Monthly Archives: March 2008

Pune OpenCoffee Club Meeting – 4th April (for Startups)

If you are a Pune-based entrepreneur (or think you’d like to be an entrepreneur someday), consider joining the Pune OpenCoffee Club. There is a meeting of the POCC on Friday. Main agenda is for the members to get to know each other. Also a couple of VCs will be attending – they also want to get to know Pune entrepreneurs.

Details from Anjali Gupta (anjali at NOSPAM bookeazy dot com):

Dear Pune OpenCoffee members,

Thank you for your enthusiastic response in bootstrapping the Club. In the last few weeks over 50 members and 20 startups have joined POCC on http://punestartups.ning.com

Who’s here?
Pringoo, Komli, Mithi, Mangospring, Zmanda, 42, ThinkingSpace, TechZemplary, Coriolis, Josh Software, Niyuj, Indyvation, Mobikon, 5 Colors, Business Gateway, Spring Computing, TastyKhana, Lipikaar, and BookEazy.

We’ve planned our first networking meetup on 4th April, 5:30pm – 7.30pm (Friday) at BookEazy.

We’ve also invited a few guests who have expressed interest in meeting POCC entrepreneurs at the meetup.
– Mukul Singhal, Canaan Partners
– Niren Shah, Norwest Venture Partners
– Startup mentors and incubators will also be attending

Do invite entrepreneurs, founders, investors/advisers or those interested in starting up or joining startups.

For event details and directions to the venue, please visit:
look here

Don’t forget to confirm your participation here to help us plan:
RSVP link: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/428897/
RSVP over email: anjali at NOSPAM bookeazy dot com

Feel free to add your feedback and comments on the POCC forums.

Look forward to meeting everyone.

Best regards,
Anjali

Pune needs more of a tech “community”. So please join.

Building EKA – The world’s fastest privately funded supercomputer

Eka, built by CRL, Pune is the world’s 4th fastest supercomputer, and the fastest one that didn’t use government funding. This is the same supercomputer referenced in Yahoo!’s recent announcement about cloud computing research at the Hadoop Summit. This article describes some of the technical details of Eka’s design and implementation. It is based on a presentation by the Eka architects conducted by CSI Pune and MCCIA Pune.

Interconnect architecture

The most important decision in building a massively parallel supercomputer is the design of how the different nodes (i.e. processors) of the system are connected together. If all nodes are connected to each other, parallel applications scale really well (linear speedup), because communication between nodes is direct and has no bottlenecks. But unfortunately, building larger and larger such systems (i.e. ones with more and more nodes) becomes increasingly difficult and expensive because the complexity of the interconnect increases as n2. To avoid this, supercomputers have typically used sparse interconnect topologies like Star, Ring, Torus (e.g. IBM’s Blue Gene/L), or hypercube (Cray). These are more scalable as far as building the interconnect for really large numbers of nodes is concerned. However, the downside is that nodes are not directly connected to each other and messages have to go through multiple hops before reaching the destination. Here, unless the applications are designed very carefully to reduce message exchanges between different nodes (especially those that are not directly connected to each other), the interconnect becomes a bottleneck for application scaling.

In contrast to those systems, Eka uses an interconnect designed using concepts from projective geometry. The details of the interconnect are beyond the scope of this article. (Translation: I did not understand the really complex mathematics that goes on in those papers. Suffice it to say that before they are done, fairly obscure branches of mathematics get involved. However, one of these days, I am hoping to write a fun little article on how a cute little mathematical concept called Perfect Difference Sets (first described in 1938) plays an important role in designing supercomputer interconnects over 50 years later. Motivated readers are encouraged to try and see the connection.)

To simplify – Eka uses an interconnect based on Projective Geometry concepts. This interconnect gives linear speedup for applications but the complexity of building the interconnect increases only near-linearly.

The upshot of this is that to achieve a given application speed (i.e. number of Teraflops), Eka ends up using fewer nodes than its compatriots. This means it that it costs less and uses less power, both of which are major problems that need to be tackled in designing a supercomputer.

