Here we are!

First of all, Good job team. You have backed me up for saying you guys are the best in the country, and definitely who so ever has seen your apps, they are impressed.

And for those who were not at CES, the above image shows the product we actually displayed. One of the sleakest design we have seen at CES, and there is more to come!

The Day!

So, the day has arrived! How do I feel? Nothing special as such. Cos it’s not the product launch. Just a showcase. But the attention we have received proves that it is the right time for devices like this. Now suddenly many companies are coming up with the same form factor device. But again providing nothing new. May be a new name, or yet newer operating system. But where is the disruption? And where is the innovation?

When we launch and hit the market, people will see a new way to interact with devices. Adding one more dimension to the interfaces and making people ambidextrous. Ideas in the end may seem so trivial, that we might smile, but fact remains that they aren’t introduced by anyone yet.

“When you know what you want, the whole world conspires you to achieve it”. And this is something I personally believe in.  Last few weeks have opened a lot of doors for us. Got a lot of calls from BIG names who showed support and suggested future collaborations. But it’s a wait and watch game for everyone, isn’t it!

And we are after the same rule. We have some time before we launch. And we want to show, but slowly. CES is the style and ID of the product. Other events would be complete demo of the product on Android. Further events will see more product launches and our innovative UI. And before we hit the market, everyone would know about the innovations we do.

And as requested, there will be a LIVE DEMO as well. But restricted only to either those who we have promised, telecoms or people who matter most to make this dream a reality. Sharing with everyone will leak the ideas and we all know Chinese manufacturers!

As a kid, I wanted to learn a lot of things. Piano, painting, creating objects out of spare parts, SEE molecules, and what not! But I belonged to a lower-middle class family. And getting everything was not possible. But I learned what all I wanted to. And now, I’ve the opportunity to create an enabler which will realise the dreams of kids like me. One device to do everything. And choosing Android was very crucial for the same, cos I cannot be everything. And I cannot design and develop everything. The easy way out was to build on an easy platform which people can adopt and create whatever they want to.

The product will take a lot of engineering effort. But I believe it is required. If something could be done, why not do it. We faced a lot of resistance from the manufacturers about it. But everything has calmed down after the beautiful response. And adding to that, more people are reaching to us sharing about how they want to use and commercialize this device.

Every time I pray, I just say one thing “Make my faith firm”. I heard it somewhere, that’s all we need. And actually, that all I need.

Regards

And we love it!

Hello All!

We loved the response and appreciation we have got till now. But more is yet to come. Right from more than one product to be there at CES, to the recent patents we have filed, there are going to be more disclosures on the work we are doing. A special thanks to the open source community, nVidia and Pixel Qi, for supporting us and helping us make this into a reality. (Special thanks to slashgear for covering us.)

So, who are we? What do we do? When are we going to launch the product? I know you all have lots of questions.

We see ourselves as the usability firm, one which will always keep the user at the core and design everything. Right now the product which is to come at CES will showcase only Android. But was it not designed for smaller mobile phone? What about those full screen alert boxes? There are lots of issues for Android to be used on the big screen. We are going to fix it, but will not showcase in CES this time. There are going to be a lot of User Interface changes in the final product.

We believe that the ‘window’ concept is gone. The UI which we are using is some 4 decades old, but we are yet to get rid of the folders, hierarchy and drop down menus! All this is going to change. A lot of new user interface ideas are coming. One of the few one which we like are this and this. In fact, TIME’s project Manhattan is an early response to the same. The UI is going to change, because the needs have changed. Now we need our devices not only to browse internet, but also to read the books.

Some of the concept designs have made us smile in awe and in anger as well. Awe because they were able to solve a lot of problems, and anger, cos they were able to showcase it to the world before us. Yet, this new UI needs to evolve. And the community would play a very big role in the same. We are thinking of involving the community in a bigger way, where they get to choose which rules are to be adopted, what UI element makes a lot of sense and what compromises are to be made, if efficient usability is to be achieved.

iPod brought music to life, then videos as well. Soon internet and applications saw the surge. Amazon came out with Kindle. But what’s next? We believe its the media. Newspapers at go. Delivered every morning to your home screen.

We recently went to Taiwan. And to our understanding, and major ODM’s fear, we can definitely say, that Apple IS cooking up something. Even if one of the ODMs is their manufacturer, the fact that their other non-Apple group would suffer is a big burden for them. We talked to all. And we tried to explain them, that product is not going to win the next generation of computing device race. It’s the CONTENT. We tried our hard to make them realize, when Apple launches their product, they will have a very beautiful device, the best UI which a tablet can feature, and to support all that, one of the best content delivery systems (their recent acquisition are big hints). All this would again usher a big group of people making application for them. And then again the normal product manufacturers would be left.

