The Indian research lab of technology firm Hewlett-Packard (HP) plans to build new applications for enterprises in sectors such as healthcare or financial services.
The Bangalore-based HP Labs India is currently working on applications aimed at simplifying the human-computer interaction ? like gestures to minimise the use of a keyboard ? in a bid to drive IT penetration in the country.
?We are developing some applications for the Indian market that will be controlled using natural interfaces,? said Sudhir Dixit, director and chief technologist at HP labs India, adding that individual technology components are already getting transferred to the company’s business units. ?We have combined all these things into a solution that we are building where there is a mobile, a TV and there’s paper.?
The idea is to integrate technology that’s available off-the-shelf to allow tasks such as digitising a paper document using a mobile phone or synchronising entertainment between a phone and television. The lab, meanwhile, is also working on a prototype of a hardware ecosystem, Dixit said.
?When we started off, we focussed on products and applications such as personal computers and printers. But in India, there is a lot of opportunity in the enterprise business in the software side,? said Dixit. ?Right now, we are not after a particular vertical, but that’s where a lot of our focus is going to be.?
The lab on Tuesday released a beta version of its ?Personalised Video? application for computers that helps users to create their own channels, based on a topic of interest, by pulling online videos from YouTube to create a playlist of sorts. The lab sees potential for the video application in India, reasoning that the video would dominate the internet in India because the number of Indian languages poses a difficulty for text-based content.
?By 2013, the majority of internet traffic will be online video,? said Krishnan Ramanathan, senior research scientist at HP Labs. The lab is also working on applications such as linking online text-based educational content with videos. The video application follows last year’s release of SiteOnMobile, a service that enables SMS and voice access to websites in an attempt to offer Internet access from low-end mobile phones.
