Monthly Archives: September 2008

Stop terrorists from hacking into your company computers with AirTight networks?

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AirTight Logo

In a report titled “Wi-Fi networks extremely vulnerable to terror attacks,” the Economic Times points out that:

 

The recent incident involving US national Kenneth Haywood, whose Internet Protocol (IP) address was allegedly used to send the terror e-mail prior to the Ahmedabad serial blasts, should be regarded as a wake up call. While this incident of wireless hacking took security agencies by surprise, lakhs of individuals and companies are actually exposed to a similar risk. Incidents of such hacking are common, but go unreported since they may not have such grave implications.

The police version of the Haywood incident, as reported in the newspapers, is that suspected criminals allegedly hacked into the Wi-Fi network of his laptop and used it to send the terror e-mail. Prior to this hacking, Mr Haywood is said to have complained of high browsing bills. If this is to be believed, then one possibility is that Haywoood may have left his access point open. The suspected terrorist could then have hooked on to this access point and sent the email, which then showed Haywood’s IP address as the originator. This is regarded, in hacking terminology, as stealing of bandwidth while impersonating Haywood.

Wi-Fi hacking is an even bigger a problem for companies that have many employees who take their laptops all over the place and might come back infected, or who have a number of access points that can be easy targets if not secured properly. This is the market that Pune-based AirTight Networks is going after:

Hemant Chaskar, Airtight’s technology director, explained: “Companies earlier used firewalls, which prevented or regulated data access between internal systems and the external world. With the adoption of wireless, firewalls can be bypassed, exposing internal systems to free external access. External devices can access internal enterprise networks, while internal devices can also connect to networks outside the company’s premises in the absence of adequate security measures.

There are a few different capabilities that a company needs to be able to tackle this threat. First, being able to detect that wireless intrusion is happening. Second, being able to phyisically (i.e. goegraphically) locate exactly where the threat is coming from. Third, being able to do something about it. And finally, for the sake of compliance with government laws, being able to generate appropriate reports proving that you took all the appropriate steps to keep your company’s data secure from hackers. This last one is required whether you are worried about hackers or not, and is a huge pain.

AirTight provides all these facilities and then goes one step further, which makes it unique. At $20000 a pop, most small companies would balk at the price of all the infrastructure required for achieving all this. So AirTight provides WiFi security as an online service – you simply install a few sensors in your company. Everything else is on AirTight’s servers. So you just have to pay a small monthly fee, as low as $60 per month. And you get full security from wi-fi hacking, and you keep the government happy with nice compliance reports.

For a more details of AirTight’s products, see the PuneTech wiki profile of AirTight.

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Pune buzzing with tech activity this weekend (20 Sept)

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This is going to be a very active weekend for tech activities in Pune. The big gorilla is of course, PHPCamp, the day long unconference for PHP enthusiasts on Saturday. With 700+ registrations from all over India (and indeed from other countries too), it promises to be a huge event even if just one third of the participants show up. Very impressive for a free event organized by volunteers in their free time. And if the enthusiasm seen at previous barcamps is any indication, the energy at this event will be awesome. This is a day long event at Persistent Systems near Null stop. Further event details are here.

If PHP is not your cup of tea, there are a couple of other events happening in parallel during the day. Dr. Neeran Karnik, a technical directory with Symantec Research Labs, Pune, will give a seminar on how to write good research papers at PICT. I’ve worked with Neeran for many years now, and he is good – both, as a researcher, and also as a speaker. If you have any intentions of doing research, or in general writing papers, I would say you should try to go for this one. Neeran has a PhD from the University of Minnesota, USA, and has worked with IBM Research Labs, Delhi, and Symantec Research Lab, Pune. He has been on numerous program committees of international academic conferences. He is also one of the original founders of CricInfo. This event is from 3pm to 5pm at PICT. Further details are here.

