Indonesia’s e-Gamelan Makes Traditional Music with a Digital Touch

Photo: iTunes.Apple.com

Electronic Gamelan, or e-gamelan, is the name of an iOS app that has been created by students and lecturers of the University of Dian Nuswantoro (Udinus) Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia. The app brings the complete sound of Indonesia’s traditional instrument, the Javanese gamelan, which is a large set of xylophones, drums, and gongs. The precision of percussive tones is similar to the original gamelan.

Udinus is an IT-oriented university in Semarang. The e-Gamelan team has performed in many countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. In the country, they have performed for the Governor of Central Java. Later in October, the team will perform at the State Palace.

Team member Ikhsanuddin Mohammed Rahmatullah said that the e-Gamelan community formed about two years ago. All the gamelan objects and sound recordings are taken from the Sri Kuncoro Mulyo Gamelan in Indonesia’s historical music studio, Lokananta in Surakarta. Starting with the inception of the e-Gamelan project by one of the lecturers, they began thinking how to create the modern gamelan. Rahmat said:

This is faculty research. We are under a research body and community service. It started when we won a competition set by the minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

The purpose of the e-Gamelan app is to attract youth towards traditional music at a time when kids are gravitating towards western pop music – or popular music in general. E-Gamelan rises to the challenge via the iPad app. To achieve these goals, the community works with kids on the e-Gamelan app/program as an extracurricular activity at several high schools in Semarang. As a result, the students are said to have become more interested in the gamelan.

(See also: Bring Out Your Inner Beastie Boy with the Gamelan DJ App)

According to Rahmat, after using e-Gamelan, players can sort of play the original traditional instrument. However, to use the app, you don’t need to know the Javanese instrument. Approximately, it takes two days to be able to smoothly play e-Gamelan.

Several types of gamelan can not be played in the app – or maybe in any app – because of inevitable difficulties with complex actions on a touchscreen. So you won’t find the gender gamelan, the two-headed drum called the kendang, and the two-stringed fiddle called rebab.

e-Gamelan can be downloaded from the Apple App Store for US$5.99. The purchase price of the app will be used by the team partly to preserve the original gamelan – the other half of the income of course goes towards app production and recording costs. Before you buy, check out a demo video here:

[Source: Republika.co.id, Egamelanku]

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Baidu Shares Plunge After Credit Suisse Downgrades Rating

Shares in Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), China’s biggest search engine, plunged in the US on Tuesday after Credit Suisse cut the company’s rating to ‘underperform’ – downgraded from the previous ‘neutral’ badge. Baidu’s shares closed for the day at $106.49, down 6.83 percent.

Forbes notes that Raymond James and Jefferies also cut Baidu’s rating in recent weeks, with things like stiffer competition – from Qihoo’s new 360 Search service – cited as a concern.

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A Drilling Machine that does not need Electricity [Grassroot Innovation]

Power, or rather, the lack of it, is the biggest problem in rural India. The previous post in this fortnightly column featured an illiterate farmer’s attempts to generate electricity out of a simple water wheel and a windmill. Today we have another innovation that is aimed at tackling the power-problem, though for a specific use case.

Vikas Shinde, a farmer from Pingalwada village in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, has designed a drilling machine that works entirely on manpower, without using electricity. This foot-pedal-operated manual drilling machine is made by using old gear and spare iron parts, and is suitable for drilling large pieces of materials made of metal, wood, PVC etc.

The mechanics behind the machine are simple: it is fitted with a drill bit used for drilling holes in various materials. The drill bit is gripped by a chuck at one end and rotated while cycling the device. The plate is attached with a handle for raising or lowering the position of a job. Power is transmitted from the pedal to the drill through different transmission gears. This is different from the traditional handheld mechanical drills used by carpenters in the way that those have to be operated by rotating a small wheel attached to the bit by hand, and are mostly gearless, therefore unable to achieve the same amount of torque required to drill through harder materials.

Using this machine, an average human being can produce 150 rpm of drill bit. However, if you have electric power at your disposal, It can also be operated by a motor by connecting the device pulley to the motor pulley.

Costing about 2000, this manual drilling machine is very helpful for small scale workers and fabricators. National Innovation Foundation (NIF) is supporting Shinde financially for this product, and have also filed a patent (1016/MUM/2011) in his name.

Vikas studied till class ninth and then dropped out of school to start farming. He developed an interest towards machines while commuting daily to his farm on his bicycle and repairing it occasionally. With some self-learning, he ended up opening his own welding workshop.

Besides the pedal operated drilling machine, Vikas Shinde has innovated many other effective machines that usually require electricity to run on, like a motorcycle-operated pump that utilizes power from his motorbike to lift underground water, a jhoola washing machine that uses the pendulum motion of a swing to move the wash/spin tubs, and an agricultural implement which can be used to cut grass and plough.

