Monthly Archives: November 2011

Pune’s 2011-2012 Budget Analysis by Janwani and Parisar

Pune is one of the few cities in the country that regularly and promptly publishes its annual budget on its website. Pune NGOs Janwani and Parisar have analysed the budget and published the analysis so that everybody can get a better idea of where our tax money is being spent.

You can download Janwani’s PMC Budget Booklet Edition here. (If you have trouble downloading from that link, try this page and you should see a link to the budget document somewhere on the page.)

You can also check out Parisar’s analysis of the budget.

Overall, while Pune gets good marks for making the budget available to the public, apparently, the budget is not easy to understand, and making sense of it requires a significant amount of further processing. Parisar has done exactly that.

Now the next step is to convince the authorities to publicize how the money is actually spent (as opposed to how they had planned on spending it).

Win 3 free passes to ClubHack via Online Capture-The-Flag Hacking Contest

ClubHack is one of India’s foremost conferences on Security, and this weekend Pune will play host to the 5th ClubHack conference. Richard Stiennon is the keynote speaker, and look here for the complete agenda.

ClubHack has now announced an online “Capture-the-Flag” hacking contest, and the first three contestants to capture the flag get a free ticket to the conference. (If you’ve already bought a ticket, you can still participate, and transfer your winning ticket to a friend.)

More details of the contest are here.

Very high-powered India/US education conference in Pune – Dec 5-7

From 5 to 8 December, Pune will play host to a very high powered conference on education, featuring some of the top names in education from India and US. And by top names, I really mean the top: everyone’s listed as speakers and panelists, from ministers (Sharad Pawar, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushilkumar Shinde, and others), Governors, bureaucrats (from planning commission, AICTE, UGC), heads of various universities and colleges too numerous to mention (including Kadam, DY Patil, Navale, Karad, Mujumdar – all the big names in Maharashtra’s higher education), and a whole lot of others.

From the US there are members of congress and senators, top officials from Princeton, UC Berkeley, and a bunch of other universities. Just look at the detailed agenda for a full list. This is the first time this conference is being organized, so there is no track record, and I don’t know whether all the listed speakers will indeed show up, or there will be bunches of last minute cancellations, but even if a fraction of them show up, it will still be one of the most impressive collection of movers and shakers in the higher education space. Just look at the delegation coming from the US

The conference is organized by three organizations: Alliance for US India Business (AUSIB), State Legislative Leaders Foundation (SLLF), and Dr. D Y Patil University.

For more details, see the AUSIB website.

You can register for the conference here. It costs Rs. 5000 per person.

IPMA Event: Leveraging Social Media for Market Research – 3 Dec

The next meetup of the Indian Product Managers Association (IPMA), Pune, will feature a talk on Leveraging Social Media as a Market Research Tool (as opposed to outbound marketing), by Pinkesh Shah, Founder and CEO at Adaptive Marketing. The event is on Saturday, 3rd December.

About the Speaker – Pinkesh Shah

Pinkesh Shah, is a Silicon Valley Executive who has been a Product Management Practitioner for the last 14 years in US. Most recently he was the global Vice President of Product Management at McAfee (now acquired by Intel). Having played a key role in understanding how global products have to be adapted to work in emerging markets, he also started the product management organization in McAfee India.

Before McAfee he had several senior management roles in product companies like IBM, netIQ and have launched new products in the high technology space in startups like Netrex and Captivo.

Shah is a gold medalist from M.S.University where he earned his Bachelors in Engineering in Computer Science and a UPE research scholar at Purdue University where he earned his Masters in Computer Science.

Shah started Adaptive marketing with a vision to create the next generation product managers and marketers in India to enable technology product and services companies to market their product globally. He is part of the Angel network which invests in early stage technology companies.