Handling Failures

A computer that includes 1000s of processors, 1000s of disks, and 1000s of network elements soon finds itself on the wrong side of the law of probability as far as failures are concerned. If one component of a system has a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 10000 hours, and the system has 3000 components, then you can start expecting things to fail once every 10 hours. (I know that the math in that sentence is probably not accurate, but ease of understanding trumps accuracy in most cases.)

If an application is running on 500 nodes, and has been running for the last 20 hours, and one of the nodes fails, the entire application has to be restarted from scratch. And this happens often, especially before an important deadline.

A simple solution is to save the state of the entire application every 15 minutes. This is called checkpointing. When there is a failure, the system is restarted from the last checkpoint and hence ends up losing only 15 minutes of work. While this works well enough, it can get prohibitively expensive. If you spend 5 minutes out of every 15 minutes in checkpointing your application, then you’ve effectively reduced the capacity of your supercomputer by 33%. (Another way of saying the same thing is that you’ve increased your budget by 50%.)

The projective geometry architecture also allows for a way to partition the compute nodes in such a way that checkpointing and status saving can be done only for a subset of the nodes involved. The whole system need not be reset in case of a failure – only the related subset. In fact, with the projective geometry architecture, this can be done in a provably optimal manner. This results in improved efficiency. Checkpoints are much cheaper/faster, and hence can be taken more frequently. This means that the system can handle failures much better.

Again, I don’t understand the details of how projective geometry helps in this – if someone can explain that easily in a paragraph or two, please drop me a note.

The infrastructure

The actual supercomputer was built in just 6 weeks. However, other aspects took much longer. It took an year of convincing to get the project funded. And another year to build the physical building and the rest of the infrastructure. Eka uses

  • 2.5MW of electricity
  • 400ton cooling capacity
  • 10km of electrical cabling
  • 10km of ethernet cabling
  • 15km of infiniband cabling

The computing infrastructure itself consists of:

  • 1800 blades, 4 cores each. 3Ghz for each core.
  • HP SFS clusters
  • 28TB memory
  • 80TB storage. Simple SATA disks. 5.2Gbps throughput.
  • Lustre distributed file-system
  • 20Gbps infiniband DDR. Eka was on the cutting edge of Infiniband technology. They sourced their infiniband hardware from an Israeli company and were amongst the first users of their releases – including beta, and even alpha quality stuff.
  • Multiple Gigabit ethernets
  • Linux is the underlying OS. Any Linux will work – RedHat, SuSe, your favorite distribution.

Its the software, stupid!

One of the principles of the Eka project is to be the one-stop shop for tackling problems that require huge amounts of computational powers. Their tagline for this project has been: from atoms to applications. They want to ensure that the project takes care of everything for their target users, from the hardware all the way up to the application. This meant that they had to work on:

  • High speed low latency interconnect research
  • System architecture research
  • System software research – compilers etc.
  • Mathematical library development
  • Large scientific problem solving.
  • Application porting, optimization and development.

Each of the bullet items above is a non-trivial bit of work. Take for example “Mathematical library development.” Since they came up with a novel architecture for the interconnect for Eka, all parallel algorithms that run on Eka also have to be adapted to work well with the architecture. To get the maximum performance out of your supercomputer, you have to rewrite all your algorithms to take advantages of the strengths of your interconnect design while avoiding the weaknesses. Requiring users to understand and code for such things has always been the bane of supercomputing research. Instead, the Eka team has gone about providing mathematical libraries of the important functions that are needed by applications specifically tailored to the Eka architecture. This means that people who have existing applications can run them on Eka without major modifications.

Applications

Of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, Eka is the only system that was fully privately funded. All other systems used government money, so all of them are for captive use. This means that Eka is the only system in the top 10 that is available for commercial use without strings attached.

