National Instruments used its annual conference in Bangalore this week to launch LabVIEW 2010 - the latest avatar of its graphical programming tool for design, test, measurement and control applications. The new version offers time saving features and off-the-shelf compiler technologies that execute code an average of 20 percent faster. It now provides a new hardware configuration tool that enables users to access and configure their LabVIEW Real-Time targets remotely via a Web browser.
In his opening keynote, National Instruments’ Managing Director India, Russia & Arabia, Jayaram Pillai said the 2010 LabVIEW included some 44 new improvements crafted by India-based engineers of National Instruments, many based on suggestions from the strong academic and industrial community of users in the country. Over 400 engineering colleges in India teach LabVIEW and there are some 25,000 LabVIEW trained engineers in the country, Jayaram, added.
The conference which hosted 25 technical sessions, 23 expert speakers and 17 live demos attracted over 800 engineers. Many of National Instruments’ largest industry partners – like Captronic Systems – were on hand as were dozens of academic institutions whose students had harnessed LabVIEW to seed startup of their own.  In recent years, the India end of National Instruments has  put in place an India-specific  pricing system which is sensitive to  local realities -- and this has sharply expanded the LabView ecosystem in the region.

In the exhibition section of  the conference Students of the MVJ College of Engineering, Bangalore,  who had joined to start their own outfit – Alectrono Techno Solutions –  used the event to unveil a LabVIEW-fuelled robot rover system for which they hoped to find some investors. 
Link to What's new in LabVIEW 2010: http://www.ni.com/labview/whatsnew/

- from Anand Parthasarathy in Bangalore/ October 15 2010