About IPMA

India Product Management Association (IPMA) is a not-for-profit, voluntary, grassroots organization. IPMA Mission is to Foster Product Design and Innovation and Catalyze Product Management/Marketing Talent in India across software, mobile, hardware, telecommunications sectors in the IT industry. IPMA organizes knowledge sharing and networking forums such as Monthly Speaker Series, Workshops, P-Camps etc for professionals interested in product management and marketing. IPMA operate chapters in major product hubs across India and for more information about upcoming events, visit indiapma.org

Fees and Registration

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

Java Knowledge Contest to win free tickets to IndicThreads Java Conference

PuneTech is pleased to announce a Java Knowledge Contest which will give the winner a free ticket to the IndicThreads Java Conference.

The 6th Annual IndicThreads.com Conference On Java will be held on 2nd & 3rd December 2011 here in Pune. Sessions at the conference discuss topics like JavaEE 7 & the Cloud, Java EE 6 PaaS, Scala, Scalability, Concurrent Java, Gradle, JavaFX, REST Web Services, Google Protocol Buffers, Solr Search, JavaFX, Akka & more.

IndicThreads has been running a Java Conference in Pune for the last 6 years, and claims to be the oldest vendor-neutral Java conference. It is a great place to learn & discuss Java. You can check out PuneTech’s previous coverage of IndicThreads conferences to get an idea of our opinion of these conferences.

This Java Knowledge Contest will give two PuneTech readers the chance to attend this conference for free (which otherwise costs Rs. 3500 (2500 for students)). The contest is open to all, and all you need to do to enter is take one of these Java Knowledge tests:

Quick rules:

  • Complete the challenge on or before 6pm on Monday, 28th November, 2011.
  • Each of the above two challenges will have one winner who gets a free ticket. You can enter both if you so wish, but you will be allowed to win only one.
  • The ticket is not transferable. If you don’t want the free ticket, let us know, and we’ll give it to the next highest scorer
  • Names of judges (for the subjective questions contest), and tie-breaker rules (for the objective questions contest) will be announced soon.

For more details about the conference see: http://Java.IndicThreads.com

(Disclaimer #1: PuneTech has a policy of not promoting paid events, except under these circumstances:

  1. We publicize calls for speakers of conferences in Pune, especially if selected speakers get a free entry to the conference
  2. We publicize events where the fees are reasonably low, or if the event is exceptional.
  3. We publicize contests related to such events if that will result in PuneTech readers getting a chance at free tickets
  4. We allow addition of paid conferences to the PuneTech calendar, and will sometimes tweet about them, but they are not allowed on the PuneTech front page unless they satisfy one of the criteria above
  5. We are happy to publish event reports after the event, if they match up to our quality expectations.

This contest is being published on PuneTech due to reason #3.

Disclaimer #2: The contest is being run on ReliScore.com. Since the founders of ReliScore are also the people behind PuneTech, we try hard not to misuse PuneTech for publicizing ReliScore (due to the conflict of interest). However, in this particular case, since the contest benefits the community, we felt it was acceptable.)

Will Pubmatic be Pune’s First Software Product Company IPO?

Online ad optimization platform maker, PubMatic, which is developed wholly out of Pune, has just hired Steve Pantelick, a CFO who specializes in preparing companies for an IPO, reports VC Circle.

Earlier, Business Insider ran a story claiming that Pubmatic had gotten an offer of $300 million from Amazon, but turned it down in favor of going for an IPO.

Pubmatic is doing extremely well, as seen in this excerpt from the VC Circle article:

PubMatic acquired ReviNet, a US-based advertising optimisation company in May this year. It recently expanded to Europe and launched more data management and mobile products. Its GAAP revenue has risen 33 times in the past two years and by 51 per cent between the second and the third quarter of this fiscal year.

While Pubmatic is technically US-based, it has two co-founders who are in Pune (Mukul Kumar and Anand Das), and all of its development happens in Pune (with the exception of the ReviNet acquisition).

If Pubmatic does indeed go for an IPO, it will the first mostly-Pune-based software product company to do so. While last year’s Persistent IPO was many years in the making, Pubmatic is just 5 years old, and will be a great source for inspiration for technology startups in Pune.

