A similar session, My Story by Carwale.com’s Mohit Dubey is one of my favorite tech events in Pune this year, and I loved the advice he gave. That is why I have high hopes from this event.

Here is TiE Pune’s description of this event:

“From a single idea to India’s largest bus ticketing company, redBus is an entrepreneurial success story with resonance around the world. It remains compelling proof that a young visionary with a strong engineering background can use technology and insight to create a competitive business and transform an industry.”

Founded in Aug. 2006, redBus today has operations across 15 states and offers services for 15,000+ routes and has built relationship with about 850+ bus operators.

redBus is amongst Forbes top 5 startups to watch in 2010. redBus is ranked no#1 – with a growth rate of 4823% between 2007-’09 – amongst the fastest growing companies in India in a survey done by All World Network. And is also awarded India’s best internet startup, 2010 by IMAI.

Phani is ranked no# 3 amongst India’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs by Business World. He was awarded Entrepreneur of the year award under IT, ITES category by ET NOW and the BITSAA 30 under 30 award. He is also selected as Endeavor Entrepreneur (www.endeavor.org) and TiE Entrepreneur (www.tie.org).

He was a State ranker in Intermediate examination, Andhra Pradesh Sr. Secondary Board, graduated with distinction from BITS-Pilani, and worked with Texas Instruments, Bangalore before he co-founded redBus.

About TiE Pune My Story Sessions!

“My Story – Inspiring Journey of an Entrepreneur”

This program is created to celebrate entrepreneurship and bring stories from successful entrepreneurs in their own words. The invited speakers will share their entrepreneurial journeys and talk about lessons learned, mistakes they wish they avoided, and key decisions that helped make their venture successful.

Fees and Registration

The event is from 6pm to 8pm on 16 September at the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Whitfield Diffie, one of the pioneers of public key cryptography, and the co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange will be in Pune for a few days this week, and will give a talk on 8th September as part of Uniken’s Innovation Lecture Series at COEP Auditorium. This is a day-long event that will consist of student project presentations from 10am to 4:3pm, followed by sessions by Sanjay Deshpande of Uniken and Dr. Diffie. See the event page for more details.

The event is free for anyone to attend. You can register as an attendee or register to be a student presenter of your innovative idea/project at the event page.

Uniken is a Pune-based company that builds technology in the areas of Information Security and Biometrics, Embedded Systems, Control Systems, Intelligent Software Systems and applies them to problems in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Media and Entertainment, Healthcare, etc.

Dr. Whitfield Diffie has recently joined the Scientific Advisory Board of Uniken.

Abstract

Modern FPGA devices offer great advantages for designers of industrial imaging, networking, automation and control, data acquisition systems for test, industrial and medical applications. Apart from offering high performance programmable fabric, FPGAs offer a wide variety of IO standards to interface with networks, motors, sensors, transducers, offer built in high density data storage and the ability to interface to high speed external memory devices. But, most importantly FPGAs offer Gigabit serial connectivity via standards based protocols such as PCI ExpressTM. The ubiquitous nature of PCI Express technology enables development of FPGA based plug and play board and card products that interface with standard off-the-shelf embedded compute and communications platforms, running WindowsTM, Linux or other operating systems and custom device drivers. PCI Express 3.0 Architecture offers many reliability, availability and scalability features to address application needs, as well as advanced features such as relaxed transaction ordering, transaction processing hints, optimized buffer flush-fill, active power management to achieve the highest throughput performance possible within the platform’s power and thermal budgets.

About the speaker: Kiran Puranik

Kiran is a Principal Architect at Xilinx, Inc., responsible for serial connectivity protocol products such as PCI Express. He has spent the last 10 years at Xilinx engaged in architecture definition, design, development and verification of Intellectual Property blocks for several generations of FPGAs. Before Xilinx, Kiran held various engineering positions in the field of ASIC, ASSP design and ICCAD software development.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. It was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start & grow their businesses.

• Google groups: http://groups.google.com/group/punechips?pli=1
• LinkedIn group at: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostPopular=&gid=1924468
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/PuneChips/290402133314
• Twitter: @punechips

Please forward this information to anybody in Pune who is interested in renewable energy, solar technologies, semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required.

Everything else remains the same – Chuk-Munn Lee will be speaking. And there will be goodies given away.

