Monthly Archives: September 2013

TechForSeva: Technology for the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid: 2-day-conference

VijnanaBharati.org, Seva Sahyog, Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha (MKSSS) and MCCIA, are pursuing a new initiative called Tech for Seva under the leadership of stalwarts like Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Dr F C Kohli, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, Dr. Jagannath Wani, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar and many more.

Tech for Seva is a platform allowing academic & research institutions, individual & corporate innovators, NGOs & grass root operators to come together on a common platform and share their success stories and problems that need scientific solutions to help the bottom of the pyramid of our country to share the fruits of development.

Please visit the web site for more details.

This is a two day conference in Pune on 28th & 29th September 2013 where all the three stakeholders i.e. innovators, corporates & NGOs will jointly share their success stories, problems and will try to come up with some partnership proposals.

This platform will be an ongoing activity even after the conference is over and will be monitored by a special task force set up by Tech for Seva.

The topics chosen for deliberations / presentation are education, health,livelihood and environment.

The topic of Environment is further classified as energy, water, waste management and bio-diversity.

A grand expo, “Padma Vibhushan Dr.Verghese Kurien Expo”, student competition, “IET TFS Student Competition of Innovative Ideas”, and Leadership dinner will be major highlights of the conference.

In TFS expo individuals/institutes/VOs/NGOs/corporates will showcase their equipments, prototypes, models, products, processes and information about the schemes/programs, success stories, etc. for the delegates and other stake holders.

Event website: http://techforseva.org

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PuneTech Event: Data Analytics in Location & Intent Aware Mobile Promotions

This Friday, we have a distinguished visitor from the Silicon Valley – Sanjay Mittal, a serial entrepreneur, investor, advisor to startups, with a highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. He will talk about his current interest – use of Data Analytics in Location and Intent aware Mobile Promotions.

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm to 7pm, at MCCIA, ICC Trade Towers, SB Road.

Abstract of Talk

Search, Location and Mobile Ads can be put together to create targeted promotions for mobile users. Measuring and improving performance of these promotions is a different matter altogether. Join us to hear Sanjay Mittal (Chairman & CTO of Spotzot Inc) walk you through importance, methods and instruments of data collection, analysis and ad tuning, and how it can create a win-win situation for retailers, advertisers, publishers and consumers.

About the Speaker – Sanjay Mittal

Software Entrepreneur, Technologist, Private Investor, Advisor to Startups. Highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. Strong technology background in internet and artificial intelligence technologies.

Sanjay is currently a co-founder, Chairman of the Board, and CTO at mobile startup SpotZot. SpotZot has built a network of 30 million high-intent mobile shoppers who regularly make their purchases offline at brick and mortar retailers. Spotzot reaches these shoppers by providing a location based in-app shopping service to high traffic shopping, search and game applications. Spotzot allows retailers and brands to help consumers discover the hottest trends, best offers and coupons and find a store nearby.

Sanjay has been a co-founder and CEO of NASDAQ-listed company Selectica which makes software products to help the largest companies in the world improve the effectiveness of their sales and contracting processes.

In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Sanjay has been a senior researcher at Xerox PARC, a director of TiE Silicon Valley, and many other achievements which can be seen on his linkedin profile

Sanjay has done his B.Tech. Electrical Engineering from IIT-Delhi in 1975, and an MS in CS from the University of Nebraska, USA.

Fees and Registration

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm-7pm, at MCCIA Hall No. 5, 5th Floor, A-Wing, ICC Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

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C-DAC unveils Mercury Nimbus online healthcare software

Pune-based C-DAC has launched Mercury Nimbus, which appears to be an online EMR (electronic medical records) software suite, on the Windows Azure cloud platform, that doctors and hospitals can use to share patient data – according to a report in the Times of India

Excerpts from the article:

Gaur Sunder, principal technical officer at C-DAC, said that if a cancer patient goes to a nearby clinic and the doctors refers him to a hospital outside his present location, town or state, than in such a case, through ‘Mercury Nimbus,’ the doctor can virtually refer his case to the specialty hospital along with all the details of the patients, records and reports.

The doctor at the specialty hospital can study the records and through video conferencing prescribe immediate treatment to the patient and also give the next date of visit. The next time the patient visits the clinic, his reports would be sent again to the hospital and accordingly the specialty doctor can give him the time and details of his treatment or surgery date.

and:

The subscription charges range from $15 to $150 per month.