Pubmatic has been one of PuneTech’s favorite Pune startup companies, and we’ve been covering it (see here and here) since our first month of operation in 2008. We wish it good look, and hope that this is just a first in the series of Pune IPOs

Update: Reader V. Krishna points out Kale Consultants was probably Pune’s first software product IPO. Kale Consultants provides solutions to the airline and travel industry, and has a mix of products and services, so it is indeed, arguably, Pune’s first Software Product Company IPO.)

Profile: Renu Electronics & Ajay Bhagwat

(This article is a based on a broad and free-wheeling interview of Ajay Bhagwat, founder of Renu Electronics, by Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape)

To a large extent, the computer technology in India is synonymous with software technology. So, when we found that Renu Electronics manufactures all its own hardware for all the products it sells, including LCD panels, and that this is all being done in a small building on Baner Road, we were shocked.

Renu Electronics, founded by Ajay Bhagwat, has generally maintained a low profile, but has a very interesting story to tell.

Early Years

Ajay has an interesting educational background. After his engineering at IIT-Bombay, he went to the US on an L&T scholarship, and did his Masters from the University of Iowa. Here, he excelled, finishing his Masters in 9 months, in the process getting some really interesting results. Specifically, he figured out an algorithm in control systems to determine whether a particular system’s transfer function could be identified adaptively or not. This result was useful enough that some senior professors from UIUC and industry folks from GM requested him to do some additional work on this algorithm to get some specific results they were interested in. For this additional work, which he did in a few months, he got an one more Masters degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

1990s – Starting Renu Electronics

Ajay came back to Pune in 88, and by 1992, had decided to start Renu Electronics, 100% export oriented unit selling HMIs (human machine interfaces; i.e. front end control panels for industrial control systems). The basic idea was to sell a common front end panel that could talk to many different backends and give the customer a common interface. The trick is to be able to talk all the different protocols of the different backend systems (which did not have standards or interoperability). This was done using a core firmware and then pluggable drivers for each backend – which also made it easy to add support for new backends. This was a big improvement in usability since having to teach floor technicians a different front end interface for each backend manufacturer was a major pain point for his customers.

At this time, the majority of the business came from white labeling this technology to established brands. Even GE approached them and started selling this technology under the GE brand. He was one of the few people in India at that time who was exporting technology to the US and Europe instead of importing it. When he was filling out a customs department form for this purpose, he got scolded by the customs officer for putting machinery in the outgoing column and money in the incoming column. The officer knew that things are supposed to be the other way around. It took a long time to convince him that the form was indeed correct.

Building Products

Renu’s flagship products are HMIs which allow industry floor operators to do configuration entry, monitoring of status, alarms in case of exceptional conditions, production of reports, and trends (graphs).

By 1995, Renu had decided that they would manufacture all their own hardware. By designing the entire system in-house they were able to achieve efficiencies that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. For example, they used the 8051 chip, and made maximal use of all the features of this chip, so that they were able to do alarm handling, interfaces, dual-port communications, using just the internal RAM of the 8051 chip – which is just 256 bytes. This gave them a huge cost advantage. At one time, they got threatened by a competitor from Europe that dumping (i.e. selling a product at a price less than it costs to manufacture) is illegal and they would take action. The competitor was very surprised to learn that Renu was actually making a 20% profit in spite of the ridiculously low price.

Renu have always been a product company. They have never done a custom product for anyone, and they’ve always owned their own IP.

Initially, they were only providing the front ends, but soon they wondered whether they they should make their own PLC. All the top PLC companies were Renu’s customers, and Renu did not want to upset the customers. But it turns out that customers actually encouraged Renu to enter this space. They were not worried about competition from Renu, but were happy that Renu would understand the market and domain even better and come up with even more innovative products that they could white label.