• Indian companies are good with technology, but we don’t build sales and marketing organizations early. Most engineers think that if you build a great product, customers will be easy to get. This is the biggest shortcoming that needs fixing.
  • Having a sales & marketing person in the founding team is great, but not necessary. Having one of the technical co-founder play a sales/marketing role is really great. Customers tend to trust technical guys more than pure sales guys. And this is a skill that can be learned. Initially, it will be hard, as you will be turned down by a large number of people, but you’ll figure it out. We all know how to do sales & marketing – because we do a lot of that when dealing with our parents, teachers, siblings. We’ve just forgotten to apply those skills in the context of our work.
• The large markets are in the US, so how do you build a good sales and marketing organization? The best people in the US are both expensive, and hard to find.
  • India now has customers who are willing to pay for tech products. So it is possible now to use India as a test market, and build a small sales/marketing team based on this.
  • Not all sales/marketing has to happen on the ground. You can achieve a lot with the internet and phone.
  • The market of the future is not necessarily in the US. For example, new technologies, the US is a maturing market (i.e. there are legacy products and you have to convince people to migrate) whereas less developed countries are green field markets who are more receptive to new technologies.
• The most experienced companies in the world are not just building great products – they are building great customer experiences. And experience is everything – from how the customer first hears about your company, how your product functions and makes the customer feel, and afterwards, if there is a problem, how you handle the problem and how you treat the customer. You need to be building great experiences. Example: craigslist is the top classifieds site in the world, but has a not-so-good experience. AirBnB took one small slice of this market, built a great experience around it, and now has a billion dollar valuation. DropBox makes the experience of backup and file-sharing so smooth and unobtrusive.
• The biggest challenge in building a company is how to build the right culture. Before hiring, Pune company InfinitelyBeta makes prospective candidates build a mini-product and then review that code. Hence their hiring process takes 2 months. But then they know exactly what kind of a programmer they are getting.
• Pune is ahead of other Indian cities as far as people building or interested in building products. This is probably because Pune has traditionally not had that many software services companies, and it has had some large development centers of product companies (like Veritas/Symantec, nVidia), so the product DNA has thrived more in Pune.
  • Because it is ahead of others in product orientation, Pune is the Indian city that is best positioned to be able to reproduce the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
  • It already has a microbrewery (like Silicon Valley’s Gordon Biersch), so an important component of the valley culture is already here
• Currently, top Indian tech universities (like IITs) are quite isolated from the industry. But as more and more product companies start coming out of India, there is likely to be more collaboration between universities and companies. So we should start seeing more of this in the next 5 years.
• We are getting into an era where fast response to changing conditions is much more important than protecting your intellectual property. Thus building an agile engineering organization is more important than getting patents.
• You can build a B2C company immediately after college, with minimal experience. But building a B2B company really requires you to have some experience in the industry.
• Challenges of selling into the SME market in India: Selling products for the SME market is tough for the following reasons:
  • No one has really solved the problem of distribution. Creating a product that SMEs find interesting is not good enough. Creating an efficient system for selling the product to a large number of SMEs remains a challenge. Often the cost of selling a product to a customer turns out to be higher than the income from that customer. And it is sometimes easier to sell to large companies than it is to sell to SMEs (which tend to be very price and feature conscious)
  • Far too many Indian companies in this space are creating products that they think SMEs want, but in reality, SMEs are not really that interested. Finding products that SMEs really want is very tough. Few startup founders have a good understanding of the SME space.

The event is on 16 July, 5pm, at Symbiosis Vishwabhavan, SB Road. The event is free and open to all, but registration is required

Java 7 Launch Event Details

Harshad Oak writes:

Java 7 is an upcoming major update to Java and is expected to be released (GA) on July 28th, 2011. A detailed list of features & a developer preview is available online.

Wouldn’t it be great if even before the actual general availability of Java 7 there was an event where we could learn & discuss exactly what’s coming in Java 7?

So, supported by Oracle, the Java Pune google group is hosting a great big launch event & celebration right here in Pune! Join in to learn & to celebrate the launch of the newest release of JAVA!

The event is free for all, however the seats are very very limited. So register early, but we do request you to register only if you are sure you will be able to make it to the event. We definitely do not want to waste any of the few seats we have on offer.