ThoughtWorks is organizing a Geek Night on Saturday afternoon, and the theme is Usability. Coming close on the heels of Pune OpenCoffee Club’s meetup on usability, this indicates that this very important field is finally getting the recognition it deserves in Pune. Abhijit Thosar, who has 20 years of experience in designing products based on emerging technologies will conduct the seminar. This event is from 2pm to 4pm at Thoughtworks, Yerwada. Further details are here.

Finally, September 20th is also Software Freedom day. But, wisely, the organizers have shifted the event to Sunday. This event will extol the virtues of free and open source software – like GNU/Linux, PHP – and is the place to go if you want to get started, or want help in any of these areas. Further details are here.

And Hemir Doshi, of IDG Ventures India, will be in Pune on Thursday and Friday, looking to meet early and early expansion stage technology and tech-enabled consumer companies. If you are interested in meeting hi, send him an email at hemir_doshi at idgvcindia dot com.

Stay in touch with all the interesting tech events happening in Pune, at the community-driven tech events calendar for Pune. Please note, it’s community driven. That means you. Please contribute. Add your events there.

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PHPCamp Pune will be huge – Sept 20

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What: PHPCamp is a barcamp for PHP enthusiasts from all over the country.
When: Saturday September 20, 2008
Where: Persistent Systems Pvt. Ltd., Plot No. 9A/12, CTS No. 12A/12, Erandwana, Near Padale Palace (Opp Sharda Center), Pune, Maharashtra 411 004

Registration: This event is free for all. Register here.
Website: http://phpcamp.org
PHPCamp is a ad-hoc gathering for PHP community. It similar to barcamp, but more focused towards PHP based web application development. This means that anyone can come to PHPCamp and participate. There is no set agenda – the agenda gets decided at the venue. If that sounds weird to you, you should read up on barcamps now.

Links

Keep up with all other interesting tech events happening in Pune at the PuneTech events calendar. Add your events there to reach a wide audience.
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How to write a research paper – Seminar on Sept 20

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What: Seminar on how to write a good research paper, by Dr. Neeran Karnik, Symantec Research Labs
When: Saturday September 20, 2008 from 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Where: Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Satara Road, Pune, Maharashtra

Registration: This even is free for all, and no registration is required
This is intended to be a basic introduction for students and faculty on how to write a good research paper.
Speakers :
Dr Neeran Karnik, Technology Director, Symantec
Dr. Arun Gaikwad, Principal PICT Pune
Prof Rajesh Ingle, Head Computer Dept.  

Some links to background material:
1. Writing a Paper –http://www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf
2. How to write a paper http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/PS/re-writing.pdf
3. How to write a great research paper-http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/giving-a-talk/writing-a-paper-slides.pdf
4. How to Read a Paper- http://www.sigcomm.org/ccr/drupal/files/p83-keshavA.pdf
5. Writing Reviews for Systems conferences- http://people.inf.ethz.ch/troscoe/pubs/review-writing.pdf
6. Science of Scientific Writing- http://www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs/sci.pdf

Keep up with all other interesting tech events happening in Pune at the PuneTech events calendar. Add your events there to reach a wide audience.
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Software Freedom Day – Sept 21

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What: Software Freedom Day – Celebrating GNU/Linux, PHP, etc.
When: Sunday September 21, 2008 from 11:00am – 3:00pm

Where: Bhaskaracharya Pratisthan
56/14, Damle Path, off Law College Road, Erandavane, Pune, 411 004.
Pune, Maharashtra

Program :
 1) Installation Demo: Fedora, Ubuntu, Open SuSE, Mandriva.
2) Install Fest: Bring your machine, we will install GNU/Linux on it.
3) Small Demo: Hands on Demo for c,php programming.

PS: Please give us your suggestions.
We want more Programs like talks, workshops.
So please come forward as speaker.
Also we want volunteers, who will help for this event.

For more information about – Software Freedom Day
http://softwarefreedomday.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Day

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Geek Night – Usability Design with Abhijit Thosar

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Update: Here is Aman King’s article on this event.

