PuneTech

Event Name: MahaBio 2008 - 2-day conference on bio-technology
When: Nov 14, 15 all day.
Venue: Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA
Registraion and Fees: Details are sketchy, but I think this will be free for anyone to attend. Those interested should see the MahaBio 2008 website, and make contact at the email address provided

Details:

The event titled ‘Mahabio 2008’ will take place in Pune on November 14 and 15. Various political figures will be in attendance:  Inauguration by Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Presentations by Ashok Kolaskar, former vice-chancellor of UoP, A S Ninawe, vice-chancellor of Maharashtra Animal and Fisheries University, Nagpur and Dilip Deobagkar, vice-chancellor of Goa University among others.

But, Dr R A Mashelkar, chairman, Maharashtra Biotechnology Commission will address the inaugural ceremony, and also there will be actual academic papers being presented. Also, an exhibition of biotechnology will be held at Jaykar library in UoP where, about 20 industries, related to biotechnology, shall put their stalls.

So, I think, if you are interested in biotechnology, and are willing to put in a little effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, I think it will be worth visiting, at least the exhibition, if nothing else. A little more information is provided by an Indian Express article on this topic. I have sent an email to the organizers, and will update this article later today if I get a response.

What: A 3-hour, free event for World Usability Day, and a 2-day, paid conference on usability engineering, both featuring the who’s who of Usability in Pune, and some experts from outside too.

When: World Usability Day event is from 3pm to 6pm on Nov 27th; The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering is on Nov 27th and 28th, full day.

Where: Sumant Mulgaonkar Auditorium, ICC towers, 403-A, Senapati Bapat Road. Map.

Registration and fees: The World Usability Day event is free for all to attend, and no registration is required. The full conference fees are Rs. 3500 for professionals, Rs. 2000 for academics, and Rs. 500 for students. Details here.

Details - World Usability Day Event

A gathering of usability practitioners is organized with many participatory community events to encourage informal discussion, knowledge sharing and networking. Usability professionals, user experience designers, design teachers, IT professionals, managers, software developers, students etc. are welcome to attend.

This event will consist of the following:

Photo Essay Competition on ‘Usability in Transportation’

The participants of this competition are expected to highlight usability problems and difficulties faced by people using a series of photographs and apt description of possible solutions. The photographs have to be focusing on any of the usability problems pertaining to transportation in terms of design of vehicles, transportation systems, traffic signals, road signage systems and communication, journey booking systems, etc. It should also touch upon design, engineering, social, cultural and ergonomic issues related to transportation.

Jury members for Photo Essay Competition

Dr. Sanjay Tripathi, Senior Consultant (Usability), TechMahindra Ltd, Pune -Chairman
Bhakti Khandekar, Principal Designer-User Interface , Infosys Technologies, Pune -Member
Taral Kulkarni, Senior Usability Engineer, Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member
Kedar Kadam, Usability Engineer , Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member

Usability Quiz

It is going to be a fun quiz contest to test our know-how of usability. The quiz will cover questions related to web-usability, user centered design process, human factors, user experience design etc. The best answer for each question will be awarded! So come prepared for the Usability Quiz!

Quiz Coordinators

Ganesh Gaikwad, Principal Human Factors Engineer, Symantec, Pune
Atul Manohar, Lead User Experience Management Practice , Satyam Computer Services , Ltd. Pune
Nagesh Susarla, Manager / Principal UI Designer, Symantec Pune
Shashank Deshpande, Director , Clarice Technologies , Pune.

Panel Discussion on ‘Multi-disciplinary Perspectives of Usability’

Whose property is it anyway? Engineering, Design, Management, Psychology, Ergonomics ?
It is an interactive deliberation between panelists and participants to understand the difficulties faced by those who aspire to practice usability. Following panelists will represent different domain perspectives of usability.

Panel Moderator :
Dr. Dinesh Katre, Group Head- Human Centred Design and Computing, C-DAC, Pune

Panelists :
Dr. Pradeep Yammiyavar, DoD, IIT, Guwahati - Psychology
Dr. Neela Rajhans, Professor, College of Engineering, Pune -Ergonomics
Prof. Pradeep Pendse, Dean IT/Business Design , Welingkar Institute, Mumbai. -Management
Prof. Aniruddha Joshi , Associate Professor , IDC , IIT , Mumbai. -Design
Mr. Sameer Chabukswar, Head, Usability Engineering, Persistent Systems Ltd. Pune -Engineering

Details - Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering

Normally, we at PuneTech do not feature information about paid workshops, trainings, or conferences. But every once in a while, an event comes along which appear to have exceptional technical content, which in our subjective opinion makes it worth the money. The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, 2008, hosted by Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, is one such event, where the impressive list of speakers, and the detailed schedule makes us feel that this could be a good event to attend. (Please note: PuneTech is a purely non-commercial website and does not take any considerations (monetary or otherwise) for any of the content on the site. Decision to feature content on the site is made by the editors purely on the basis of interestingness and technical content.)

Broad themes of the conference:

Offshore Usability
Cross-cultural aspects, remote usability methods and tools, challenges in user requirements research, etc.

