Slinging Back


It's a little sad to say the India series has come and gone. A great experience, though, and I've done few things through my entire career that have gotten such a big response in such a short time. If you saw the series, or read the blog, or whatever, thanks .. I appreciate hearing how you thought it went.

Back on the Silicon Valley beat, it was kind of fitting that one of my first stories since putting the India series together was on the new, improved Sling Box. This is the box that lets you watch television on your lap top or mobile device .. very Silicon Valley, and they're selling like hotcakes.

I remember seeing the Sling Media offices the first day the first Sling Box came out, and have followed the company since. Start ups that do cool things are great to follow .. you get the feeling that these products (and these people) will be huge one day, and it's nice to we covered them way back when.

It's been a good year for the Sling Box, as it spreads out beyond the early adopters of the Silicon Valley, and gets picked up all over the place. They succeed, I think, largely because they keep it simple. Plug something in, and you can watch TV wherever you are. Talk about the American dream.

More gadgets to come .. meanwhile, I've started to read a book called "The Namesake," about an Indian family that moved to America. It's set about 30 years ago .. just the opposite of what's going on today.

India on TV


Just a quick one here, as I hole myself up in an edit bay to go through more than 6 hours of incredible video from our trip to Bangalore ..

First off, thank you to everyone who took time to comment on the blogs from India, whether through the comment spot or through e-mail (feel free to let me know what you think, or drop any suggestions, at scott.budman@nbc.com)

Secondly, the series has a home: It will air on NBC 11 starting monday, September 25th .. through friday. All 5 parts will air at 5pm. Hope you can tune in, or TiVo it. We have so much footage, we'll put extra stuff on the web as well.

Hope you're all well, and thanks again for checking in.

Last Day In Bangalore


One of the many cliches of the Silicon Valley tech industry is to "Take the view from 10,000 feet up." We're now just hours away from boarding a plane and taking the 30 hour trip back home, and looking back at a week spent in Bangalore (with a side trip to Mysore), I can give you a little bit of what the 10,000 foot view will look like.

I'm really left with the impression that there are two sides to Bangalore .. today's trips turned out to be sort of a microchosm of that. First, the traditional side. The breathtakingly big Palaces speak to a time when royalty was part of society. That's where we get the image of a King riding an elephant .. in Mysore, that really used to happen. Just off the beaten path, we ran into a ceremony full of traditional costumes, music, dancing, and offerings to dieties. Further up the road, a woman walks down the street with three cows .. a little further on, a man rides an oxcart which carries clothing and food.

Contrast that with some of the places we saw and people we met just today. For example, you'll find no more modern businessman than V.G. Siddhartha, even if you were to scour the Silicon Valley. Siddharth, as everybody seems to call him, runs a very modern, very hip line of coffee houses called "Cafe Coffee Day." This is where people of all ages come to eat, drink, socialize, and open their laptops in comfort. Sound familiar? There are no Starbucks in India, but thanks to Cafe Coffee Day, no one seems to mind. Before running the coffee shops? Siddharth made millions as a VC .. he continues to invest (extremely successfully) in companies, with a very optimistic view about India's future.

As I mentioned earlier, you won't find many companies more modern than Infosys .. lots about this one in a previous post. Visiting Infosys HQ in Bangalore's "Electronics City," you realize that India is catching up to the Silicon Valley in terms of running a cutting edge company. Even the PR team, young, hip, and led by Kaavya Kasturirangan, would be right at home in any high-tech company .. even as they work among people who dress traditionally. By the way, here's the link to Cornershop: http://www.luakabop.com/cornershop/ Enjoy.

So there you have it .. an amazing city where history still proudly lives and breathes, but with modern times also announcing its presence with authority. We return with more than six hours of tape to go through .. can't wait to re-visit what we saw.

And, someday, to re-visit India.

The Crown Jewel


There are high-tech campuses, and then there is Infosys. If you follow business in India, or just keep track of hot stocks on the NASDAQ, you may know of Infosys. If India is the hot spot for tech these days, Infosys is the hot spot for India.

It's always a pleasure for me to see, first hand, a company firing on all cylinders. Walk into a Starbucks and you'll see what I'm talking about. See the lines for the newest iPod, or how many people are drinking a Hansen's Natural soda .. that's it too.

The cylinders are a little harder to see at Infosys. Its business is software support. Not the "we're losing our jobs to India" support .. this one comes with some of the strongest engineers in the world. I just got out of an Infosys training session .. they don't train their new employees to speak clearly so Americans can understand. This training session (and the one next door) was full of Americans. Fresh out of college with engineering or computer science degrees. And on their way to work for Infosys.

An Indian company.

Why? Some, because they simply felt the deal was best here. Most told me it's because Infosys is a global company, leading the way in our global economy. Hard to argue. Seen Infosys' stock price lately? It has a market value double that of AMD, triple that of Juniper, and bigger than Electronic Arts, Safeway, or The Gap.

Yes, an Indian company.

And did I mention the campus? This thing makes Oracle's campus look like my house. It's gigantic, with everything you could ask for, not only in a well-heeled tech company, but in a country club as well. One worker says it looks like the Club Med of India.

This is what a company looks like when it fires on all cylinders. Others can complain about how India does business. Infosys doesn't mind. It's too busy doing too much business, and making too much money, to care.

Poverty in Bangalore


This is what you hear about, but can never get used to when you see it. Bangalore, for all its growth and wealth and technology, still has crippling poverty. It's not hard to find, either. As we're drivng around, the man driving us pulls over at the sight of some cows. By this time, we're shooting lots of video of cows (see previous post), so the driver, who doesn't speak english, knows to pull over for cows. It's pretty funny, actually. We can say "make a left," or "let's go to that Mosque," and it won't get a reaction, but by this time, he's pulling over when he sees a cow.

