Bangalore firm develops genext mobile phones

BANGALORE: A tiny company nestled in Ottawa, Canada, is helping build next generation phones.
These mobile phones are fast becoming amalgamation points of numerous multimedia technologies and are offering newer capabilities such as camcorder, video-on-demand and interactive gaming. Helping Atsana in this area is a Bangalore-based company, Epigon Mediaware Technologies, which develops voice and video codecs (which encodes audio/video signals in machine understandable formats such as MP3 and decodes them back into sound or images).
On a broadband network like Reliance, one can download a video file or a complete movie and watch it on a larger LCD (4 cm X 4 cm) screen.The storage capacity for such devices could go up from the present 256 MB to 1 gigabits depending on compression on high-end phones. The gaming enthusiasts can play seamlessly on the same network. As opposed to the current breed of camera phones with 1.3 mega pixel capacity, the next generation ones, slated for release sometime next year, will have 2 mega pixel and above.
"The media processor companies are building chips that can add mobile video capability to these phonies," says Vivek Chhabra, head (software development and strategic partnerships) of Atsana, a Siemens-funded wireless semincoductor company based in Ottawa.
The codecs developed by Epigon would be ported to the Atsana multimedia chips.
In addition to the chip, Atsana is also building the core middleware platform for mobile applications. It is working with various independent software vendors which will develop several applications for banking, retail and travel industries on the same middleware. Chhabra claims Atsana chips would enable the handset makers to offer their products at cheaper price with low power consumption and enhanced features.
Atsana may be just in time to harvest the feature-rich mobile phones market which is etimated to grow to 40 million units in a couple of years.