Usability to Bridge the Digital Divide
Designing ICT products and applications for rural users, such as e-governance, e-learning, localization of user interface.

Usability Engineering
Institutionalisation, processes & practices, multidisciplinary dimensions, best usability practice, impact of adaptation of user centred design approach in SDLC process and project management, agile process, interaction design and client architecture, internationalisation of user interface, etc.

User Experience Design for New Media
Web, Mobile, PDA, Touch-screen, new interaction models, interaction design for development, etc.

User Experience Research
Tying user experience to strategic business innovation objectives, UX methods and research approaches for emerging markets with unique technology adoption curves, user experience innovations for Indian consumer and enterprise products, next generation user-driven technologies, etc.

Multidisciplinary Challenges of HCI in Education
Fusion of diverse disciplines in the syllabus of Human-Computer Interaction, user experience design thinking into the design / engineering / management curriculum, etc.

If you are not familiar with Usability, or not convinced as to why it is such a vitally important field of study, check out past PuneTech articles on usability.

Earlier, we published a list of free web services that a company can use to better run their business. However, tools do not really make or break a company. Having the right attitude, and making the right decisions at the right time is much more important. If you are a startup founder, it is not necessary that you learn everything from your mistakes at the school of hard knocks. You can try to benefit from the experiences of countless others who have learnt from their own successes and failures, and have survived to write blog posts about them. 

To educate you, Sukshma.net (the blog of Santosh and Anjali, founders of Bookeazy and Lipikaar) have put together this list of articles and books that they found useful in their own journey. Here is a full list, shamelessly plagiarized from there, (to save my lazy readers from one extra click, I hope they don’t mind):

Think Big!

• The pmarca guide to startups Part 1 and Part 2.
• What is your Primary Motivator?
• Failing Cheaper - Redeye VC.

1st Month: Bullet-proof your idea.

• Build a bullet proof Startup - Business 2.0.
• What’s in a name? - Found + Read
• Naming your startup.
• Evaluate a Product Idea - Evan William (Blogger, Twitter Founder).
• Clarify your Story (Internet Businesses).

2nd Month: Raise Money, or scrape some together.

• How to fund a Startup - Paul Graham.
• The art of Bootstrapping (an excellent article) - “Bootstrapping by Definition”, Vijay Anand.
• The art of Bootstrapping - Guy Kawasaki.
• 101 Unconventional Ways to Raise Money.

3rd Month: Define your value proposition.

• Marketing Myopia - Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business Review Classics. (pdf)
• The Fundamentals of Customer Value.
• Getting customers to pay - The Penny Gap, Redeye VC.
• Pmarca Guide to startups - The only thing that matters (is the market).
• You need a strategy map.
• The Consumer Technology 3 Act Play (Distribution, Product, Branding).
• Positioning Products and Services Accurately - Edward M. Gurowitz Ph.D.

4th Month: Iterative Innovation.

• (Customer) Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue(find the slides here).
• The application of Social Media to Web Strategy.
• The cluetrain manifesto.

5th Month: Advertising.

• Public Relations Secrets (TechCrunch).

7th Month: Momentum

• 7 months in to my 2nd stint as Startup CEO - Jason Goldberg.

9th Month: Profit for sustainability.

• The Ugly Adolescent Stage (when you consume more than you produce).
• More on Cash at this stage.
• The Margin Manifesto, part 1 and part 2.
• Media Business Models - Chris Anderson (The Long Tail).

Raising serious money from Professional Investors/Venture Capitalists.

• Build your own Cap Table.
• Term Sheet Hacks - Get a Great Deal.
• What does a Series A term sheet look like?
• Should I use debt or equity?
• How much equity can I give away (Paul Graham)?
• What does a convertible note look like?
• How much funding is too much (or too little)? - pmarca.
• When the VC’s say no - pmarca.
• But I don’t know any VC’s - pmarca.
• What value do VC’s add (or take away) - StartupBoy?
• What is liquidation preference? (get a spreadsheet on computing scenarios here).
• More on VC Term Sheets and Liquidation Preference.
• Term Sheet Glossary - GigaOm.
• Strategic Corporate Investments.
• Are convertible notes valid in India?
• Is Google’s YouTube worth $4.9B? - A nice analysis justifying the current YouTube Valuation.
• Financial Models for Startups. Where projections meet reality.

Master your disruptive contribution.

• The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Managing up and down.

• The best business books of all time.
• The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker.
• Effective Leaders Follow these Eight Practices - Peter Drucker.

Other books worth reading.

• The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.
• Founders at work: Stories of startup’s Early Days.
• Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap …and others don’t.
• What the CEO wants you to know - Ram Charan.
• Innovator’s Dilemma - Clayton M. Christensen.

The Economics of Media and E-Commerce businesses.

• 3 ways to build an E-Commerce business with $500M in revenue - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• 3 ways to build an online Media business to $50M in revenue - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• More on building an online Media business - Jeremy Liew of LightSpeed Ventures.
• USA! USA! USA! We’re number one (in online advertising markets) - Jeremy Liew.

