the
Air Force, Navy, Army and
NASA, a burly man called
“Priest,” who said he entered
government service after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
advised the audience that if
they wanted a government
job the key was to stay out of
jail, go to college and not do
drugs.
The panelists said there was
a debate in their world about
whether it was better to turn a
cop into a cyber specialist or
turn an information technol-
ogy expert into a cop.
“I think you just need to be
a geek who knows how to
talk to people,” said Ahmed
Saleh, special agent in
NASA’s computer crimes
division.
“We have a little bit of
both. We have a little bit of
the geeks who became cops
and the cops who became
geeks, or nerds or whatever
words you want to use,” he
said.
The panel started with a
“spot the Fed” contest in
which the audience had to
guess which of four women
on stage was a federal agent.
Most of the audience
picked the one who said her
favorite president was
Ronald Reagan. Wrong. It
was the one who said her
childhood dream was to be a
pilot. One sure way to catch
the attention of would-be
employers is to win the pres-
tigious “Capture The Flag”
contest. This year 12 teams
huddled with laptops in a
low-lit room all day, hacking
each other. The competition
is all about “attack and
defense,” explained “Fac-
tor,” who was part of the
defending champion team
ACME Pharm. The attack-
er’s goal is to find vulnera-
bilities while the defender
tries to to prevent the holes
from being exploited.
“You are amongst gods,”
Factor said. “This is the
Olympics.”
He shrugged off as “hype”
the negative image of hack-
ers as criminals and said the
public should not believe
everything it reads. “There
are good hackers, there are
bad hackers,” he said. “And
some of us have kids.”
Other competitions includ-
ed “Hacker Jeopardy,”
“Crack Me If You Can” and
“Hack Fortress.”
But one required absolute-
ly no computer savvy
and got a little hairy —
best beard, mustache,
partial beard, and fake
beard. — Reuters
GEEK FEST
Your smartphone, a new frontier for cyber punks
Las Vegas, Aug 7: Hackers
are out to stymie your smart-
phone.
Last week, security
researchers uncovered yet
another strain of malicious
software aimed at smart-
phones that run Google’s
popular Android operating
system. The application not
only logs details about
incoming and outgoing
phone calls, it also records
those calls.
That came a month after
researchers discovered a
security hole in Apple Inc.’s
iPhones, which prompted
the German government to
warn Apple about the
urgency of the threat.
Security experts say
attacks on smartphones are
growing fast — and attack-
ers are becoming smarter
about developing new tech-
niques. “We’re in the exper-
imental stage of mobile mal-
ware where the bad guys are
starting to develop their
business models,” said
Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder
of Lookout Inc., a San Fran-
cisco-based maker of
mobile security software.
Wrong-doers have infected
PCs with malicious soft-
ware, or malware, for
decades. Now, they are fast
moving to smartphones as
the devices become a vital
part of everyday life.
The smartphone’s useful-
ness, allowing people to
organize their digital lives
with one device, is also its
allure to criminals. All at
once, smartphones have
become wallets, email lock-
boxes, photo albums and
Rolodexes. And because
owners are directly billed
for services bought with
smartphones, they open up
new angles for financial
attacks. The worst programs
cause a phone to rack up
unwanted service charges,
record calls, intercept text
messages and even dump
emails, photos and other pri-
vate content directly onto
criminals’ servers.
Evidence of this hacker
invasion is starting to
emerge. Lookout says it now
detects thousands of
attempted infections each
day on mobile phones run-
ning its security software. In
January, there were just a
few hundred detections a
day. The number of detec-
tions is nearly doubling
every few months. As many
as 1 million people were hit
by mobile malware in the
first half of 2011.
Google Inc. has removed
about 100 malicious appli-
cations from its Android
Market app store. One par-
ticularly harmful app was
downloaded more than
260,000 times before it was
removed. Android is the
world’s most popular smart-
phone operating software
with more than 135 million
users worldwide.
Symantec Corp., the
world’s biggest security
software maker, is also see-
ing a jump. Last year, the
company identified just five
examples of malware
unique to Android. So far
this year, it’s seen 19. Of
course, that number pales
compared with the hundreds
of thousands of new strains
targeting PCs every year, but
experts say it’s only a matter
of time before criminals
catch up. “Bad guys go
where the money is,” said
Charlie Miller, principal
research consultant with the
Accuvant Inc. security firm,
and a prominent hacker of
mobile devices. “As more
and more people use phones
and keep data on phones,
and PCs aren’t as relevant,
the bad guys are going to
follow that. The bad guys
are smart. They know when
it makes sense to switch.”
—AP
bITs
Haifa, Aug 7: Wikipedia,
the online encyclopedia
that is written entirely by
volunteers and allows any-
one to edit its entries, is
losing contributors, its
founder said.
Wikipedia founder
Jimmy Wales said the non-
profit company that runs
the site is scrambling to
simplify editing procedures
in an attempt to retain vol-
unteers.
“We are not replenishing
our ranks,” said Wales. “It
is not a crisis, but I consid-
er it to be important.”
Administrators of the
Internet’s fifth most visited
website are working to
simplify the way users can
contribute and edit materi-
al. “A lot of it is convolut-
ed,” Wales said. “A lot of
editorial guidelines ... are
impenetrable to new
users.”
