Cheap, ultrafast broadband? Hong Kong has it

Hong Kong residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second – known as a “gig” – for less than $26 a month.

In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Verizon, the nation’s leading provider of fiber-to-the-home service, doesn’t offer a gig, or even half that speed. Instead, it markets a “fastest” service that is only 50 megabits a second for downloading and 20 megabits a second for uploading. It costs $144.99 a month. That’s one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadband’s service for downloading, for more than five times the price.

One thing working in Hong Kong’s favor, of course, is its greater population density, enabling broadband companies to reach multiuser dwellings at a much lower cost. But density is only part of the explanation. The personality of Hong Kong Broadband should be noted, too. A wholly owned subsidiary of City Telecom , it is an aggressive newcomer. It was willing to sustain seven years of losses while building out its fiber network before it turned profitable.

As Google matures, startups keep it young

Google co-founder Larry Page is taking charge of the maturing Internet giant in a move seen as recapturing youthful roots in the face of competition from hip upstart startups like Facebook.

The California firm isn't waiting for Page to formally take the chief executive chair being emptied by Eric Schmidt in April, it is tapping into the energy of nimble entrepreneurs bought with Google's ample war chest.

"Any engagement that Google can have with the startup community, with entrepreneurs, we learn and we are inspired," said David Krane of Google Ventures , an arm of the firm that invests in new ideas and young companies. "We need to be close to the people who are moving quickly and chasing big dreams at the early stage, he said in a Friday interview with AFP.

"Because that can influence and shape the way that we run as we try to fight off some of the natural side effects that come as a company gets larger."

Google has grown to a global powerhouse with 25,000 employees in far-flung locations since it was started by fellow Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Page in 1998.

Voice-based browser for the blind on cards

Browsing the internet will become much easier for the visually challenged and those who find the computer keyboard or typing difficult. Users will simply have to speak to the computer, which will browse the internet and get back to them with answers in the same language.

The voice-based browsing will enable communication in English, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali. The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has undertaken a project in this regard, which will be ready in two years.

The project has been funded by the Union government’s department of information technology , Under the project, a software for an automatic speech recognition system will be developed, which will enable a computer to recognize what has been said to it by the user.

“If a user wants to browse the website of the government of India, he/she can speak it in front of the computer. The software will convert the speech to text and go for processing and the information will be retrieved. The software will then convert the text on the website to speech and the computer will speak it out for the user,” C-DAC executive director Hemant Darbari told TOI on Friday.

Two technologies—speech-to-text and text-to-speech—have been used in this software.

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