We originally started in 1999 as Khitchdee Music Inc, a company based out of Portland, OR, USA, building software to teach Indian Classical Music; worked on it on and off between 1999 and 2009. I have been devoted to it full time since 2009, this time as an Indian company Khitchdee Technologies Pvt. Ltd. registered in 2012.
I am from Allahabad. When I returned to Allahabad after studying and working abroad, I found the only jobs available to me locally were teaching. I started Khitchdee to address this void.
Most Indians have heard of Khitchdee and probably tasted it at least a few times. So its got good registration. Also, it represents a dish that is simple to put together and easy to digest. I liked the simplicity aspect as I wanted our technology to be equally simple. I wanted to juxtapose simple, Indian and technology.
We are a computing gadget maker. We make hardware – gadgets such as PCs, tablets and smartphones. This is our long term vision. Currently we are working on a software app that serves as an intelligent software agent to assist us in designing gadgets. We called it Inck.exe. It’s an integrated PC based gadget design tool that integrates high level user interface design, cloud based middleware and low level GDSII chip layout design.
A few big companies such as HCL build PCs. I guess they mostly put them together based on imported off-the-shelf parts. There’s not a lot of original design in them to differentiate from their competitors. They mostly compete on cost — lean engineering. The same is true of a flurry of smaller companies that are building tablets. Aakash by Datawind and Adam by Notion Ink are some examples. These are also lean engineered from off-the-shelf imported parts. A common theme is lean engineering since we are in a cost sensitive market. But the approach is low tech since they are mostly using off-the-shelf-parts. Khitchdee steps in and takes lean engineering to a whole new level. We build our own parts — the chips that go into our gadgets and all the other circuits. This takes us longer but its far more sustainable in the long run. We’re doing this in Allahabad so its adding a new dimension to Allahabad’s rarefied techscape. Most of the other players are based in Bangalore.
I think there needs to be a lot more collaboration between industry and academia. For example, if the gadget manufacturers opened their design processes to students, it would benefit the students greatly. At the same time, the professors need to reach out to the gadget manufacturers and invite them for talks etc. Our industry is not truly high tech whereas our academia is at the cutting edge. This difference needs to be bridged somehow. Also, there needs to be a holistic course on gadget design. Currently there are courses on chip design and computer architecture but nothing along these lines. Academia is slow to change. Khitchdee plans to play an active role in teaching students our new methods and getting them to contribute to our design expertise. This will give them confidence in being able to build truly useful technology.
Allahabad is a great place to run a high-tech company for the following reasons:
A. Good intellectual atmosphere. Laid back lifestyle.
B. Less traffic. Lower rent, cost of living.
C. Off the beaten track location stimulates out of the box thinking.
D. We’re one of a handful of high-tech companies here. Great visibility.
Bangalore is too crowded and for a truly high-tech company working on original engineering, Allahabad offers enough intellectual stimulation.
Our long term plan is to popularize Use-Centric design, our new approach to designing gadgets use-centered (top-down) rather than bottom-up (starting from the microprocessor) as has been done in the past. We want to popularize this method in India where there is a greater need for technology solutions that fit right and are lean engineered and therefore as cheap as possible. We plan to achieve this long term goal in four stages:
Stage 1: Build Inck.exe, a Windows app to design gadgets using Use-centric design and popularize its usage amongst EE/CS students. Using Inck.exe, students will be able to work on all aspects of designing a gadget including its use scenarios and interface protocol at the the top, any middleware to realize the computational needs of the gadget through the cloud and the GDSII layout of the chip that will run the gadget at the bottom.
Stage 2: Use Inck.exe to build our first gadget, The Switch, which will enable students to build gadgets standalone without any need of a PC. The Switch will have all the functionality of Inck.exe plus it will have an attached breadboard to test chips and circuits designed using it, and a built-in oscilloscope.
Stage 3: Students will use The Switch to design custom gadgets for themselves to replace their laptops. Later they will design PCs for their non-EE/CS fellow students.
Stage 4: We will design gadgets for the public by franchising our gadget development process to franchisees. Franchisees will use the Switch to design gadgets for their clients and we will get them fabricated. We would have simplified the gadget design process so much by this point that someone with a basic familiarity with PCs will be able to use our gadgets to design gadgets for clients.
Rohit Agarwal is an Electrical Engineer From IIT Kanpur. He went on to do his Masters from University of California, Irvine and then worked as Senior Software Engineer at Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR, USA. Currently, he is Assistant Professor at IIIT Allahabad. He has 17 US patents to his name and has interests in music, teaching, algorithms and systems.
Well, I am an electronics engineer myself and I understand the need for something like this. I understand that, if executed well, it will benefit the students, the industry and the consumers as well. We, at TheTechPanda, highly acknowledge initiatives like Khitchdee and we wish them loads of success.
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Status update:
Khitchdee is now working on a Windows app programming tool
as a first step towards achieving our long term goals.
This is an open source Github project.
https://github.com/khitchdee/Randhaa
we have made another course correction
after a brief analysis, we have found that
macs are making big market-share gains in the enterprise space
so we have decided to target them instead of Windows PCs
also, instead of building tools for developers
we have decided to take our tool effort in-house
and release apps targeting the enterprise instead
our first such app will involve a lot of sound analysis
our plan, in the short term, is to validate our long term strategy
by building really useful enterprise tools for the mac platform
and using our success in doing that as a stepping stone into the future
we have identified the first MacBook app we will build
it will be a tool to enhance a verbal speech with projected visuals
the visuals will consist of illustrations
and presenter controlled placements
of the phrases they speak as they speak them
for this, we are building a speech recognizer
and we are designing a protocol
that uses keyboard and speech input
to both generate illustrations
and place phrases on the screen in meaningful ways
the app targets deep technical presentations
that need to convey meaning in a precise and unambiguous way
and that convey the presenter's raw thought process to the audience
we plan to dethrone Microsoft's PowerPoint and Adobe's Acrobat
as the de-facto standard used for technical presentations
We have changed the design focus of this app slightly
instead of deep technical presentations
we will target product design
such as the high level design of an app
we will focus on the live/real-time aspect of this design process
The release date is Monday, October 17th.
The app is named tz---nq---nj.
It's a high-level app design tool for OSX.
It defines a new way to express design ideas through the PC interface
and to collaborate on them
and it defines a new way to design UIs
tz---nq---nj is a replacement for XCode,s InterfaceBuilder front-end
the main thing tz---nq---nj will showcase is simplicity
we missed that release date.
don't yet have a planned date yet
we are planning 3 features for this product
1. The ability to do formal app design
2. A simplified approach to the UI
3. A way to write OSX apps in C instead of ObjectiveC/Swift