The Hindu : National : Indian wins $50,000 in PC design contest

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Friday, Jan 06, 2006

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National

Indian wins $50,000 in PC design contest

Anand Parthasarathy

Prashant Chandra, an industrial designer, has focussed on school children

Prashant Chandra's `sChOOL Pak' PC won the Microsoft Chairman's Award worth over Rs. 22 lakh announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Thursday.

BANGALORE: He called his design, "sChOOL Pak": a `cool' back-pack personal computer for school kids — and it has just netted him a cool $50,000 — that's over Rs. 22.5 lakhs — as the winner of the Chairman's Award at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas on Thursday; the Chairman, (is Microsoft's Bill Gates) in whose name the company has instituted jointly with the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA), a PC-design contest with four awards for innovative design tailored for the Next Generation Windows operating system-based PC.

And the first winner announced is Lucknow-born, Prashant Chandra, lead industrial designer with the Gurgaon-based Telserra India Pvt Ltd, a technology services provider headquartered in the U.S. Mr. Chandra's design — a smart PC aimed at appealing to the young, includes two screens, one a Tablet-PC like writeable surface and another, a traditional screen for reading text. Encased in a `hip' rubber casing and equipped with straps for use as a backpack, the sChOOL Pak has slots where lightweight digital cards containing textbook material can be slotted in.

Bill Gates'choice

Mr. Gates is said to have chosen the design for the inaugural Chairman's Award, because he felt it captured a smart trend and pushed the frontiers of PC design beyond the obvious.

Mr. Chandra is reportedly waiting for the day when one or more PC manufacturers turn his design into a reality for Indian school children.

Another winner of the $50,000 prize is Purdue University (U.S.) graduate student Sungho Son, for a `bookshelf" computer design. These winners plus two more, will be featured on the competition website www.startsomethingpc.com, to encourage manufacturers to come forward and convert them into commercial products.

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