Anyway, what we see beyond this particular cow is not funny. Entire rows of tents, in the shadow of what would not even be considered tenament housing in America. The stench around us is almost overwhelming, and the people are crammed together in the tents, or out playing among filth and dirt, with cows walking around, looking for food.

The scene is repeated several times within a couple of miles. It's easy to see why people consider Bangalore to be two different places: One, the growing high-tech capital of India, with endless possibility and the world tripping over itself to do business here. But the majority of the city's are nowhere near able to take advantage of this growth.

Is there anything to be optimistic about? Only that there is hope for some of these kids .. Home of Hope (mentioned in an earlier posting) is helping hundreds of Bangalore's poorest kids get an education, complete with computer skills. It's inspiring to see these kids working to learn. One girl told me she wants to be a software engineer.

That would be nice. And a far cry from what we saw in the communities off the side of the road.

Cows


One of things that has always fascinated me about India is that so many people tell so many stories about it. Being here in Bangalore, you realize that some of those stories are true (about how crowded everything is, about how fast the country moves when it comes to technology, etc), and many are false (that it's a backwards country, that things move really slowly.. OK, some things do take time, but I'm told it's getting a lot better).

Among the folklore associated with India .. the sacred cow. Is it possible, I used to wonder, that the cow can be so revered in the country that cattle are literally allowed to walk free anywhere, even in traffic? It seemed impossible, until the first time we got into a car and hit the road.

Yes, cows dot the roadway pretty much throughout Bangalore, and yes, they're pretty much given the run of the place. It's amazing to see: Even in India's thick, seemingly-without-rules traffic, everything stops when a cow decides to walk through the road. Some are big, healthy looking cows, and some are emaciated cows, but they're here, and everybody, it seems, has gotten used to it.

So then I wondered, don't these cows need to be milked? Yes, they do, and just last night, while driving along Bangalore's outer road, we saw it .. twice. Young men and women milking the cows right there on the side of the road. Like you or I might pull over to change a tire.

It's part of the Indian way of life. Drive along the road, and people will honk and flash their lights at you if things slow down even a tiny bit. But if you're a cow, no honking, no flashing lghts, just respect. I remember once listening to a Giants broadcast and the great announcer Hank Greenwald said, "hey, if somebody hits a home run in India, can you say Holy Cow?"

He was onto something.

More to come, from the land of the sacred cow.

Philanthropy in Bangalore


After spending lots of time at technology companies here in Bangalore (and there are still more to come), it was very interesting to spend a large chunk of today with people helping the poor. Specifically, poor children. Thanks to a program -started in the Bay Area- called Home of Hope, which can be found on the web at http://www.hohinc.org, hundreds of children in Bangalore are getting a solid education, K through college, including computer training.

The staff at Atmashree school are former businesspeople, politicians, you name it. They've come together to work passionately on behalf of their students, and it's great to watch the results. Kids of all ages using the Linux Operating System to solve computer problems, learn their native language .. even a program for geography.

A kind of strange note .. Don and I, upon arrival at the school, were welcomed like royalty. For an hour. Maybe royalty is not strong enough. It was like Aishwarya Rai walking into a video gamer's conference. OK, bad example. It was kind of surreal, though. When we finally got to work, things got inspiring.

Then, off to a restaurant owned by an Indian entrepreneur, who made his money back in the Silicon Valley at Oracle. He's now CEO of an Indian start-up, and also turned his passion for motorcycles into a bike-themed restaurant. Great food, and atmosphere, no matter where you're from.

Tomorrow, more visits to families who moved from the Bay Area to Bangalore. A scant few years ago, that would have been a ridiculous sentence. No more, though. I'm sure we'll fight crazy traffic to get there. I'm still agape every time we get into a car. If you're from here, you know what I'm talking about.

First Day In Bangalore


It's been an incredible first day here in Bangalore, India. Weaving through traffic at breakneck speeds, then weaving on foot through throngs of people .. we covered a lot of ground, and met a lot of great people.

First off, Network Appliance ..HQ'ed in Sunnyvale, but working in an equally impressive facility in Bangalore .. lots of good interviews there, and we found tech workers playing foosball, pulling practical jokes on each other, and working 14-hour days. Sound familiar?

We also hit HP labs here .. The head of the Lab was someone we actually met back in Palo Alto while filming a story on technology of the future. They're also developing it here in India. We stopped by Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems, and lots of other companies, and then watched as hundreds of workers put the future Yahoo building together, piece by piece...things move more slowly here when it comes to getting certain things done - you just have to be patient, as we're learning.

We also met & interviewed some people who moved to India from the Bay Area .. not the other way around, like it used to be. Surprising stories .. also surprising that not all of those leaving the Bay Area for India are Indian.

Lots more on all of this later .. in the coming days, we'll visit an orphanage, a restaurant owned by a former Silicon Valley resident, and tour the mighty Infosys .. crown jewel of India's software/outsourcing/high-tech business.

Passage To India


A quick entry this time .. I've just arrived for a 5-day stint in India .. just me and photographer Don Hardy, chronicling how things have changed between the Bay Area and India.

Am now in Bangalore, the "Silicon Valley of India." Just got into the hotel after a 25-hour flight, and have to quickly get ready for our first meeting with a Bay Area company doing business here in Bangalore.

I've long wanted to see India .. this is a chance. I'm excited about seeing how things work (and don't work), and learning about the changing relationship between this country and America.

Assuming I can re-find this internet connection, there's much more to come from here .. lots about Network Appliance, H-P, Infosys, etc, etc .. along with how some people from the Bay Area are trying to help kids learn about computers.

I'll be blogging when I can. Have you been here? Know people who live here? Please let me know.