Microsoft Unlimited Potential team gets a new chief
Microsoft's Unlimited Potential (UP) team has a new Corporate Vice President: Amit Mital, the former General Manager of the Live Mesh and Developer Platform unit.
Mital, a 15-year Microsoft veteran, is reporting to Anoop Gupta, whose title is "Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Unlimited Potential Group, Education Product Group, Technology Policy and Strategy." Gupta took over last year as head of UP when Microsoft Windows veteran Will Poole retired from his last Microsoft post, where he worked on emerging-market initiatives.
Mital will be focusing on the mobile space, among others, as part of his new job. More on Mital's responsibilities, from his bio on Microsoft's Web site:
"Mital works collaboratively across the company's core groups, including Windows, Office and Mobile Communications, as well as key field and segment organizations. Within the Unlimited Potential Group, he is taking a leadership role in the strategic development areas of mobile phones, shared-access computing, low-cost computing and education solutions for emerging markets."
Microsoft has shown off various mobile offerings aimed at emerging-market users, including phones used as healthcare information hubs. Microsoft also is working on a new Microsoft technology codenamed Kojax that is aimed primarily at helping developers create applets for emerging-market customers using mobile phones as their primary "Mobile First" compute environments.
The Unlimited Potential team is the group that pioneered Windows Starter Edition, FlexGo licensing, StartKey and other products and projects aimed at bringing Microsoft technology to individuals in developing nations. It is also the team that has worked with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative to get Windows on XO laptops.
Microsoft recently moved the Live Mesh team, of which Mital was the general manager, under Steven Sinofsky, who is in charge of Windows and Windows Live engineering.
According to a Microsoft spokesperson, Mital joined the Unlimited Potential group in late 2008. The announcement of hiis new post was added to Microsoft's collection of bios on February 17.