Renu was the first company in the world to put the PLC in the HMI itself. This works well for smaller systems. But it also led to too many different products and was messy in terms of sales and marketing – and was confusing to customers. So they designed a modular system which allows PLCs to be chained together to create simple or complex PLCs depending upon what exactly the customer needs. This makes it easier for the customer to create a customized system that exactly meets their needs, without having to go for a high-end, expensive system. The fact that the HMI can be with the PLC, and there is no new system and software to be integrated and learnt is another advantage. Now, finally, they have started a line of modular PLCs without the HMI, and most growth in recent years is coming from
the modular PLCs (with or without HMIs).

Focus on Quality

One of the biggest problems faced by Ajay was that neither he (nor most other people in India) understood how to create an industrially robust process. This resulted in manufacture of components that had latent problems – i.e. units that work perfectly fine, but stop working 6 months later. After they continued to have latent failures they learnt from their customers the various things they need to do to ensure long-term quality of their devices. They spent lots of time and money getting in-house quality control equipment and processes. This high level of quality control results in very reliable products – and this is now one of the USPs of Renu Electronics.

We took a tour of the premises and saw some of the advanced equipment used for testing at Renu. There’s one unit that allows devices to be tested at temperatures from -40 to +60 degrees Celsius. Another unit allows humidity testing up to 98% humidity. A voltage fluctuation/spike/pulse tester can produce a spike of 2Kv in 1 nanosecond. This is in addition to vibration testers, RF interference testers, and 60+ other tests. They have installed anti-static flooring on their manufacturing area. This is very expensive at Rs. 1600 per square foot, but has paid off handsomely, because their latent errors are now down to almost zero.

Staying Ahead of The Curve

Renu believes in implementing processes that they believe are the right thing to do in the long term irrespective of whether they are immediately required by customers or the law. For example, Renu is one of the few ISO-14001 compliant companies. Sometimes, this causes a problem for other companies, because Renu sets the standard and soon the others are expected to follow. On the other hand, sometimes this causes a problem for Renu.

For example, Renu was one of the first companies companies that was ROHS compliant. For this, they had to invest in ROHS compliant machinery and components – which cost significantly more. Further, their running costs went up, because the components they needed on a regular basis were more expensive. But, they’re still ROHS compliant because it is the right thing to do. This story has a happy ending (financially) though – from 1st January, 2012, this investment is going to pay off because there are two new Indian Government directives that will enforce control of hazardous materials, and Renu will already be compliant, whereas other companies would have to struggle.

KPIT Story

Ajay Bhagwat was also one of the promoters of KPIT, one of Pune’s most well known software services companies.

When Ajay was in IIT, he was very interested in music, and would organize and compete in music competitions (he was one of the people behind the creation of a program called Sur-Bahar, which still happens). Shirish Patwardhan was one of the people Ajay used to bump into at music competitions at IIT. Later, in the late 80s they met again in Pune, and started talking about starting a company for doing software products/services. So Ajay joined the software wing of Kirtane and Pandit (an accounting firm) and KPIT was born. Ajay helped set up the quality systems, and the embedded team for KPIT. Although Ajay has been out of day-to-day functioning of KPIT for a long time, he was a director of KPIT until recently.

Contributions to the tech/startup ecosystem in Pune

To those watching the startup ecosystem in Pune, it is clear that Ajay is also one of people helping TiE Pune’s revival this year. This year, TiE has had fortnightly ‘My Story’ sessions with very interesting and accomplished entrepreneurs, and monthly ‘Breakfast sessions’ with more free-wheeling discussions on issues of interest to entrepreneurs. This vitality of TiE in Pune is a very welcome addition to the startup ecosystem in Pune, and will certainly go a long way in cementing Pune’s position as one of the top destinations for doing startups in India.

As a charter member of TiE Pune, Ajay also sets aside 5 to 6 hours every week for one-on-one mentoring of entrepreneurs in Pune. This is a non-trivial time-commitment for any busy executive, but even that, says Ajay, is not enough. There is need for more mentorship of entrepreneurs in Pune. If you have a startup in Pune with actual revenues and enterprise sales, we would suggest talking to Ajay
for some guidance.