Vikas is also helped by wife Pramila in farming as well as innovating stuff. For example, one hot May, when water was very scarce, Pramila took nursery bags and grew cotton seedlings in those bags. These cotton seedlings were irrigated with limited water, and later transplanted to the fields at the onset of rain, when other farmers will begin sowing crop. Complementary innovations by the Shinde couple created a new hope for fighting against uncertain weather, shortage of water, and increasing production.

A remarkable aspect of Mr Shinde’s innovations is that all his machines utilize junk, scrap and waste materials, and thus are energy efficient, cost effective and can be used by many. He intends to improve on some of his current innovations, and plans to standardize a few parts. “When I made these equipments my only intention was to make them work and hence did not pay much attention to these aspects. However now I would like to standardize them and work on their appearance as well.” More, refined, useful innovations in the making.

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» A Drilling Machine that does not need Electricity [Grassroot Innovation] @Pluggd.in.

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Football Association of Indonesia Changes Website

A couple of days ago, Indonesia’s Football Association, PSSI, officially launched its new website PSSI.or.id, replacing the former official website at PSSI-football.com. The association hopes that the new website’s look and interface will be future-proof in the coming years. Personally, I think the new domain name is better but the new site looks boring.

PSSI worked together with Gunadarma University in developing the website, with the latter in charge of the site’s server and design. When I tried to access the website at around 10:30am, the site was down – but now the new site is back up again.

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India Inc witnesses 3 months of consecutive dip in recruitment activity, Maybe time to startup?

Planning to startup your own venture? Well, if you look at certain developments over the past one month, you might get better convinced that the time has come to take the plunge. To begin with, look at Naukri’s Job Speak Index –  says sectors like IT, BPO and Banking have seen a drop in hiring levels in September 2012 when compared to last month. The index suggests that the job market has considerably slowed down over the last six months as key sectors are adopting a cautious hiring approach.

Naukri Job Speak Index - Sep2012

Naukri’s report notes that during September 2012, IT and BPO companies hiring index went down by 3% and 4% respectively over August 2012. Earlier in September this year, according to a study, Indian IT companies are one of the 10 worst paying employers in the world.

Mid to senior level staff in India get an average salary of $ 38,767 every year, less than a quarter of what IT employees are paid in Switzerland.

In the meantime, Manpower group’s survey projected that hiring pace across Indian companies is likely to slow down noticeably in fourth- quarter.

Another strong reason for starting up is the roll out of some promising incubators and accelerators of global fame led by industry veterans. There has been a lot of action in the startup ecosystem in past 30 days. Last week, technology veteran Lalit Ahuja, Swiss Venture Capitalist John Cook and French-American VC Larry Glaeser have announced to launch Kyron, a $50 mn accelerator for Indian startups. Kyron has plans to incubate 125 new companies and there will be two batches of 10 startups every year starting from February and July.

Also, super angel Dave McClure’s accelerator 500 startups hired Pankaj Jain to focus on Indian startups. In September, Pearl Uppal, former CEO of FashionandYou and Gaurav Kacharu, had  launched an accelerator called 5ideas to invest about Rs 2.5 crore in each of the 5 startups it selects. In addition to that, erstwhile president of Reliance entertainment, Rajesh Sawhney launched multi city GSF accelerator is reported to be investing around $ 25,000- $ 30,000 in return for 5- 8 % equity in startups across 4 cities.

Isn’t NOW the best time to launch your own venture

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» India Inc witnesses 3 months of consecutive dip in recruitment activity, Maybe time to startup? @Pluggd.in.

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Diabeto : Diabetes meets Hardware innovation

Hardware startups are just as the name puts “hard”. Yet Diabeto is a combination of improbable in the country with a nascent (hardware) startup culture. Diabeto is providing a modern day solution to keep a track of the blood sugar level. In the land of diabetes ( India has the world’s largest diabetic population ), Diabeto is first in the new phase of home grown personalized healthcare devices.

You might think that Diabeto is a glucometer (the device used for measuring the blood sugar), but Diabeto is a hardware device which plugs into the existing glucometers used by the people and transfers all the data (blood sugar readings) via Bluetooth to an Android device running the Diabeto app.

Diabeto Devices

Also, thinking that Diabeto is just a device might be an understatement. The innovativeness of the service lies in the bundling of hardware and the software. The app allows users to first select their glucometer so that their reading is calibrated, after which all the data that is collected can be easily shared with a doctor within the apps. Data is a powerful tool and a lot of interesting things are being tried out  by the team at Diabeto, ranging from a visual representation of the data to setting up of triggers within the app when a blood sugar reaches a particular level wherein it would directly forward the details to a listed contact.