Psst: Apart from the learning there would be some goodies as well

What’s new in Java 7

The feature set for Java SE 7 is driven, in large part, by a set of themes. The themes describe the main focal points of the release. Some themes are fairly abstract guiding principles; others are more concrete in that they identify particular problem areas, significant new feature sets, or specific target market segments.

The themes are not prioritized, except that the first one is the most important.

Compatibility: As the platform has matured, yet continued to evolve, many community members have naturally come to expect that their investments in Java-based systems, whether large or small, will be preserved. Any program running on a previous release of the platform must also run-unchanged-on an implementation of Java SE 7. (There are exceptions to this general rule but they are exceedingly rare, and they typically involve serious issues such as security.)

Productivity: Java SE 7 will promote best coding practices and reduce boilerplate code by adding productivity features to the Java language and the Java SE APIs. These features will increase the abstraction level of most applications in a pragmatic way, with no significant impact on existing code and a minimal learning curve for all developers. We propose to enable, among other improvements, the automatic management of I/O resources, simpler use of generics, and more-concise exception handling.

Performance: The Java SE platform has traditionally offered developers a range of features for writing scalable multi-threaded applications, for example with monitors in the Java language and VM and the concurrency utilities defined in JSR 166. To keep up with the inexorable trend toward multicore CPUs, Java SE 7 will add new concurrency APIs developed by Prof. Doug Lea and the JSR 166 community. These include, in particular, a Fork/Join Framework which can adaptively scale some types of application code to the available number of processors. Java SE 7 will further enable I/O-intensive applications by introducing a true asynchronous I/O API as part of JSR 203.

Universality: Building upon the initial work in Java SE 6 to support scripting languages, Java SE 7 will introduce, via JSR 292, a new “invokedynamic” bytecode instruction and related APIs which will accelerate the performance of dynamic languages on the Java Virtual Machine.

Integration: The Java SE Platform provides developers with a wealth of capabilities, but Java applications do not operate in isolation. A specific pain point for many years has been that of interacting with native filesystems, where a good user experience often requires exposing some details of the underlying platform. Java SE 7 will include a new, flexible filesystem API as part of JSR 203 which will provide portable access to common filesystem operations yet also allow platform-specific code to be written when desired.

About the Speaker – Chuk Munn Lee

Chuk Munn Lee has been programming in the Java language since 1996, when he first joined Sun Microsystems in Hong Kong. He currently works as a senior developer consultant and technology evangelist for Technology Outreach at Sun in Singapore. Chuk’s focus is in: Java APIs, Java EE, Java SE, and Java ME. Chuk worked with key Asia-Pacific independent software vendors (ISVs) during the last six years to helped them design, prototype, develop, tune, size, and benchmark their Java applications. Chuk is also an avid gamer; he shares his enthusiasm for Java technology adoption with other game developers. Chuk graduated in 1987 from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, where his favorite subject was compiler theory.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab (that’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not Pune’s MIT), considered one of the top young innovators in the world, is in town, and we’re taking this opportunity to have him give a talk. The talk is at 5:45pm on Wednesday, 6th July, at the Venture Center, in NCL, Pashan. He will talk about various topics including:

• Netra, the mobile phone based eye exam for developing countries,
• His other work in the field of computational vision and imaging,
• His initiatives in India and Pune,
• Help/Collaborations he is looking for from people organizations in India
• MIT Media Labs, commercializing inventions, the startup ecosystem in Boston.

This will be followed by time for discussions and networking

About Ramesh Raskar

Ramesh Raskar is the head of MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging, and human-computer interaction. Recent inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next-generation CAT-scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long-distance barcodes (Bokode), touch + hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (NETRA) and new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena.

Awards and Honours for Ramesh Raskar:

• Top young innovator under 35, from MIT Technology Review in 2004
• Top 20 Indian technology innovators, from Global Indus Technovator Awards, MIT, 2003
• Sloan Research Fellowship, 2009
• DARPA Young Faculty award, 2010
• 40 US patents
• 4 Mitsubishi Electric Invention awards

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required

About Naren Gupta

Naren is co-founder of Nexus Venture Partners.

