Narendra Bhandari, director, Asia Pacific, SSG—developer relations division, Intel, discusses the scope for innovation on the mobile platform and Intel’s initiative to encourage innovation in that space. In this free-wheeling conversation, Bhandari also talks about the changing scenario, as things move from a desktop environment to an online world; the relevance of Intel’s ‘monster’ powerful machines; whether more processing would occur at the server end or on a desktop computer; and finally, whether hardware or software rules the tech world.

In addition to the desktop and server markets, another market is emerging—the mobile market. How prepared is Intel for this? And what is the scope for open source technologies in this domain?

The third market, the mobile platform, is going to be growth-oriented. And, again, the challenges of a mobile device are going to be related to power, performance and battery life. Recently, we launched an initiative called Moblin, which is basically for mobile devices. Moblin creates an environment where a worldwide community can innovate and build the elements that go to make a complete stack of applications for the mobile platform. Intel has announced many such initiatives, which are helping people build applications more effectively and efficiently on Intel architecture platforms, and whatever their choice of operating system or distribution is, they should be able to use these tools to build better applications.

With an initiative like Moblin, a number of applications will be built. What kind of licences would they be available under?

We are not building applications. It is the open source community that is actually contributing to that. We are just providing the framework and the problem statements. The community is contributing, and the community is governed by its standard licensing mechanisms, which are reasonably well-understood by the industry. Log on to moblin.org, and you will find we are very clear about what the licensing scheme is and what its impact is. And this is no different from what any other open source project is primarily focused on. Everything that is contributed is openly available, and goes back into the community.

How relevant is this in the Indian context?

From an Indian perspective, it’s really hard for us to track who is using what. Still, I can see an exciting market emerging in the mobile space. There is a lot of ground business going on in the server and desktop segment, and they will probably continue to grow. What I am saying is that when we look at new opportunities, the mobile space becomes very interesting. Our initiatives like moblin.org are very potent for a country like India, which is witnessing the mobile explosion. Today, developers are trying to build innovative applications on current cell phone-like platforms. But they face revenue challenges as the experience is not very rich on the existing ‘phone-type’ applications. These developers, and also those who build applications for PCs, are inte rested in looking at these mobile devices and see how they can participate in the opportunity.

The other thing that’s interesting is the captive mobile market in India that’s growing month by month. Whether you call it a phone, a smart phone, or a mobile Internet device, people will want more from their mobile devices. This demand creates a very interesting opportunity for developers to create new business ideas, maybe around even the open source infrastructure, and drive a new class of applications in that space. I think that’s probably a great new growth opportunity.