What:Geek Night – ThoughtWorks Pune is proud to host Abhijit Thosar – Usability Guru
Date/Time: Saturday, September 20, 2pm – 4pm
Venue: GF-01 & MZ-01, Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada, Pune Pune, Maharashtra 411006
Registration: This event is free for all, but please register here

About the Speaker – Abhijit Thosar

Abhijit has over 20 years experience in the design and development of products based on emerging technologies. He joined Human Factors International, India in 2000 and worked as a project director on over 50 usability projects for clients across domains. Abhijit now works for Capgemini Pune. His other interests include designing accessible systems and interfaces for members of the elderly and disabled population as well as designing research for products and services for upcoming markets. Abhijit is looking forward to an interactive session where he wants to share case studies from his experience.

About Geek Night:

As some of you may know, we at ThoughtWorks have been organizing something called a ‘Geek Night’ for some time now. A Geek Night is an informal gathering where we pick a hot technology topic and proceed to discuss it and learn from each others’ experience and perspectives. The meeting takes about two hours inclusive of eating/drinking (soft drinks only *wink*) and heckling the presenters. We generally plan it on Saturday evenings so that our peers from other organizations can join us too.

The topics for these Geek Nights may range from cutting-edge technologies like JRuby to proven open source tools like Hibernate or Spring. And sometimes we indulge in Code Jams where we get our laptops in the room and go about solving a problem and discuss our solutions till the food is over.

<h3>Related Articles</h3>

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Nominate yourself for Innovations 2009 conference

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Innovations is an yearly conference that tries to showcase the best innovations in any field in India. It is organized by the IIT Bombay Alumni Association of Pune and will be held on January 10 and 11, 2009 at Persistent Systems, Pune. The last date for submissions is 30th September, so if you have done something innovative, you should consider nominating yourself.

More details:

Who can Participate
  • Innovators from all fields, irrespective of their educational qualifications, age group or affiliations to any organizations are welcome to submit their entry. You can submit more than one innovation – please fill a separate entry form for each innovation.
Unique Opportunity for Innovators
  • Present your innovation to the right people-VCs, bankers and experts from industry
  • Showcase your innovation along with just 15 other chosen innovations
  • Participate in the mentoring sessions with industry leaders
  • Get national publicity
  • Listen and learn from Keynote speech by an Industry visionary
  • Meet and listen to other innovators across industries
The Selection Procedure
  • There is a two step selection process from entry to presentation. In Step 1, you are requested to submit entry which will be evaluated. In Step II, you are requested to make a presentation about it. Please visit selection process for details. 
  • During the entire selection process you can maintain a level of confidentiality as desired by you.
Sponsorship Opportunities
  • Innovations 2009 will be a highly visible gathering of crème de la crème drawn from the industry, financial community and academics. Be a sponsor! There can be no better statement of your commitment to nurture innovations.
  • Contact us here for details about opportunities. 
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How (and why) to bootstrap your own startup

Live Blogging, , , ,

I am liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club saturday meetup, where we are discussing how to bootstrap your startup. We have invited three speakers who have experience with both bootstrapping a startup and VC funding: Anand Soman, Tarun Malaviya,  and Shridhar Shukla.  The following is a quick-n-dirty capture of some of the discussion that happened.

This is not intended to be a well thought out, well structured article – hopefully that will happen after a few days, when hopefully someone blogs about this event.

Update: The hope has come true. Here are two other blog posts on that event: A post by Santosh (or maybe Anjali) of Bookeazy, and one by Rishi from Thinking Space Technologies (ActiveCiti and EventAZoo)

Getting funded vs. bootstrapping your own startup:

Anand: Take funding when you want to do something that you cannot do without funds. This can be VC funds, or any other source of funds. But make sure that the goals of the financer are the same as your goals, otherwise you’ll get into trouble.

Tarun: Most of you will not get funded. Officially there are 45 million businesses in India. Unofficially, 85% of 350 million people are in the unorganized sector – so they are businesspeople.

I don’t want to be a mom-and-pop show in a corner. I want to be a big business. But remember Reliance is a bootstrapped company. Finance is a good thing at a certain time, not always. I’ve seen too many people fixated on getting funded. It is better to be fixated on running your business well – keeping customers happy.

