Jag Minhas Internet and Cell Phones in UK Part-II
By kamla bhatt • Jun 30th, 2006Category: Business & Tech, Diaspora, Ideas, India, Internet & Telecom, London
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Jag Minhas is an engineer and a blogger based in London.
In Part II Jag talks about the early days of the Internet and fast forwards to the current mobile phone revolution. UK has achieved 100% saturation in cell phones says Jag. Jag is Chief Architect, Data Products at O2, UK’s largest mobile company.
We start our conversation by looking back to the early 1990s when Jag was part of the team that built the Internet backbone in UK. Jag worked for British Telecom then. He describes their visit to UUNET, which provided access to Internet backbone and their meeting with Rick Adams, the Internet pioneer.
From the 1990s we fast forward to 2006 and Jag discusses the way mobile phones is changing the technical and social landscape of UK. He believes that it is not killer application, but a killer environment that has going to be the next thing to watch out in the mobile phone space.
Jag is a pioneer of sorts (although he might vehemently disagree with the term), who has worked extensively on mobile blogging and mobile streaming video.
I met with Jag in London (May 2006), where we spoke on a wide range of topics — from his blog to the early days of the Internet in the UK and the current mobile revolution in the UK. UK has 100% saturation in terms of mobile phones, and people now own more than one cell phone explained Jag. So, it was not a surprise when I discovered that he carried three cell phones with him, and had a fourth one in his car. In fact he changes his phones frequently and had just got a brand new phone that had barely hit the UK market and was busy debugging the interface etc.
Jag knows his mobile phones. Here is how he described cell phone: there is the candy bar phone and the clam shell phone (like my sturdy basic Nokia mode). Women seem to prefer these two types of phones. And then there is the slider phone, and so on.
Jag has been using his mobile phone to take pictures of everyday London and tries to find art in everyday life. A hallmark of Jag’s blog is the number of interesting images about everyday London that he regularly posts.
Jag’s blog is a reflection of his wide array of interests: cooking, traveling, music, technology and mobile phones. It is also a reflection of who he is: a Londoner first and foremost and then a British Asian and a European.
Jag lives with his family in London.
Kamla Bhatt is the host and producer of an Internet Radio show where listeners can find stories about the new and emerging India and the global Indian community. As a pioneer of 'internet radio' format in India Kamla started her first show News about India, followed by TalkNewsIndia in 2005. In 2006 she premiered her new show: The Kamla Bhatt Show: Life, People and Ideas. 






[...] Last year I met Jag in London and had a wonderful conversation with him about technology going back to the good old days of Unix, TCP/IP and the early dotcom days and mobile phones and digital lifestyle. Mobile phones, convergence, digital lifestyle are subjects that Jag can talk for hours and provide new and different perspectives. [...]