Raja Tuli is the CTO of Datawind, a company that is the third-largest tablet seller in India. Tuli holds a glass with a photoresist coating in a specialized lab at their Montreal facilities.
Photograph by: Marie-France Coallier, Postmedia News. , Postmedia News
Jason Magder, Postmedia News
| Jul 20, 2013 | Last Updated: Jul 20, 2013 - 8:13 UTC
Bustling with couriers, real estate agents and call-centre employees, the lobby of the Point Zero building in Montreal 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 engineering graduates with impressive skills, and he's not sure he would be able to find the same level of expertise in another city.
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. 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.
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.
Recently, the company reproduced the processes, tools and machines developed here to an identical lab in Amritsar, India.