Naren has been an entrepreneur. He co-founded Integrated Systems Inc (ISI), a leading embedded software company, where he served as the President/CEO for fifteen years. He took ISI public and subsequently merged it with Wind River Systems. Naren continued to serve on the board of Wind River till its recent acquisition by Intel. Currently, he serves on the boards of Red Hat and Tibco. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the California institute of Technology and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Naren has over 20 years of early and early-growth stage investment experience in US and India. Several of his earlier investments have had successful public exits, including Digital Link (IPO), E-Tek Dynamics (IPO), RightNow (IPO), Numerical Technologies (IPO, acquired by Synopsis) and Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai).

Naren holds a B. Tech. degree and is a recipient of President’s Gold Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi; an MS from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Naren has received distinguished alumni awards from Caltech and IIT and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. He is an active advisor to entrepreneurs worldwide.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register by sending an email to register@nexusvp.com

• “Carwale.com, the story so far: Started in 2005, seed funding in 2006, hit break-even point in 2007, series A funding in 2008, got acquired in 2010. So far, the website has served 3,12,68,180 people.”
• “Nobody gave me a job. So I had to start my own company”
• “I was never really good at coding. But I was good at jugaad, and co-ordination. I did an ecommerce course, but at the end I wasn’t good enough to create an ecommerce website. I convinced my teacher that she should do the website, and she would get a certificate of having worked on an industry project, which will help you in your career.”
• “I am not a genius. I took a two-year drop but did not get into IIT. None of my colleagues in CarWale.com are geniuses. We’re all ordinary people. Who stayed together for a long time. Ordinary people + Years of effort together = Success.”
• “If you have a purpose, it’s easier to find soulmates.”
• “For two years, we kept trying to do tele-medicine. But that never really took off. In the meantime, we kept doing software work for anybody we could. Everything we did failed. Co-founders never complained, because we had a relationship.”
• “Commitment is more important than competence. Sticking together is more important.”
• “‘We’ll pay you whatever we can pay, whenever you can pay’ was the salary offered to Gaurav.”
• “In 2005, I went to Bombay to figure out what to do. I told my team to give me 2 months to figure something out. Otherwise we’ll close down the company. I got a Rs. 10000 contract to build a website for a used car dealership. I spent 3 months understanding the business. My team wondered why I was spending 3 months for a Rs. 10000 contract. But the software that we built for the used-car dealership, we started selling to other used-car dealerships. At this point, I was given the advice that I was trying too many things, and wanted to do everything. I should focus. So I decided that I would focus only on automobiles. And thus CarWale.com was born. My team (8 people) disagreed with me, but I decided that they were wrong.”
• “I sold the software to 30 dealerships. And after a while realized that none of them were using the software to sell cars. We decided that something was wrong. And changed the model within 10 days. We decided to take it to the customers directly ourselves.”
• “Done is better than perfect. If you launch a product and it is bug-free, you waited too long to release it.”
• “The purpose is fundamental. The purpose helps you get the right time. Cash? Go to spouse, parents, relatives, friends. If you can’t get money from them, how will you get it from strangers? Also HNIs and Angels. Everybody who was rich in Bhopal, I approached them for money. You need to be able to do that.”
• “For funding purposes, we made a 60-page business plan. But with the strategy changing every 2 weeks, it was difficult to keep the 60 pager updated. So we went down to 5 pages, and even that was a problem. So we brought it down to 2 pages. What worked? 5 line email which resulted in a reference; and the reference really did it.”
• “Everything takes longer. 2x or 3x. So stay optimistic about building a valuable company, not about the launch, or hiring, or a big client, or funding, or anything specific.”
• “Things can change quickly. When that happens, we don’t wait for a weekly meeting, or a monthly meeting, or a big company meeting to decide. We have a quick huddle, and take a decision”
• “These are the four core values of our company: 1. Treat Others Well. 2. Be Responsible. 3. Be Agile. 4. Company Before Self. These should be qualities you already have before we hire you. These are more important than ‘standard’ things like customer satisfaction.”
• “By 2020, one of the world’s top 3 online auto companies is going to be from India.”
• “We had no cash in the bank. I remember going to a dealership one day with no money, and I was thinking that I must make a sale today, and ask them to pay some money in cash upfront. That sort of a situation really helps focus your efforts.”
• “To share equity in the company, I had a very simple method. Early in the company, you have no clue which co-founder is going to be most important. And the guy with the idea does not deserve more equity – the idea is not important, at all. The best answer is distribute equity equally. You’ll get better commitment that way. For early employees, the people who join the company within the first 6 months, I allocate 7.5%. A total of about 20% to be allocated to all your employees.”
• “Today if someone wants to create an online store, there is no need to do a website. Just create a facebook page.”
• “When writing content, focus on the user. Do SEO and SEM, but write content for the user, not for Google.”
• “There are very, very few tech companies that need to operate in stealth mode. Everybody else should stop being secretive and talk about their idea in full detail with VCs etc. Your execution, your company culture, your method of hiring, cannot be copied. Startups have a DNA which allows them to move very fast and take decisions quickly. Big companies cannot do that.”

