India kicks off competition for home-grown video conferencing clone

India's government has kicked off a competition to develop a locally-developed video conferencing platform it hopes will put the country on the product development map. India wants such a tool because it's needed during the national lockdown and, according to its National Policy on Software Products (PDF), prefers local …

[trevorde]

Aaaaand the winner is ...

Tata/Wipro or some other large outsourcer. We all know how that's going to end.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the UK then. Controlling your own system in country does matter.

The UK would award the contract directly to Crapita

[IGotOut]

Yup and the 3 months would be just working out how much they can inflate the price by, once they have won the contract.

UK Gov Project tendering 101:

Quote high price

Win Contract

Add 100% to consulting fees

Delay by *2

Multiply initial price by 5*

Fail to deliver project.

Get paid *2 initial quote without delivering usable project.

Wait:

Bid on revised project:

Repeat above

[Piro]

you're not wrong

they'd bill at as being very secure, as not leaking any data - because the sodding thing would never even work in the first place

[Anonymous Coward]

Other AC> The UK would award the contract directly to Crapita

Atos, Shirley?!

[TrumpSlurp the Troll]

Work on any system?

I have an Atari STE in the loft somewhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Already in place?

I thought India had a significant investment in Owncloud already

https://owncloud.com/government-india-banks-owncloud-digilocker-project/

If so, they probably already have the building blocks in place for a VC systems based on Nextcloud Talk with its open standards and other advantages. If India put its effort into improving Talk's scalability, especially regarding it federated capability, that would benefit us all.

[MacroRodent]

Open Source?

I think there are a number of open source options, like Jitsi discussed at https://lwn.net/Articles/815751/

(never used any of them myself, but then, the only conferences I need are the webex ones provided by my employer).

[Mellipop]

Re: Open Source?

And here - https://opensource.com/alternatives/skype

[Captain Scarlet]

Erm

I know of Zoho Meeting which I thought was designed by their team in India?

Correct me if I am wrong

[JanMeijer]

Kickstarting Indian native Web-RTC services

Taking an optimistic approach: the Indian government is actually kickstarting a pool of Indian native web-rtc services, as that's the only way to get a prototype up and running in 3 months that satisfies the requirements.

And that's cool because new services natively designed around all the goodness the WebRTC standards have to offer will give a superior user experience compared to the ball-and-chain legacy cruft older solutions carry with them.

[Mellipop]

Oh, the possibilities

Teams allows you to have subtitles. That's particularly valuable in one meeting we have in work where a participant is deaf. The AI/ML engine (a descendent of [Tay][1], no doubt) is being put to a good use because it also does a good job of interpreting this person's speech.

Now then, if only the Indian politicians had known about Kuhn's [structure of scientific revolutions][2]. They would have realised that they need to navigate to the [blue ocean][3]. Not to compete but to leapfrog.

We have speech recognition, we have still and video backdrops, we need total avatar synthesis. With translation. What a coup that would be for India.

I want speech to be voiced by [Peter Sellers][4]. Or perhaps like [this][5].

[1]:(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35890188)

[2]:(https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

[3]:(https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-ocean-strategy/)

[4]:(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nTBNHwar5o)

[5]:(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6h0lkq-Sno)