I need inspiration. I need to know this has happened to others. It’s never too late to start over.

Read Founders@Work. Just turn to any story, any page and start reading. This is not to be read in one go, it’s most useful when you think you’re a complete idiot. Also, don’t forget to read Guy Kawasaki’s list of best pages from the book. Make your own list. We both have our list that we’ll put on the blog someday.

Startup Resources from around the web.

• Purdue Entrepreneurship Certificate Program Wiki.
• The Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner - eCorner.
• Garage Technology Ventures - Reference Library for Small Business’.
• The Startup Kit - I; Proto.in blog.
• Free Advice for Software Startups - Dharmesh Shah.
• Technology and Business Discussions.

Remember to check the source, as they are promising to keep updating that list based on your suggestions (leave a comment).

Pune-based Harbinger group, creator of the Raptivity e-learning software, has just won an award from the “Chief Learning Officer” magazine for ”Clinical Challenge,” an innovative online learning program that it created with Philips Healthcare, designed to pioneer the use of gaming in healthcare education. This program tries to combine entertainment with challenge to test knowledge on complex clinical subjects. 

From the press release:

As can be seen on the Philips Learning Center web site www.theonlinelearningcenter.com, complex subjects such as anatomy, physiology, pathology and imaging specific challenges have been made engaging and interesting using a variety of game formats including popular TV game shows, common board games, challenging brainteasers, immersive simulation games and so forth. The tools have also provided a means to present advanced clinical images in a format that allows for exploration via drag and drop, hot spots and auto-solve techniques. 

Use of games for learning appears to be one of the areas that Raptivity is focusing on, earlier having partnered with a US non-profit organization, the Entomological Foundation, to design an develop games based online learning software products targeted towards 3rd and 4th grade children in the US. The games teach the children about “the exciting world of insects and their role in our environment.”

The main features of Raptivity:

• Leverage Raptivity library of pre-built interactions based on best practices in instructional design.
• Completely customize each interaction.
• Create a single Flash File for your eLearning interactivity.
• Successfully track completion status, score and responses for each interactivity.
• Packages that allow easy creation of 3D content, learning games, converting videos to interactive videos, and simulations

Harbinger are also the creators of Flockpod, a web-service that allows web publishers to create a space on their webpage where users can interact with each other right on-the-spot, without leaving the page.

What: A basic course on Linux conducted by Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG)

When: Monday, 6th October. 4pm to 6pm. 

Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), 7th floor, Atur Center, Model Colony, Pune, India (Map)

Registration and Fees: The event is free for all. No registration required.

Details
This is a very basic GNU/Linux course. The aim is to provide some hands on experience to the user so as to make him aware of all the different features and flavors of a GNU/Linux OS. At the end of the course, a user should be able to connect to and browse the internet, send receive mails, create rich text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, administer personal system etc. all using a GNU/Linux system and various free software available on the net.

Check out the detailed syllabus for this course.

Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune, is running Endeavor 2008, a business plan competition (open only to students). So if you are a student with an interesting idea looking to get visibility, guidance, and possibly lots of money, hurry, because the last date to submit entries is 24th August.

Details:

“SIBM Endeavour 2008″ provides a platform for budding entrepreneurs with
viable Business Plans to meet seed funds and venture capitalists through the
“SIBM Endeavour Business Plan” contest. This contest is a 3 month long
business plan contest with 4 rounds. Every participating team can expect to
gain from the contest. Individual mentorship, Elevator Pitch for top 40
b-plans, cash prizes, and above all, funding of upto Rs. 10 Million (from Seed
Fund Advisors Pvt. Ltd.).

Our panelists for this contest are:

• IndiaCo Ventures Capital Ltd.
• NEA-IndoUS Venture Capitals
• SEED FUND Pvt. Ltd.
• NEN Online

Last date for Executive Summary: 24th August - 2008

Cash Prizes:
1st Prize: Rs. 2,00,000
2nd Prize: Rs. 85,000

For registration: http://www.sibm.edu/endeavour08

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The Economic Times reports that a new animation school modeled on the gurukul system is coming up in Pune soon.

The unique venture, called Seamless Education Academy or SeamEdu, will be run by Saurabh Gadgil, a jeweller, and aims to cater to the fast growing animation industry’s huge demand for trained personnel.

“There is a huge demand for talented animators in the country - around 200,000 in a couple of years. So we thought this was a very good business idea,” said Gadgil, a major stakeholder in the venture.

[...]

To be launched Sep 30, the school has acquired two animation studios in the city, including Toolbox Animation Studio run by Chetan Deshmukh who worked for the Hollywood blockbuster “Chicago”. The academy expects to enrol about 2,000 students by next year.

The University of Pune has now created a website where college and university level researchers may submit research proposals online to get them funded by UoP, which has earmarked Rs. 8 crore for this purpose.

Since 2006, the UoP introduced the scheme to encourage college and varsity-level research projects by teachers and students. The university provides Rs 50,000 to Rs 3.5 lakh for each project, depending upon the proposal.

Source: Now submit your research papers online (The Times of India).