Shridhar: You get funding only if you’ve proved that you have a viable business. Which means that you have to bootstrap until you reach that point. So you need to figure out how to do this in any case.

What are the disadvantages of VC funding?

Tarun: You have to build a bridge across a river. You need a million dollars. You get funds for only 50k. What do you do? Fold the business? That’s what a financial investor will suggest. An entrepreneur will do anything to keep the business running. Buy boats to get across. Run a boating service. Change tactics to make some progress.

VCs insist on big returns. Leave you with no choice.

Q: If someone wants to build a lifestyle business, then you don’t need VC funding. But if you want to build a product, there are many people across the world with the same idea. If they are funded and you are not, then you are at a major disadvantate.

Lifestyle business = this is a lifestyle choice for the founders. They are doing this just because they enjoy doing this, and they are making a little money. They are not interested in giving a huge exit to their investors.

Don’t worry about lifestyle or not. Focus on building value for customers. As long as you can do that, and create significant value, you will do fine, and you will attract investors. If the value created is not significant, you’ll find out soon enough, and you’ll change your strategy.

There is a major trade-off involved here. You must believe in yourself. But not to such an extent that you are blind to realities and are not listening to anybody at all. So you need to balance this – believing in yourself vs. listening to feedback. That is difficult.

So why take VC funding?

Tarun: Family businesses get ruined by all the informal/unprofessional structure. VC funding is a great way of getting a professional corporate structure that is necessary for success.

VCs have wisdom, if you select wisely. They open doors to contacts. They are advisors. Some of them can be given a stake without being given money. So that is important.

Every VC that I’ve talked to has helped me in some way. So even if you don’t take funding, take advice from them. Go through the process.

Anand: VCs are not the only source. Many other sources.
One good source is raising money from your first customer. Win-win situation. He invests because he can direct you to build a product he wants. This is good because the understands your product and understands the business requirements. And he is happier giving you a contract because he actually has control over you 9since he funded you).

Bootstrapping your product through services.

Shridhar: Do services. Charge high. Don’t worry about good quality work. Do boring work because it doesn’t take up too much of your time (so you have time to work on your product). Don’t have qualms about doing this. Even when you do your product, keep the structure in place for keeping the flow of money from services. Money from any source is good. Don’t give up on that.

Another possibility for bootstrapping is to moonlight. Work somewhere. Have a day job. Work at night. Don’t create pressure on your own savings or your friends savings. Many businesses got started that way. Many people are worried about being fast, and first to market. That is not so important. But be ethical. Don’t do your current employer in

Anand: 14 of the top 15 companies in the world were started by part-timers.

Tarun:
Q: Why do you want to do product?
A: Exponential returns. Build once, and sell many times. Product encapsulates a service. You can bootstrap this. Sell your product as a service to the first few customers. Or maybe, start by selling your expertise.

Shridhar:
Don’t tell your customer that you are going to build a product in the space that you are doing a project in. Be smart. Don’t sign a contract that gives away your IP.

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Pune significantly trails other cities in number of developers?

News,

Bhavin Turakhia of Directi believes that the biggest challenge facing a small startup in India today is the avaiability of talent. To get a feel for which city has the best pool of developers, he and his team did some keyword searches on top job sites and have published their findings on Bhavin’s blog. The results are interesting – while I am not surprised that Bangalore is head and shoulders ahead of Pune, I was surprised that Hyderabad, NCR and even Chennai are significantly ahead of Pune:

 

  • Bangalore has 2.5 times the number of Java resumes of Mumbai
  • In terms of total resumes from each city the ranking is in the following order – Bangalore, Hyderabad, NCR, Chennai, Delhi, Pune, and lastly Mumbai
  • As an example, here is the citywise count of Resumes that contained the keyword Java
    • Bangalore – 123,205
    • Hyderabad- 114,561
    • NCR – 85,347
    • Chennai – 82459
    • Pune – 54,086
    • Delhi – 53,256
    • Mumbai – 43,672

See full article. You may now begin finding faults with their methodology…

PMI Pune meeting – “Production Support” and “Earned Value Management”

Events, , ,

PMI Pune Deccan-India Chapter is pleased to invite you for interesting and thought provoking seminars on:

Production Support – a Value proposition to Organizations by Mr. Prabhu K.B.