Wikipedia has more than
three million entries but
has been marred by subjec-
tive entries and pranks.
Even so, Wikipedia cites
studies that compare the
website’s accuracy favor-
ably to more conventional
encyclopedias, while other
studies give it lower marks.
Despite Wikipedia’s
wide-reaching popularity,
Wales said the typical pro-
file of a contributor is “a
26-year-old geeky male”
who moves on to other ven-
tures, gets married and
leaves the website. Other
contributors leave because,
10 years after the website
was launched, there are
fewer new entries to add,
he said.
As of March 2011,
Wikipedia had about
90,000 active contributors.
The goal is to tack on
another 5,000 by June of
next year, said Sue Gard-
ner, executive director of
the nonprofit that runs the
website.
Among its steps, Gardner
said the nonprofit is
expanding a program that
encourages university pro-
fessors to assign the writ-
ing of Wikipedia entries to
their students, particularly
in India, Brazil, Canada,
Germany and Britain.
The website has also
introduced a new feature
called WikiLove aimed at
keeping users engaged.
Visitors to the website
select a graphic icon —
choices include kittens,
stars and the Mediter-
ranean dessert baklava -
and send it with a message
of appreciation to a page
contributor as encourage-
ment. “It’s like a ‘like’ on
Facebook,” Wales said.
Even so, Wales said
Wikipedia must be used
with care. “Particularly be
careful if we say ‘the neu-
trality of this article is dis-
puted,’ or ‘the following
section doesn’t cite any
sources.’ That’s probably a
good warning,” he said.
— AP
First cloud phone set for October Wikipedia
is losing
volunteers
Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas drew more than
10,000 attendees.
KAPIL KHANDELWAL
T
he downgrade of
United States sover-
eign rating by Stan-
dard & Poor to AA+ may
signal a shift in the exist-
ing world order. US has
held the gold standard
AAA rating since 1917
and dominated the world
economy.
The impact is going to be
felt globally and across
industries including health
and pharma and the off-
shoring and outsourcing
services.
Back home, our Finance
Minister has not ventured
out to conclusively give a
verdict on its impact to
India.
If US is unable to man-
age its fiscal affairs, there
can be another downgrade
in the next 12 to 18
months, which may signal
a spiral impact globally.
One of the contributing
factors for US downgrade
by S&P is the country’s
inability to contain the
spiraling healthcare costs
and delays in the health-
care reforms.
Let us calibrate the
impact in the short and
medium term.
From India’s point of
view what are the impact
to the outsourcing services
providers, healthcare serv-
ices and pharma compa-
nies.
Many predict the surge
in demand for medical
care associated with the
aging US population will
strain resources because
of which future genera-
tions in the US will face
higher inflation, higher
taxes — or both.
Some suggest the rising
cost of Medicare and
Medicaid, the federal
insurance plan for those
aged 65 and older, will
drive the national debt to a
point of no return.
And still others have
suggested that cost pres-
sures can ultimately result
to reduced health benefits
for all.
While the aging popula-
tion may contribute to the
US healthcare crisis, it’s
the emergence of costly
new drugs, diagnostics
and medical technologies
that will pose a problem. .
American health care
industry is already in a
state of flux with the
downgrade and fiscal con-
solidation. For health
insurance companies, the
general consensus is that
the situation will poten-
tially bring about price
and margin pressures but
can also lead to an
increase in top line rev-
enue as more people will
be covered by some form
of insurance. This is posi-
tive for outsourcing, as
one of the levers for cost
control can be outsourced
to India and other low cost
destinations.
The second trend is a
move toward accountable
care organisations
(ACO’s) and global capi-
tation payments.
The general idea is for a
health care provider to
receive a set amount per
patient and take responsi-
bility for the patient’s
medical care.
This serves to transfer
most, in some cases all, of
the risk to the provider of
health care services.
The risk is that the
patient may need more
services than the provider
will budget for. However,
if the patient, requires
fewer services, the
provider receives the ben-
efit.
This spells more medical
tourism opportunities for
the local healthcare serv-
ices providers in India.
The third trend will be
that of consolidating the
industry. While the big
players in the US industry
appear to be achieving
reasonable growth, there
are smaller companies
within the health care
industry that will face
challenges and may exit or
consolidate.
As the post-merger con-
solidation occurs, there
will be enough opportuni-
ties for outsourcing IT,
functional and clinical
services to low-cost desti-
nations like India.
Let us now discuss a
couple of caveats for India
to blow this opportunity
away in the shifting of the
world order.
Firstly, US dollar
exchange rates may
strengthen the Indian
rupee.
Secondly, the rate of cost
inflation in India is
squeezing the margins out
and making India uncom-
petitive against other glob-
al outsourcing destination.
The second half year
(H2) for this fiscal year for
Indian services providers
in healthcare and pharma
may require re-rating as
they gear up for the
emerging challenges and
opportunities posed by the
US sovereign downgrade
and a shift to a new world
order.
A Dose of IT
India can benefit
from US downgrade
Kapil Khandelwal is Director, EquNev Capital, a niche invest-
ments banking and advisory services firm and an independent
advisory board member with leading healthcare and information
communication technology (ICT) companies.
Nicolas ZhuHaifeng, head of Huawei Devices India R&D and Product Centre.
AGE
THE