DATAWIND REBOUNDS AS A MASTER OF REVERSE OUTSOURCING.
DATAWIND HAs REBOUNDED FROM ITS FIRST DISASTROUS ATTEMPT TO SUPPLY INDIA WITH ITS $50 TABLETS, MADE RIGHT HERE IN MONTREAL
Bustling with couriers, real estate agents and call-centre employees, the lobby of the Point Zero building on St-Antoine St. at the corner of de la Cathédrale St. looks rundown and dingy.
But walk a few steps through the main floor’s hall and open the door to the office of Datawind, and you’re suddenly in one of the most high-tech labs in the city.
Behind a glass wall, men and women in lab coats work in a room where the air is changed twice a minute to keep it free of dust particles. The workers hold wide, ultrathin glass panes and embed circuitry onto them. Behind them is a room that looks like a photo lab, enclosed behind golden yellow-tinted windows.
If the scene seems surprising, it should. This is probably the only place in North America where touch screens for tablet computers are being produced — at a rate of 6,000 per day. More surprising still is the market they are targeting: India, a sort of reverse outsourcing.
But it all makes sense for the founders of London-based Datawind — now the largest seller of tablet computers in India, the company grabbed 15 per cent market share in the first quarter of 2013, beating out Apple.
Datawind’s chief technical officer Raja Tuli said Montreal possesses engineer- ing graduates with impressive skills, and he’s not sure he would be able to find the same level of expertise in another city. “Plus it’s also where we live,” he said. Tuli, 47, and his brother Suneet, 45, were born in India, but moved to Edmonton more than 30 years ago. They relocated to Montreal in 1996 to set up a technology company.
“I had a company making these big fax machines,” Raja Tuli said. “We set up a research centre here because there is a better overall perspective to do R&D here. Ever since then, I stayed. I liked it. Montreal is a great city.”
They founded Datawind in Montreal in 2001, but moved the company’s head office to London a few years ago, because that’s where the bulk of its investors are based. They employ about 300 people in Montreal, London, India and China.
The company came into the worldwide media spotlight two years ago when it won a contract to produce tablet computers for India’s schools.
Its Aakash tablet has a bit of a checkered history. Launched in 2011, it was hailed as the lowest cost tablet in the world at $35, which included a subsidy by the Indian government. In an effort to put computers in the hands of all public school students, the Indian government has subsidized the Aakash tablet for students, lowering the cost to roughly that of a basic cellphone in India, or a pair of shoes.
Tuli admits the first Aakash was a disaster, mostly because the resistive touchscreen — which requires users to apply pressure with their fingers — was too difficult to manipulate.
“Nobody wants to use their fingernails and drag things across a screen,” Tuli said. “They want to swipe.”
Despite the initial setback, Datawind developed the Aakash 2, a seven-inch capacitive touchscreen. The Indian government ordered 100,000 units and Datawind has already delivered most of those units at a price of $50 each, paid for by the Indian government.
For many months, the Montreal operation was Datawind’s sole source of touch screens. Recently, the company reproduced the processes, tools and machines developed here to an identical lab in Amritsar, India.
“There are millions of businesses in India. Now they can get eBay, email, Facebook.” RAJA TULI
In the Montreal lab, workers etch circuits into each pane of glass. There are six sets of circuits embedded into the sheets, because they are later cut into six different 7-inch touch screens.
The technical work was developed and is carried out by the top minds in the engineering field — PhD holders from local universities.
The technicians coat on a photoresist film, making the screen look dark green. The photoresist film is then developed in a lab, making it colourless, but there are still visible grids where sensors will go. Sensors are then connected and a protective lens is added, which makes the grids look nearly invisible.
“We etch all the circuits on it,” Tuli said from the Datawind office, pointing at the work going on behind the glass wall. “It’s a process we developed here.”
While the specialized lab can produce 6,000 touchs creens per day, the finished products are long sheets of glass, each containing six touch screens that must then be cut off the larger piece and “packaged.”
Packaging is the more manual aspect of the process and is done out of the same office, with workers behind a mesh curtain all wearing hairnets and sitting in an assembly line.
They cut the screens into 7-inch displays, affix flexible boards, and a plastic coating to make them scratch and crack resistant. Then 200 screens at a time are placed into a vacuum oven at 30 degrees Celsius for an hour, then into what is essentially a pressure cooker for another hour to eliminate any air bubbles.
The finished screens are then shipped to India and China, where the final product is assembled.
The Aakash 2 is no speed demon. It runs on a Cortex A8 chip with a 1Ghz processor and 512MB of RAM. Flash memory of 4GB can be added, plus a further 32GB through its micro-SD card slot. In addition to embedded Wi-Fi, the Aakash 2 tablet computer has external 3G and EVDO slots to connect to mobile broadband sticks.
The device runs on Goo- gle’s Android 4.0 operating system, has a VGA camera, an accelerometer, an internal microphone, speakers and headphone jack.
The company has also developed a commercial version of the tablet to be sold with a cellular modem installed — for Internet access anywhere there is a wireless network — and it’s currently developing the Aakash 3, the latest generation of the lowcost tablet.
Tuli said the selling point of the tablet is that it gives millions of Indians something they don’t have: access to the Internet. And Montreal know-how is behind that too.
Because Indian cellphone networks are about 10 years behind North American ones, getting Internet is a challenge. Smartphones and standard tablets are useless for most, because Wi-Fi networks are only available in major cities, leaving hundreds of millions of Indians without any kind of Internet access.
Datawind’s patented process delivers the Internet through the antiquated cell networks by using a server in Montreal, which accesses the chosen web pages and sends them in a low-data format (one-30th of the bandwidth) to the devices.
“It goes through a proxy server and then it sends you a picture on your screen,” Tuli explained. “It allows you to scroll, and zoom, and whatever you want to do. That whole process is patented.”
Tuli said while the networks aren’t fast enough to deliver high-quality video or video conferencing apps like Skype, they are good enough for most of the Indian public.
“What works is the Internet. It’s what these guys are lacking,” he said. “There are millions of businesses in India. Now they can get eBay, email, Facebook. What doesn’t work well is video. If you want to do Skype, you’ll need a Wi-Fi connection. But Indian cellphone (long-distance) rates are quite reasonable anyway. In the future, when the networks get better, it’s a whole other story.”
Datawind charges $2 per month for Internet access, but because of the low cost of the operation, Tuli envisions a day his company will be able to offer Internet access for free, using ads to support it.
It’s a business model the company tried, but one that failed in the United Kingdom about 10 years ago. The emergence of smartphones made Datawind’s Pocket Surfer — a cheap netbook with free Internet access — obsolete.
This time, Tuli believes the developing world is ready for his low-cost tablet.
“There are three billion people in the world that don’t have Internet access. We want to get it to them so we can educate them. The possibilities are endless.”