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JULY 29, 2005
By Steve Hamm A Brain Trust in Bangalore [Page 2 of 2] CRICKET GEAR. Sarnoff is further along in the collaboration sphere. Researchers keep in touch via phone, e-mail, and videoconference, and pass tasks off to one another as the day turns to night in one location and engineers arrive at work in another. This is no master-student relationship, however. "A guy in Princeton will ask us to follow up at the end of his day. Or if we're working on something, we ask them to do the same for us," says Prashant Laddha, a lead software engineer in Bangalore. Sarnoff's Bangalore offices look much like technology offices elsewhere. A bunch of men in their 20s and early 30s labor away in small cubicles. One difference from their American kin: Rather than softball or bowling trophies, these guys keep cricket memorabilia on their desks. Several have motorcycle helmets stowed away, and the parking lot outside is jammed with cycles. The reason: Bangalore's narrow thoroughfares are so crowded with cars and busses that two-wheel transportation is the only way of getting to work in a reasonable amount of time. The Bangalore researchers are working on a wide variety of projects, but one of them has already met with notable success. It's a good illustration of how networked global research is supposed to work. VIDEO FEED. Since the lab was started, one of the goals was to help create a set of technologies for compressing and transmitting video wirelessly that could be sold, potentially, to a wide variety of customers. Rather than being an assignment from a client, Sarnoff conceived this as technology that it would develop and own itself. The project is run by Sandip Parikh, Sarnoff's manager for multimedia technologies. He coordinates about 30 people, half in Princeton and half in India, who are working at least part-time on it. The aim was to produce high-quality video transmissions for low-power handheld devices, cell phones, and PDAs, at data speeds as slow as 28 kilobits per second. Sarnoff bases its technology on the latest industry standard for video compression, called MPEG 4, but uses its own proprietary algorithms to produce the best quality video for those demanding conditions. The breakthrough came during a high-pressure couple of days in April when Parikh and the Bangalore crew teamed up to prove their concept. It was a successful attempt to win over their first customer -- a large European cell-phone operator they wouldn't identify. WEEKEND WORK. This started on the Thursday before Easter. Parikh was in India on a driving vacation with his family when he got a cell-phone call from the customer detailing the video quality levels they wanted to see. While his wife drove, Parikh worked up ideas on his laptop for how to tweak some of the algorithms to squeeze out extra performance. He called Laddha, and the Bangalore engineers set to work. Over the next three days they took Parikh's ideas, improved on them, and tested the results until they were sure they got it right. By the time the boss returned to the office on the following Monday, the job was done. To celebrate their victory, Mitchell treated all the employees to a daylong outing at a place on the outskirts of Bangalore called California Resort. They spent the day playing cricket, badminton, and volleyball. TECH NECESSITY. There could be some long-lasting rewards as well. The Bangalore team has filed five invention-disclosure reports on the work they did on this project -- the first step toward filing U.S. patent applications. "We got some breakthroughs from the Indian engineers," says Parikh. Over the coming years, that sentence could become a mantra for the many Western tech outfits that are counting on their Indian research operations to give them a competitive advantage. In fact, one day, having a brain trust in India may not be a luxury for the world's tech giants. It may become a necessity.
 Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York
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