Read the full article

See also: CoEP unrolls online health management portal for 1800 hostelites

RailsGirls Pune – The Gold and the Beautiful

(This event report of RailsGirls Pune – a one-day conference for women working on Ruby-on-Rails, first appeared on the Josh Software Blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

I was skeptical! Just from my experience of organizing RubyConf India and some local meetups, I was sure the turnout would be low and the event would be ‘casually boring’. If only I knew how crazily wrong I was!

A few days before the event, seeing about 250 registrations was itself a revelation. Then the turnout of over a 100 girls was exhilarating to say the least. I mean, how often does one get a chance to address a crowd at a techie event with ‘Hello Ladies!’. I am indeed lucky.

RailsGirlsJosh Software was one of the sponsors along with ThoughtWorks and CodeIgnition. It was great to see a LOT of mentors turn up for the event — which in my opinion was one of the success factors of Rails Girls Pune – EVERYONE got attention and there was never a case where someone was sitting idle or looking around for help.

The demographics of the crowd was varied – quite a few girls had come down to Pune for this event, some even travelling most of the night to get here!. There were a lot of girls with a prior technical background but none in Ruby. And there were 5 people who were entirely new to programming and they too managed to code, gleefully if I may add! It’s not often you get to hear an artist talk about controllers and methods. 🙂

kid2

One good cultural change that stood out was the kids running around an event with their dad’s baby-sitting them while the mom’s coded!

Proceedings were kick-started off  by Gunjan from ThoughtWorks. She spoke about Women in Technology and Leadership and why such events are so important for everyone.

railsgirls1

After a brief introduction from other sponsors, all participants were divided among various tables and each table was assigned a mentor, though I saw at least 2 or 3 mentors at each table. Everyone was eager to help and answer questions.

RailsGirls3As the mentors were aware of the RailsGirls teaching process, it started of with getting familiar tryruby.org before moving on to other things like BentoBox and explaining basic concepts of Rails. Before long, everyone was busy working hard!

There were lot’s of discussions happening amidst kids running around, regular trips for getting more coffee or tea or some snacks. Before long, it was time for lunch and a breather.

chickendanceThoughtWorks organized an awesome lunch and after lunch, it required more than just Ruby to shake everyone up. What better than a ChikenDance for 5 minutes that started slow with a little bit of shyness among the audience but reached a crescendo with everyone joining in!

 

 

lighteningtalkThere were three Lightening Talks to get the crowd back into the coding groove. I spoke about why we love Ruby with the talk ”My Grandmother can read my code“.  Praveena  gave a talk on “Perks of being a Programmer” and Nishita gave a talk about “How the Internet works!”.

The afternoon was one busy session and everywhere you went, you heard only about Controllers, Scaffold, Bootstrap etc. – music to my ears!

Towards the end of the session, we had some participants showcase their work after uploading on Heroku. A few mentions of some really good work are  http://vast-mesa-2265.herokuapp.com/ideas and http://shrouded-cove-2185.herokuapp.com/

mentorsThe mentors did a wonderful job and got a lot of appreciation from all. Well, at the end of the day, a lot of people mad new friends. (Do not miss the “I <3 Matz” on the bottom right corner of the photo!)

Anup and Prathamesh wound up proceedings with introducing everyone to Pune Ruby User Group and after the prolonged networking that ensued, everyone called it a day and probably slept the night dreaming of instance variables!

A special thanks to Shilpa Nair and Hephzibah who did a wonderful job organizing RailsGirls. Hope to see more of these events soon. Do like the Rails Girls Facebook Page  and show your appreciation!

CoEP unrolls online health management portal for 1800 hostelites

COEP – The College of Engineering Pune, has unrolled a program called AyushDeep – an online health management portal for 1800 students living in hostels with the help of a local software company Ayushman aka IndiaOnlineHealth.com.

The portal will hold an electronic medical record of the students online, which can also be viewed by parents and doctors, and it is hoped that the students will continue to use and update this record for the rest of their life.

“The first and most obvious motivation is the identification of any health problem in our students that require special attention. Secondly, we want students to inculcate a habit of building their EMR, which will form the core of continuity in healthcare for them for the rest of their life. The platform of connected healthcare we offered to our students can render them help from appropriate specialists, if needed, using the online health platform,” college director A D Sahasrabudhe said at an Idea Exchange held at The Indian Express office here.

More info: