Bangalore firm has a design to customise handheld thingamajigs

Mistral Software on Wednesday emerged as a significant electronic design company by announcing the launch of its smart handheld design, which could be used to customise a range of handheld devices that go beyond the plain vanilla PDA.

Three variations of the basic design have been licensed to one customer in the navigation field, Anees Ahmed, president of Mistral, announced in Bangalore.

This is only one among the several design wins that the company has been notching up lately.

Another significant win is a project executed for a karaoke system with digital signal processing capability for a Singapore manufacturer.

The karaoke device is likely to be in production shortly and be launched in Japan under the brand name of Commander.

The novelty of the product is that it is able to make up for any tuneless of the person singing along with the system.

Mistral has also scored a major win with the country's defence establishment with its radar scan converter, which has been successfully tested and is being customised for the advanced light helicopter.

Explaining the significance of the smart hand held design, Ahmed said Mistral was not offering a PDA but the basic design from which hand held devices could be customised for any number of industry verticals to boost their productivity.

These verticals could be navigation, games, logistics, healthcare and e-learning where the potential of mobile computing could be truly utilised.

Keeping track of a fleet of trucks or enabling a salesman to access his company database from the customer's premises to book a firm order could all be enabled.

Ahmed claimed that "our costs are globally very competitive and our power optimisation (battery runs much longer) is a key factor, achieved through the use of the Samsung ARM9 processor."

Mistral, which began with the initial team's own capital of Rs 5 lakh (0.5 million) in 1997 clocked a revenue of Rs 23 crore (Rs 230 million) in 2002-03.

It projects a turnover of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1,000 million) by 2006, when the IP licence revenue will rise to 16 per cent of the turnover from the present less than 3 per cent.

The company is cash positive and has received only one round of venture capital funding, $3 million from IEP Milestone, which has a 20 per cent stake.

Right now, most of the income comes from the design services. Ahmed says Mistral is the embedded company in the country in the field of product realisation that is doing the outsourced work of product development. In this it is a partner for Texas Instruments developing reference designs for them.

Mistral stood out from others by being present both in the hardware and software space. It is growing well, said Ahmed, and is looking for a partnership in the US to boost its marketing.

Should that happen, the inorganic growth will be much larger than the current estimates mentioned earlier.