Earned Value Management – Challenges in Implementing EVM in IT organizations by Mr. Alok Khandelwal

Venue: Cummins Auditorium, Pune Shramik Patrakar Sangh, 193 Navi Peth, Ganjwe Chowk, Near Alka Talkies, Garware bridge & S. M. Joshi hall, Pune 411030. Reception (Tel) – +91(20) 24534190

Date/Time: Saturday, September 13, 2008, 10:00 am to 12:30 pm

Topic 1: Production Support – A Value proposition to Organizations

Mr. Prabhu will present an overview of Production Support and its need. He would present different methodologies adopted in Production Support and detailed discussion of the process. The seminar would also cover benefits of Production support to Organizations and comparison between Project and Production Support.

Speaker 1: Prabhu K.B.

Mr. Prabhu comes with 17 years of rich experience in the business & operations of Banking & Investment Banking, and IT Project Management, IT Support and Service Management.

He has lead a large team of 24*7 Production Support, managing different countries & time zones and redefined the Support process. Rated as the Best “Support/Service Manager” in SCB.

He is currently heading the Global Production Support in Barclays (Barclays Technology Centre India Pvt Ltd) for its Core Baking, Treasury and Cards business is responsible for maintaining the Application Stability and Availability. He is a Management graduate from one of the reputed institutes in India is also accredited with professional certifications like PMP, ITIL and JAIIB.

Topic 2: Earned Value Management – Challenges in Implementing EVM in IT organizations

The primary objective of Project progress measurement is controlling cost, raising alarms, highlighting areas of concern and implementing corrective actions to achieve objectives of the project. For a given scope, Cost and Time are important attributes in measuring project success. Measurements should direct managers to the point that needs their attention. There are multiple challenges in implementing right measurement tools to get the information efficiently and effectively.

This seminar would provide an insight on how to implement EVM in IT organizations.

Speaker 2: Mr. Alok Khandelwal

Alok is a Mechanical Engineer from Government Engineering College Jagdalpur (CG). He is a PMI Certified Project Manager and has about 10 years of experience in IT industry. He started his career with Infosys Technologies Ltd in Pune and worked as Project Manager during his association of 8 years with them.

He is currently associated with Redknee India. Redknee is a leading global provider of innovative communication software products, solutions and services. It provides real-time monetization and personalization products, solutions and services to over 30 mobile network operators globally. (www.redknee.com). His current responsibilities involve managing all deliveries from Pune R&D.

Note:

Monthly seminar is FREE FOR ALL / NO Entry FEE; one does not have to be Deccan Chapter member to attend this seminar.
Practicing PMPs can earn 1 to 2 PDUs (Professional Development Units) by attending this seminar.
Please share this information with other interested / your friends, they need not be Pune Deccan Chapter members.
Practicing PMPs can earn 1 to 2 PDUs by attending seminar.
Non paid members may subscribe to On Target Newsletter by paying marginal amount of Rs. 100/- Annually. All payments must be paid in advance. Checks payable to: “PMI Pune-Deccan India Chapter”, Payable at: Pune, India. You may bring the check on seminar day and handover to Sangeeta Zaparde (Finance Director) OR Omkar Gurjar (Marketing & Communications Director). Please write your Name, eMail ID & Date of Subscription backside of the check.
To subscribe to PMI Pune-Deccan India Chapter:

1) Visit http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/pmi-pune-chapter and click on – Join this group! button.

2) Send mail to pmi-pune-chapter-owner@yahoogroups.com with following information

Name, Personal Email, Home Phone, Mobile No, Company Name, Work Email, Work Phone, Designation, PMI Member (paid $119)? Deccan Chapter Member (paid $10)?

3) Chapter website: www.pmipunechapter.org

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