Apart from that the app has a lot of configurable options to get the best sense of the time when the test was done. With options like when was the test taken, the time gap between the last meal and the report and if exercise was done. Basically all questions a doctor asks after a test a test is done. This meta-data adds a lot of added functionality to the app.

As far as the funding part is concerneed, the team is self funded as this point, with all the three founders (Amir Shaikh, Shreekant Pawar and Hemanshu Jain) contributing $25,000 each. Along with that the team would be receiving a funding of $40,000 as a part of their being selected for this edition of Startup Chile.

Diabeto is already in talks with health app developers in Europe to make their app compatible with Diabeto and they are currently testing out of their product with a leading corporate for their employee health planning system.

Challenges of Hardware startup
There is a reason why hardware startups are tough (forum discussion: Do you think there will be hardware startups in 2012 ?). Unlike software based startups, where a goof-up means that there is a software update pushed to the users’ device and the bugs are resolved. In the case of the hardware the problem could be far-reaching and costly.

Co-founder Hemanshu was delighted to tell the product story for Diabeto. The version one of Diabeto was made from hacked pcb and was more of a square box with a hanging cable than what we see today. But it worked and validated their belief that the idea was executable, whereupon they now worked upon testing the compatibility of the product with various glucometers.

Here was when the challenges began to arrive, when the team realized that the hacked pcb did not fit in the casing they had designed. Further still they realized that they had failed to take into account the space required for the battery. So bigger prototype was designed with clay and now it resembled closer to what we see in final iteration.

Now it was designed as a blue bird, both of them being symbolic. The blue colour is the color for diabetes and the bird was symbolic of happiness and wellbeing. Later they decided to have a pink colour as an alternative choice.

Diabeto - V1

Manufacturing and Retail
At this stage the team is looking at manufacturing in India, and selling it in the western market ( US and Europe ) Simply because they are advanced in their use of personalized health care devices, with products from brands like Nike and Fitbit for calorie and sleep tracking.

Tie-ups with retail sectors in the western market are being worked out to ensure the availability of the product. The team is looking at an early 2013 launch for the product with the prices being in the band of Rs.2,500-3,500.

Revenue Channels and Future
Diabeto is looking at three major verticals for their product
1. Direct selling of the hardware product
2. APIs for third party healthcare management systems for use in hospitals, corporates and app developers
3. Cloud Storage for app users to access their data from across devices and web

Along with the Android app, the team would be extending support to other mobile ecosystems and have a desktop app in place. With this the next work would be on expanding the device’s compatibility to encompass other healthcare devices.

Recommended Read: Jai Heart : India’s first genomics based test for Heart disease risk assessment

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» Diabeto : Diabetes meets Hardware innovation @Pluggd.in.

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Qihoo Bests Xiaomi, Will Unveil China’s Cheapest Quad-Core Phone Tomorrow

A teaser image from Qihoo of its quad-core phone, which will be unveiled tomorrow.

The Chinese software company and search engine Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) doesn’t want to let the upstart phone-maker Xiaomi get all the glory for making China’s cheapest quad-core smartphone – and so Qihoo is set to launch its own, for even cheaper, at an event tomorrow.

The quad-core Qihoo phone has already been teased in photos posted to social media by Qihoo CEO Zhou Hongyi (pictured above). And it has been priced at a rock-bottom 1,499 RMB (US$237) for what’s believed to be an unlocked device – that’s a good bit cheaper than Xiaomi’s upcoming Mi2 which has already been unveiled and will ship sometime next week for 1,999 RMB.

But Qihoo’s approach to its smartphones is quite different to Xiaomi’s. Qihoo doesn’t badge its phones and instead relies on its OEM partner – as seen with the company’s first Android-based smartphone, the dismally-named AK-47, which was manufactured by Huawei. And so the as yet unnamed Qihoo quad-core phone is made by a manufacturer that pretty much no-one has heard of before, called Deovo. It has a 1.5GHz Tegra 3 processor that has as many cores as cows have stomachs, and a 4.7-inch screen at 1280×720 resolution. It’ll run a fairly lightly customized version of Android 4.0, perhaps with a bunch of Qihoo’s apps pre-installed – such as its Android anti-virus apps and its mobile browser.

Other markings (pictured below) on the Qihoo device indicate that it’ll be a special for China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), the nation’s biggest mobile telco, and so it must be a TD-SCDMA 3G phone – and so not compatible on China’s other two networks, or pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Xiaomi has sold just over three million of its first-generation budget Android smartphone, so it’ll be a tough task for any other Chinese manufacturer to usurp that kind of pulling power. Nonetheless, these kinds of well-localized and very attractively priced China-brand smartphones really ought to be worrying the likes of HTC and Samsung.

[Source: Sina Tech; and more photos from CNbeta - articles in Chinese]

The Qihoo quad-core phone will actually carry Deovo and China Mobile logos (Image: CNbeta)

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