There are various traditional applications of HPC (high-performance computing) (which is what Eka is mainly targeted towards):

  • Aerodynamics (Aircraft design). Crash testing (Automobile design)
  • Biology – drug design, genomics
  • Environment – global climate, ground water
  • Applied physics – radiation transport, supernovae, simulate exploding galaxies.
  • Lasers and Energy – combustion, ICF
  • Neurobiology – simulating the brain

But as businesses go global and start dealing with huge quantities of data, it is believed that Eka-like capabilities will soon be needed to tackle these business needs:

  • Integrated worldwide supply chain management
  • Large scale data mining – business intelligence
  • Various recognition problems – speech recognition, machine vision
  • Video surveillance, e-mail scanning
  • Digital media creation – rendering; cartoons, animation

But that is not the only output the Tatas expect from their investment (of $30 million). They are also hoping to tap the expertise gained during this process for consulting and services:

  • Consultancy: Need & Gap Analysis and Proposal Creation
  • Technology: Architecture & Design & Planning of high performance systems
  • Execution: Implement, Test and Commissioning of high performance system
  • Post sales: HPC managed services, Operations Optimization, Migration Services
  • Storage: Large scale data management (including archives, backups and tapes), Security and Business Continuity
  • Visualization: Scalable visualization of large amounts of data

and more…

This article is based on a presentation given by Dr. Sunil Sherlekar, Dr. Rajendra Lagu, and N. Seetha Rama Krishna, of CRL, Pune, who built Eka. For details of their background, see here. However, note that I’ve filled in gaps in my notes with my own conjectures, so errors in the article, if any, should be attributed to me.

News in Brief: VMWare, QLogic to invest; Symantec interviews own employees; Aar-em lights up villages

VMWare to invest $100 Million in India

VMware Inc. announced today that it plans to invest more than $100 million in India by 2010, partly to double its research and development workforce in that country to more than 1,000 employees. VMWare currently has R&D centers in Bangalore and Pune. While a lion’s share of the new investment will go to Bangalore, some of it will also be used to expand VMWare’s Pune facility.

Source: VMWare Press Release

QLogic announces Development Lab in Pune

QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced the opening of the QLogic International Development Lab (QIDL) in the heart of Pune, India. QLogic is hiring engineers now for the QIDL, located in the ICC Trade Towers off Senapati Bapat Road. According to their press release the QIDL development team is expected to help “design the future” of networking for storage and HPC. For details, contact hr-india@qlogic.com.

Source: TechNewsRelease.

Symantec Pune conducts interviews of own employees

It is common practice to conduct exit interviews of employees leaving a company to find out why they are leaving and thus identifying weaknesses of an organization. Symantec, Pune is turning the concept on its head by conducting interviews of employees who have been with the company for a long time, and focusing on the strengths of the organization that made them stay back.

After selecting leaders from this group of Symantec loyalists, their example and achievements were put before the others on the company intranet. “This benefited us. Now these leaders have not only got recognition for their extra-efficiency, it has also encouraged others to see whether they can be incorporated in this list of leaders,” says Abhay Valsangkar, Symantec India’s head of HR.

Source: Sify Business.

Aar-em Electronics Pvt. Ltd. a Pune based firm known for its Champion brand of Uninterruptible Power Supplies now has entered the field of providing Uninterruptible light source for villages after sunset by providing them lights and other utilities powered by solar energy.

“MOHRI” a village situated at 100 kms from Pune City Maharashtra, India having 27 houses and a population of 160 of which 75 are children today boasts of having electricity which has been provided by Aar-em Electronics Pvt. Ltd. Where once life practically came to a standstill at sundown are now abuzz with activities. The solar-based devices have illuminated the villagers’ houses like never before- kerosene lamps are a thing of the past now. Even, infotainment is beamed to them through solar-powered television sets.

Aar-em is offering a system which typically contains a roof-installed solar PV module, storage battery, charge controller, interior wiring, and switches and fixtures with the capacity to power two- low-wattage high power LED modules.

Source: Business Wire India

Yahoo and CRL (EKA) to collaborate on cloud computing research

(Link courtesy Amit Paranjape via e-mail)

Yahoo and CRL have just announced that they will collaborate on research into cloud computing. I believe this announcement is essentially about Yahoo’s use of Hadoop on CRL’s EKA supercomputer.

This Yahoo!/CRL announcement comes on the eve of the first ever Hadoop Summit. Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. In Feb 2008, Yahoo announced that its Search Webmap application has been converted to a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

CRL’s EKA supercomputer is a Hewlett-Packard based system with 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector that is available for use on commercial terms.

