India is a country of 1.2 billion people and, while only 7% if the population use the internet according to the most recent internet stats reports, Forrester Research has predicted that the country will so be the third largest online marketplace, after the US and China.
On this India special edition of Tech Weekly, Aleks Krotoski is joined by HP Labs India's director, Sudhir Dixit, and senior research scientists, Geetha Manjunath and Sri Ganesh Madhvnath to talk about the interests of the web's next billion users. Unique economic, cultural and technological challenges face the subcontinent, and HP is working to develop prototypes to address everything from the interface to the technological economics. Some of their solutions sound straight out of science fiction, like voice recognition with facial triggering and hyperlinked paper.
Others, such as mobile social networking service RocketTalk, seem to be India-centric. But is this the case? Aleks finds out about the latest trends to emerge from the country, how decisions to adopt semantic web and W3C standards will affect the west's web use, and what we might expect to get our hands on in the future.
