Have you ever tried recording Rahul Dravid’s square cut on your mobile phone from the stands? Every time you tiptoe to record the trajectory from the moment he strikes, you’re disappointed by receiving a shoddy visual clip with jarring noise. Pune-based Pace Soft Silicon, a four-year-old mobile video solutions provider, claims to improvise multimedia capabilities of mobile video handsets so that you can take home a “real” (95%) digital replication of the square-cut!

Neil Salvi, CEO of Pace Soft, developed algorithms to improve the recording and playback qualities of mobile videophones, and got them patented. Wireless transmission is thousand times more erroneous than landline transmission. While transmitting data over airwaves, an average of 15 percent of the data per frame is lost. In this error prone signal transmission, Neil Salvi claims to control signal loss by recovering the missing frame by error concealment.

A typical video signal consists of a series of picture frames. These frames run with a gap of 1/24th of a second to create a feeling of motion. This is due to a property of the human eye: persistence of vision. So when you watch a video for one second, you are actually seeing a series of frames. If we lose data on any of these frames during transmission, we experience a jerk while replaying it. In error concealment technique, error is detected on a frame by comparing it with the previous frame. Error concealment algorithms then automatically correct this and we receive a better picture.

As handsets continuously become smaller, we need to store the same amount of data on a smaller memory space and devices require faster processors for smooth operation. We also must lower battery voltage to minimize heat losses.

Neil and his team have developed motion estimation and rate control algorithms. The quality of recorded motion depends on the amount of data recorded- basically the frames saved during the motion due to memory. His multimedia solu-tions are able to capture 95 percent of motion at 2 percent battery life at 1/60th the processing power, based on MPEG-4 standard.

Products
There are 70 crore mobile phones, 1.5 crore are PDA and 40 lakhs are personal media players in the market. Sixty percent of the company’s are from product royalties and the remaining 40 from license fees and integration devices. Today, Pace soft clientele includes Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) like Samsung, Motorola, HP, Maxon Telecom, and Sagem.

Pace soft offers wireless video software solutions like video camcorders and mobile video frameworks to provide media capabilities to operating systems like Linux, Nucleus, Symbian, Windows CE and Windows Mobile. The products are developed on Intel and Texas Instrument (TI), as well as ARM9 processors. “Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is the basic concept for our business. We preferred to get into video compression as we thought that we were good at numbers and also have expertise in DSP,” Salvi explains.


Starting problem
Starting from a seed investment of $1.4 million in June 2000 from Irish investors like International Investment and Underwriting Limited (IIUL), based in Dublin, the company has reached $2 million revenue mark. The employ eighty people in R&D and has an engineering base in Pune and a sales office in the Silicon Valley. Salvi decided to enter the mobile video segment by setting up its engineering base in Pune. The company scouted the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Banglore, for recruitment. It was the biggest recruiter in IIT Mumbai in 2000, recruiting 20 students from the Electrical Engineering department. Pace soft found it difficult to convince the value proposition of the developing product to the employees in the recruitment phase.

The technology head, Jaya Panvalkar, explains the enormity of task. “ Selling your vision to develop a product for future market was the most difficult. We had to train our workforce on systems, which did not exist in India. We can only get the right output when our team members identify their aspirations with that of ours.”

In early 2000, Pace Soft tried to tap Japanese vendors with its mobile video solutions. The Japanese vendors preferred in-house developers instead of third party developers. It was only when he approached Taiwanese and South Korean vendors that he tasted success, because those markets were relatively smaller at that time and allowed third party developers. “We were not successful in Japanese markets in early 2000, but we got to know how to benchmark our products. The Silicon Valley tag helped to get contracts very easily as Indian developers were nowhere on the preference list of these East Asian vendors and product development took us a long time,” says Salvi.

Decisions and Lessons with growth
Pace Soft is a small player catering to a niche market segment. The company is tapping the IT investments of the OEM and Original Device Manufacturers (ODM) in mobile video segment and developing high end customized software solutions like Mobile Video on Wi-Fi.

Salvi seems to have adopted Geoffrey Moore’s bowling pin strategy, where the initial target of the headpin is the customer and the other pins are the eventual targets, or market expansion. He started with videos for mobile handsets and transitioned to personalized digital assistants and media players.

Developing multimedia products for mobile video is not an easy task, and neither is handling the business itself. Salvi’s previous employment with Accenture helped instill a good technology background and his Masters in Business Management from INSEAD helped him build the management practices in Pace Soft. While pursuing management studies, he took part in a competition to develop a business plan of in India for European product companies. His experience as a product-service provider with Irish product companies gave him valuable insight of running a product company, helping him establishing a product company of his own.

“We are optimistic of crossing $4 million mark by 2007, with ten patented products. Pace soft focused on investing in technology than expanding our business. I don’t believe in putting my fingers in many pies Instead, we decided to concentrate on one vertical and we succeeded,” says the winner with an exuberant smile.