This announcement should also increase the interest in attending the presentation on EKA to be held here (i.e. in Pune) in a few days (Thursday, 27th March). The talk promises to be very interesting, especially given the background of speakers Dr. Lagu and Dr. Sherlekar (who used to be profs in IIT-B amongst other things). Details.

Understanding RPO and RTO in backups

This post is based on an article posted by Jaspreet Singh on the Druvaa Blog. Druvaa is a Pune-based startup based on Continuous data protection (CDP) technology.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovey Time Objective (RTO) are some of the most important parameters of a disaster recovery or data protection plan. These objectives guide the enterprises in choosing an optimal data backup (or rather restore) plan.

RPO – Recovery Point Objective (wikipedia)

“Recovery Point Objective (RPO) describes the amount of data lost – measured in time. Example: After an outage, if the last available good copy of data was from 18 hours ago, then the RPO would be 18 hours.”

In other words it is the answer to the question – Up to what point in time can the data be recovered ?.

RTO – Recovery Time Objectives (wikipedia)

“The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity.

[…]

It should be noted that the RTO attaches to the business process and not the resources required to support the process.”

In another words it is the answer to the question – How much time did you take to recover after notification of a business process disruption ?

The RTO/RPO and the results of the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) in its entirety provide the basis for identifying and analyzing viable strategies for inclusion in the business continuity plan. Viable strategy options would include any which would enable resumption of a business process in a time frame at or near the RTO/RPO. This would include alternate or manual workaround procedures and would not necessarily require computer systems to meet the objectives.

There is always a gap between the actuals (RTA/RPA) and objectives introduced by various manual and automated steps to bring the business application up. These actuals can only be exposed by disaster and business disruption rehearsals.

Some Examples –

Traditional Backups

In traditional tape backups, if your backup plan takes 2 hours for a scheduled backup at 0600 hours and 1800 hours, then a primary site failure at 1400 hrs would leave you with an option of restoring from the 0600 hrs backup which means RPA of 8 hours and 2 hours RTA.

Continuous Replication

Replication provides higher RPO guarantees as the target system contains a mirrored image of the source. The RPA values depend upon how fast the changes are applied and if the replication is synchronous or asynchronous. RPO is dependent only on how soon the data on target/replicated site can be made available to the application.

About Druvaa Replicator

Druvaa Replicator is a Continuous Data Protection and Replication (CDP-R) product which near-synchronously and non-disruptively replicates changes on production sever to target site and provides point-in-time snapshots for instant data access.

The partial synchronous replication ensures that the data is written to a local or remote cache (caching server) before its application can write locally. This ensures up to 5 sec RPO guarantees . CDP technology (still beta) enables up to 1024 snapshots (beta) at that target storage which helps the admin to access current or any past point-in-time consistent image of data instantly, ensuring under 2 sec RTO.

More Information – http://www.druvaa.com/products/replicator/

Upcoming Event: Seminar on CRL’s Supercomputer (4th fastest in the world)

A presentation on CRL’s EKA supercomputer will be held next Thursday evening. Considering that it is one of the fastest supercomputer in the world, and considering the qualifications of the speakers (see below), it promises to be an interesting talk.

Details

When: 27th March 2008, 6.30 to 8 pm.
Where: MCCIA, Crossword Building 5th Floor, Hall 4 & 5, Senapati Bapat Road
Price: No entry fee.

CRL’s EKA Supercomputer – Architecture and Applications

Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) has recently designed and built a high performance computer (HPC) system called EKA (Sanskrit word for “one”) which has been rated fourth fastest in the world and fastest in Asia. This rating was announced in the recent Supercomputing 2007 conference held in Reno, Nevada in USA. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, this is the only computer funded by private sector and is available for usage on commercial terms. CRL is a fully owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited. The Tata group has always contributed to scientific research in India and EKA will strengthen this cause with appropriate public-private partnerships.

The senior team from CRL will cover salient aspects of EKA — architecture and applications.