This meeting is free for anybody to attend, but registration is necessary. Send your confirmation to: ashwin.baindur@gmail.com with subject: Attending Pune meetup.

More details:

Ashwin Baindur writes:

Hello friends,

There is a lot happening in Pune next week. We have a lot of visitors in town who would especially like to interact with the Pune Community. Our help and cooperation has been sought for the Campus Ambassador training event next weekend. Our MEETUP DATE IS NOW CHANGED FROM 11 JUN TO 04 JUN 2011 (Saturday) at 1800 hours at SICSR, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Room No 704. 7th floor. Hisham Mundol, National Program Coordinator, who is leading the Campus Ambassador programme, will be in Pune for a week for masterminding the event. Bishakha Datta, Trustee, will be gracing the event on Saturday. Tinu Cherian, the quintessential Indian outreach activist, will also be coming for and participating in the meet – a rare treat for us. I spoke to Arjuna Rao Chawala and he has promised to confirm attendance by an Indian Chapter representative soon.

We have a number of people visiting us from abroad. Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach and Annie Lin, who leads the Ambassador Program are visiting Pune for the Campus Ambassador training event on 04-05 Jun 2011. We also have P.J. Tabit coming down to India between June 1st and August 21st to support the launch of the Wikipedia India Education Program. PJ is a Campus Ambassador in the US and is on the Ambassador Steering Committee for Wikipedia. We, the Pune community, welcome Frank, Annie & PJ to Pune and hope they have a wonderful stay. We also welcome any members of the Wikimedian community in India from outside Pune who are going to be with us for this event. Do let us know if we can help you in any way.

Broadly speaking, the campus ambassadors will be trained on 4th and 5th Jun by the outreach team comprising lndian and foreign Wikipedians. In the evening on Saturday, the campus ambassadors and the outreach team will be present for our meetup. After the meetup, the Outreach Team has invited the Pune Wikipedia community for a SOCIAL EVENING WITH DINNER. Venue for social evening will be indicated at the meetup.

Coming to another issue, the Campus Ambassadors themselves.

The first batch of Campus Ambassadors has been selected. To those selected, we say – heartiest congratulations, you will shortly be learning to edit and to evangelise Wikipedia. It is a most challenging task and we assure you of the community’s support. We invite you to be part of our community and we promise to help you, guide you and partner you in this extraordinary journey you will undertake. We also know that some other aspirants have not been selected this time round. In most cases, this is due to their lack of Wikipedia skills. To all of them we say – there will be another round of selection coming up in a few months, so have a great heart and wait. The fact that all of you stood tall and came forth means you already belong to the select batch of people who are doers and achievers. We, the Pune community, invite you to join us for this meetup and become part of us. We will help you get the skills to make you ready for the next round of selections.

Many of you all who are interested in becoming Wikipedians are requested to join all of the above :

• Marathi Wikipedia Group
• Mailing list for Wikimedians in India
• Mailing list for Wikimedians in Pune, India

Also please join the following groups on Facebook:

• Wikimedia India
• WikiPuneri

IMPORTANT: All those attending the meetup from Pune (excepting those selected for the Campus Ambassador program or those organising the event or visiting from outside Pune) need to confirm attendance so that we can plan accordingly. Send your confirmation to : ashwin.baindur@gmail.com with subject: Attending Pune meetup. Those not attending need not respond. So till then, Au revoir & Namaste, Khuda Hafez and Sat Sri Akal,

Jai Hind
Ashwin Baindur