We are not going to do to this mistake. That is why we have already made quite a few collaborations, and many more are in the pipeline. We would release our own SDK later next year for the bigger screen application development. We would help the open community as much as we can, so there is already lot of content there, before we hit the market. Designing on Android if way easier than on any other OSes.

We have a comments section on the website, would love to hear from you. And love to answer your queries. You can also mail us at info AT notionink.com

And this is how the world is changed!

Last 4 days has been like a dream!

Signed 4 collaborations in 4 days. Pixel Qi, Inventec, Foxconn and Compalcomm in sequence. And there is yet 1 more day to go! So finally we saw how the screen would look like. Its really impressive and is exactly what we predicted in terms of the performance and quality. We love it. It will bring in a revolution in itself.

Most impressive meetings we had were with Pixel Qi and Foxconn. Pixel Qi has shown trust and confidence in our firm and its a huge moral boost for us. With their wisdom and experience coming into play, we can quite well deliver exactly what we want. Special thanks here goes to Mr John Ryan and Mr Frank Lee. We are young and can take more risks. If we are going to take 5 years before we succeed, then five years is a good experience. And if we are successful in our first attempt, it will definitely be because of the people who are providing us moral, mental and spiritual support using their hard earned experience and wisdom.

We will add more to this space in terms of the collaboration with Foxconn, Inventec and Compalcomm as the time unfold. All we can say here is, things as per now looks very exciting and promising in the near future. They are the biggest and we are the newest Kids around. We sure can rock.

On a odd note. It took us 3 months just to sign 2 NDAs in India. There is a huge difference when we see how things work out in India and here in Taiwan. For some reason things are not as mature for business as they are here. And it really burdens us with the work people in India has done since 1991 to make things at least this easy. We have just heard of stories of people waiting for even phone connections for years let alone signing a contract. I personally cannot imagine toil it will have on our ambitions if things were like pre-1990s. Though I wont deny there is a lot of work still to be done.

People in India need to understand that the world is moving really very fast. When we say India is 40 years behind USA and 20 years behind China, there are more reasons to it than just comparing the infrastructure. Its the complete environment. Complete eco-system which makes things easier for evolution of brilliant ideas and its implementation. Though we cannot measure creativity in time, but time does have its disintegrating effects. Ideas dont care in whose mind they are gonna land. If not India, then China.

May be we are on the course of making a history here. This is something never has been done by any Indian Company nor by any Indian. More than being personal ambition its a matter of national pride for us. Something which will stop the world say we are best at call centers and for maintaining web-sites, a 3rd end solution. We will make the world stand on its feet and give us the standing ovation we rightly deserve even for our ideas which have already changed the world, right from the zero to the concept of OOPs in computer programming.

When we pray, we only ask for one thing, ‘Make Our Faiths Firm’.

From Taipei, with Love!

The Unbalanced World

The Unbalanced World

World is unbalanced at many places. We see droughts and floods. Its same for the electronic industry as well. We see products around embedded with components which are far more powerful than what current consumers can make use of. We see 4GB of RAM in PCs now a days, and not one time you will notice system consuming more than 2GB. Yes there are application which can make use of this extra horse power, but how many of we actually use them?

What is the size of HDD installed in your PC? Are you running short of more space lately? No, probably. What about those dual and quad-core processors? That would roughly give you more than 4GHz and are you using these for running internet browsers and songs?

We call these configurations Hummers for City transportation. We all live in cities and not in rendering farm houses. And how is the software industry responding to this cult? By giving us more resource hopping applications. Even OSes would tell you “Your current configuration is not our OS capable”. But there is a change in this trend.

Netbooks, UMPCs and MIDs are on rise not because we are in recession (or were in?). But, people are realizing, they need bikes and scooters. They are choosing mobility and maneuverability over real life animation rendering capabilities and complex OSes. And yes, they are cheaper.

But these new trends are presenting us with very different questions. Since resources now have to be optimised, what is the perfect configuration? How much storage should I have? How many simultaneously running applications would make me happy? What is the perfect screen size for me? Do I need a keyboard sticking on to the screen? How much RAM, since I’m not using bloatwares? What if I get stuck somewhere because of the different resources I have at my disposal, can cloud computing be a solution for me then?

If you look closely, you can draw a similarity between Oil and computer industry. First, if you make lot of oil available, you get lot of cars in the market. Lot of oil gives these car manufacturers freedom to make more powerful cars and hence consuming more fuel. And what would more demand would do the the oil prices?

Same is with the application writers. If you get freedom to use more resources, you would concentrate on how to use it, and not on how to use less of it to do the same work. In the end you get application which demand more, and we give them a systems which in the end are just, More.

And solution as we ponder upon is, Simple.