Interesting blog posts by Pune’s techies

This is a round-up of some recent intersting blog posts written by Pune’s techies. These blogs don’t necessarily fall within the narrow charter of PuneTech, but introducing PuneTech readers to these blogs and bloggers does.

At the top of everyone’s mind is of course the financial meltdown. Arun Prabhudesai (who is CEO of hover.in) details the serious effects it is beginning to have on Indian industry, and on the jobs of regular people:

L&T Infotech is trimming its work force by 5%. That would mean a job loss for 10000 people. Goldman Sachs has fired 100 employees in Mumbai and 30 in Bangalore.  Satyam has fired 30 employees over fudged bills. Corus steel (part of Tata Steel now) has cut 400 jobs in UK because of poor business conditions. Tata Steel has ruled out any jobs cuts in India. Airlines are fearing that they have to lay off 8000 ground staff. Kingfisher has announced a 90% cut in the salaries of trainee pilots. Jet Airways has sacked 25+ expat pilots.

See the full article for even more scary figures. His blog (trak.in) is focused on Indian Business. Amit Paranjape also has a series of posts about the financial crisis (one, two, three) that you might find interesting. He also writes about Pune’s history, restaurant reviews, and cricket. (While on the subject of the financial crisis, you should also check out Sequoia Capital’s 56-slide presentation of doom. That is really scary.)

So what is to be done in these bad times? Manas Garg points out that before any success, whether it is in good times or bad, there is a dip.  And you need to persist and make it through the dip before you succeed. (see also Seth Godin’s thoughts on this.) Another thing that can be done, technologically, is to cut costs by shifting from real servers to virtual servers in the cloud. Mukul Kumar of Pubmatic often writes detailed posts about this on his blog, but in his most recent post, he cautions you to take into account the cost of data transfers in your calculations, as that is likely to be more expensive in some cases, than the cost of compution time on the servers.

Switching gears to security, the ClubHack blog warns us about “Free Public WiFi” – why it is bad, and how it works:

If an unsuspecting healthy laptop is searching for wireless networks in vicinity, it will see the advertised viral SSID in its list. If the laptop is configured to “Connect to any wireless network” as it comes in range, it will attach itself to the respective network. The connection can also be made when an unsuspecting user manually connects to an advertised viral SSID. As soon as this connection is made, the viral SSID appears in the PNL of the healthy laptop and thus gets infected.

Read the full article. And if you’ve been following the PuneTech calendar, you’ll know that ClubHack is organizing a security awareness conference in Pune in early December.

Just because of scary financials and scary security warnings, doesn’t mean that we need to go around feeling depressed. In fact, this is probably the best time to start something new, get involved in the community. PuneTech gave you an idea of upcoming tech community activities that you can get involved in. (By the way, the Pune Mirror agrees with us, and reprinted that article on Saturday.) Anthony Hsiao of entrip.com got together with other tech entrepreneurs in Pune to start Startup Cinema. Read about it on his blog. Also, don’t forget to check out his older post on why he prefers the chaos of Pune to the perfection of Singapore/Germany.

Pune is different, of course, and being away really helped appreciate the warmth of the people, the beauty of apparent chaos and disorder (having lived in Singapore and Zurich, I can honestly say that happiness is not derived from perfection…), the very decent lifestyle I can afford as an expat here (despite being constantly broke!), and just the interesting stuff that goes on all the time (it has to, there are so many people here, something has to be going on all the time).
In many ways, I think Pune (or many parts of India in general) are quite the opposite to places like Singapore – which is clean, orderly, safe, modern, connected, etc.

Know of any interesting techies in Pune who should be featured here? Let us know.

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