About the Speaker – Dr. Rajendra Lagu

Education
B.Tech, Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, 1978, M.Tech, Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay 1981, Ph.D., University of Florida, Gainesville, USA, 1985

Experience

  • Member of Technical Staff, Computational Research Labs, Pune, June 2006-present
  • Project Director, Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), IIT Bombay, June 2000-May 2006
  • Adjunct Professor, School of Management, IIT Bombay, June 2000-May 2006
  • Group Software Manager, Mastek Limited, January 1995-May 2000
  • Assistant Professor, IIT Bombay, June 1986-May 1990

About the Speaker – Dr. Sunil Dattatraya Sherlekar

Education

  • B. Tech (Elect. Engg.), I.I.T Bombay, April 1978
  • M. Tech (Computer Sc. & Engg.), I.I.T Bombay, July 1982.
  • Ph.D., I.I.T. Bombay, Sept . 1987

Experience

  • Larsen & Toubro Ltd., Graduate Engineer Trainee, June 1978 – Nov 1978.
  • CSRE, I.I.T. Bombay, Sr.Research Asst, Dec 1978 – July 1979.
  • Computer Centre, I.I.T Bombay, Sep, 1979 – Oct 1982.
  • Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Head, Embedded Systems ( R& D), June 2002 – date.

Awards

  • Fellowship of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, 2007
  • IEEE Test Technology Committee award for contributions to the Asian activities of the committee.
  • UNESCO / ROSTSCA award for young scientists for contribution to the field of Computer Sc. & Informatics, 1989.

About the Speaker – Mr. N. Seetha Rama Krishna

Education
B.E (ECE), 1986, MBA (Dual) Indira Institute, Pune

Experience
21+ years handling Complex IT infrastructure & Data Centre solutions to verticals like:

  • Space, Defense, Research, Academic
  • Energy, Industry, Public Sector, Finance.
  • E – Governance (Govt), Medical Informatics.
  • Executed several turnkey & consultancy projects in all above mentioned areas.
  • Currently working with Computational Research Laboratories Ltd (Wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons) from May 07.
  • Earlier was working with C – DAC.

Other Upcoming Events: Startup Lunch, OpenCoffee Club and VC Circle.

LordsOfOdds – Betting on Prediction Markets

LordsOfOdds is a startup based on the concept of prediction markets. It enables users to “bet” on the outcome of Indian events in sports, politics or entertainment. But betting is just a small part of it; the prediction market concept has a far greater potential as a source of information. Did you know that Rahul Gandhi has a 44% chance of becoming the congress prime mininsterial candidate?

What is a prediction market

A prediction market is like a stock market, except that instead of buying or selling stocks in a company, you are buying or selling “stocks” in a prediction. The prediction can be something like “India will win more than 3 gold medals at the 2008 Olympics”. At the end of the 2008 Olympics, if India actually wins 3 or more medals, each stock will pay out a dividend of 100 units. Otherwise, you get 0 units. After this point, this particular stock ceases to exist.

However, before the 2008 Olympics, nobody knows for sure whether India will win 3 medals or not. Hence, it is not clear whether the price of the stock will be 100 units or 0 units. Somebody who thinks that the probability of the prediction coming true is about 30%, should be willing to pay about 30 units for each stock. Someone else who thinks that the probability is 60% should be willing to pay 60 units for each stock. And the guy who bought at 30 units should be happy to sell it to the guy who is willing to pay 60.

As new information becomes available, the price goes up or down. If Anju Bobby George gets injured, the probability of winning 3 medals goes down and the stock will fall. If KPS Gill is removed as IHF chief, the stock will probably go up.

LordsOfOdds has a really nice, detailed example if you want to understand it better.

Why bother?

At the very least, the game can be a lot of fun once you get hooked.

But there is more. Prediction markets are actually useful to get an idea of what the crowd thinks of the probability of success of any prediction. (The current stock price of the prediction directly gives the predicted success percentage.) Combine this with research that says that the average wisdom of the crowds is as good as that of highly-paid experts, and you can suddenly see how a prediction market is a great tool for getting “expert opinion” on any topic.

This has been found to be rather useful in the context of large corporations. Anybody who has worked in one, can attest to the fact that communication and information flow are rather pathetic and nobody really has an idea of what is going on. Enter prediction markets. They actually become sneaky way of getting information out of the employees while they think they are playing a fun game.

