'The Aakash Can Help Drive US Tablet Prices Down'

Silicon Valley-based Vivek Wadhwa is an evangelist for low-cost tablets. This entrepreneur-academic (at Stanford and Singularity universities) has written in the Washington Post and elsewhere about their ability to transform education and lives. Here, he tells Prasanto K Roy that low-cost tablets like the Aakash can help bridge the digital divide in the US too-and help drive tablet prices down "toward zero."

Q: The Aakash is a cheap tablet designed for India's students. Would it work in the US?

Vivek Wadhwa: After meeting children from East Palo Alto and Oakland-which are poorer parts of Silicon Valley that no one likes to talk about-I realized that there was a huge digital divide. Poor children were being left out of the innovation economy. They had cheap cell phones but no laptops or tablets. They weren't tech savvy like their counterparts in Palo Alto and Berkeley.

ALSO READ: Aakash tablets in US pilot projects

Q: A digital divide in the homeland of tech, of Apple and Microsoft?

Vivek Wadhwa: Look at the strategy that the big technology players-Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung-employ. They target their products at the rich, and keep their prices high. They keep releasing new features, such as retina screens, rather than dropping prices.

Q: Could the Aakash affect these vendors, or is the low-end a different market they're not interested in?

Vivek Wadhwa: Well, I see Aakash also as a way to force US tablet prices to drop-bring in some competition from abroad.

Q: Are you serious? Is that likely?

Vivek Wadhwa: This is a classic example of reverse innovation at work. Ideas and innovations conceived in India can positively impact the developed world. My goal is to cause tablet prices in the US and abroad to fall precipitously-to the $50 level and head towards zero.

Q: Whom did you have to convince, to get the Aakash into US pilots?

 

Vivek Wadhwa: I discussed this with my friends, people such as Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Zappos founder Tony Hseh, Kim Polese, Aneesh Chopra, and others. They were as excited as I was about the potential for bridging the technology gap. Chris Evans is someone I have known from my tech days. When he heard about my plans to bring Aakash to the US, he wanted to be part of this.

Q: Was it difficult selling the idea of something that had drawn so much flak in India?

Vivek Wadhwa: Not at all. Unlike many Indians who condemned the Aakash because of its early failures, American technology executives understand that there are many failures on the path to success. They expect version 1 technologies to have difficulties.

I understand the Aakash has already been deployed in pilot projects in African countries in the thousands, and even in Mexico.

Those projects are good to have. But for technology, the world looks to the US. What happens here matters more than anywhere else.

Q: What's next? Where do you see this experiment headed in the US?

Vivek Wadhwa: Just watch. I expect many other regions to do similar experiments to what they are doing in North Carolina. Stay tuned.