Datawind has sold nearly a million ultra-low-cost Android tablets in India. We sit down with the company's CEO to ask how he'll get the next billion people online.
By Sascha Segan
January 8, 2014 12:08pm EST
Forty bucks may not seem like a lot to you. But in India, it's more than an average week's wages. When the Indian government wanted to get millions of Internet-connected tablets into the hands of students nationwide, it turned to a small Canadian company with a history of hacking the Internet into inexpensive devices: Datawind.
The official Aakash tablet project in India has had its ups and downs, with unrealistically high expectations, missed deadlines, and frustrated customers. Now Datawind is bringing its super-cheap tablet expertise to a broader market, unencumbered by the expectations and demands of the very many Indian government departments.
Don't underestimate the power of connectivity in rural areas of developing countries. An Web connection can help farmers compare crop prices or get advice. It can help children learn to read and get educated in a way that their local schools don't have the expertise for, and it can connect families sundered by the need to find work elsewhere.
Will a $38 Android tablet make a difference in the U.S., the U.K., and other places where that's more of a day's wage than a month's? And how can it improve the lives of the global poor? I sat down with Datawind CEO, Suneet Singh Tuli, to ask him five questions about the Datawind Ubislate tablet and how the concept might succeed globally.