HP started using prediction markets internally in sales forecasting. Now they use prediction markets in several business units. Intel uses them in relation to manufacturing capacity. Google uses them to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. Microsoft uses it to predict number of bugs in a software package. GE uses it to generate new product ideas from employees. (Sources: wikipedia, and LordsOfOdds)

LordsOfOdds – What’s there now

Currently, LordsOfOdds is being pitched more as an online betting site. You pick favorites in sports events (“Sachin Tendulkar will be man of the match for the first India-South Africa Test” is trading at 23.5), or entertainment (“The movie Race will be a hit” is trading at 34.4), or politics (“Rahul Gandhi to be Congress Prime Ministerial candidate” is trading at 44).

And since betting is illegal in India, the site operates using a virtual currency (“Loots”). And the only thing players get out of the exercise is bragging rights. But stay tuned, because they are building a prize inventory.

LordsOfOdds – The future

I am hoping to get answers from the founders on the following questions:

  • In the future, are you planning on using the predictions that your market produces in some way?
  • What is your monetization strategy?

The answers to these should be interesting.

LordsOfOdds – The founders

Rajesh Kallidumbil who was working in London, and Siddhartha Saha who was in Hyderabad debated the idea for over a month on Google Talk and then decided to start it up in Pune. Hariharan K who has a tremendous passion for Sports, decided that his job as an Investment Banking analyst wasn’t half as interesting as LordsOfOdds and joined the team.

Read the company blog if you want to follow their progress. LordsOfOdds has also been covered by StartupDunia.

Tech Community Building: Startup Lunch, OpenCoffee Club and Bloggers Meet

Startup Lunch, Pune

[A StartupLunch] is roughly the same as the SpeedDating concept. The startup founders are seated on one side and the candidates get to say hello and have a quick conversation to talk about what the background of the founder is, why he started the company and what sort of person he is looking for, while asking questions to the candidate about the reason to join a startup and what his/her passions are and ten minutes later the same process continues with the next founder. Within an hour, you would have met/spoken to most of the startups, and by the end of the day would know whom to get in touch with for your first/next job.

Something like this would be really useful, especially in Pune, because most job seekers are not aware of the startups that exist in the area, and where to find them. The Startup Lunch is an attempt at fixing this.

More details

Register here if you are looking for a job. And register here if you are a startup. Jaspreet Singh (jaspreet.singh _at_ druvaa.com) from Druvaa has taken the lead in organizing this in Pune.

VC Circle Growth Capital Forum

VC Circle is holding a day long event targeted towards the venture capital, capital investments and entrepreneural community. Basically, companies seeking funds to grow, and people with money who are willing to give it out.
Snapshot of the Event
Venue: Le Meridien, Pune
Date: April 4, 2008
Time: 10.30 am-5.30 pm
Registration fee per attendant: Rs 3,000 inclusive of all taxes.

The confirmed list of speakers:
George Thomas, Partner, India Value Fund

Nikhil Khattau, MD, Mayfield Fund
Srini Vudayagiri, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Cyrus Driver, MD, Helix Investments
Gaurav Mathur, MD, India Equity Partners
Deep Kalra, CEO, MakeMyTrip
Niren Shah, MD, Norwest Venture Partners

Kartik Parija, MD, Zephyr Peacock
Shantanu Surpure, Managing Advocate, Sandhill India Advisors
Subba Rao, Chairman, Robo Silicon
Abizer Diwanji, Executive Director, KPMG
Shiraz Bhugwadia, Director, o3 Capital Partners
Kuntal Shah, Co-Founder, Axis Holdings

More details

Pune OpenCoffee Club

The Pune OpenCoffee Club is an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors, advisor’s, (and anyone else) in a totally informal setting.nurture the startup eco-system through Community participation

Pune OpenCoffee Club was started by Santosh Dawara, co-founder of Bookeazy.

If you are interested, please sign up

Bloggers Meet

Pune Bloggers Meet organized by Vineet in conjunction with IndiBlogger and Microsoft last weekend was attended by over 50 people.

There was quite a diverse crowd:

There are lots of interesting and enthusiastic people in Pune.