2 Cleantech Companies With Pune Links Make Us Proud

(This is an email that Anil Paranjape sent to the PuneStartups. It is reproduced here with permission.)

Two emerging cleantech companies with very strong links to Pune have made us proud recently.

Pune based ‘First Energy’, one of the pioneers in the clean burning stoves business, was recently chosen as one of the ‘Technology Pioneers of 2012’ by none other than the World Economic Forum. This honor was bestowed on only 25 startups world-wide! Big congratulations to Mahesh Yagnaraman and First Energy. The announcement can be found here

In other news, ‘PK Clean’, a plastic waste-to-oil startup, took the runners-up prize in the ‘CleanTechOpen 2011’! They also took the grand prize in the ‘Air-Wast-Water’ category. CleanTechOpen is considered the ‘Academy Awards of Cleantech’, choosing the most innovative and impactful cleantech companies from the US. ‘PK Clean’ has a very strong Pune link: we are their proving ground. Their pilot plant is based here and their founder, Priyanka Bakaya, is originally from Pune with strong family ties here. Big congratulations are also in order to ‘PK Clean’ and Priyanka! More details can be found here

I am sure ‘PK Clean’ and ‘First Energy’ will add to the likes of Praj, Suzlon, Thermax etc, companies that are worldwide leaders in CleanTech and call Pune their home! No other city/industrial cluster in India can boast of this distinction!

In another little news, I’m sure a harbinger of more great news to come, Pune-originated ‘Carbon Clean Solutions’ (or CCS for short) was recently invited to attend World Economic Forum. Looks like tomorrow’s great cleantech companies have two things in common (besides strong technologies and founders): they have very strong Pune links and they all have ‘at-least-two-word-names-with-spaces-in-them’ 🙂 Maybe CCS should relocate back to Pune, they have a leg up with a three-word name! Hint, Hint, Aniruddha Sharma!

InnoVidya meeting: Changing Higher Education – 26 Nov

The gap between what our engineering colleges produce and what our industry would like to consume is widening, and will become an increasingly severe problem for the health of the software industry in India. Everybody realizes there is a problem, and there are lots of people working on this issue from various angles. Entrepreneurs are rushing in to fill the gaps, educators, especially those in independent institutes are trying interesting new experiments, and social media has the potential to change everything. InnoVidya is a platform that aims to bring together the people at the forefront of this revolution.

On November 26, we invite you to the first InnoVidya event – where the speakers will include Dr. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Director of CoEP, Mohit Gundecha, CEO of hot and recently funded startup, YourNextLeap, and Arun Prabhudesai, CTO of My Open Campus, a startup that aims to change how students interact with everybody. But the excellent line-up of speakers is not the main reason to attend this meeting – come for the audience: trustees of colleges, directors and HODs of educational institutes, heads of software companies who are desperately searching for solutions, and other Pune entrepreneurs who are looking to get rich as the Indian education system is forced to transform itself by inexorable global changes.

This is a free and open event, on Saturday, November 26th, from 10:30am to 12:30pm, at Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road. Please register here.

Agenda for this Meet

  • 5-minute InnoVidya Introduction by Raja Bellare
  • 30-minute talk by Dr. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Director CoEP + 15 min Q&A
  • 20-minute pitch by Mohit Gundecha, Co-Founder & CEO YourNextLeap + 10 min Q&A
  • 20-minute pitch by Arun Prabhudesai, CTO MyOpenCampus + 10 min Q&A
  • followed by free time for hallway conversations.

Higher Education in India – Changing Scenarios – Anil Sahasrabudhe, Director, COEP

Anil is the Director of College of Engineering Pune (COEP). Anil joined COEP as the director in 2006. He holds a vision to take COEP to the next level with a view to enriching the life of every student who enters COEP.

Anil will talk about the changing scenarios in higher education in India.

Anil did his BE Karnataka University (Gold Medalist) and has a PhD from IISc Bangalore. In the past he has been a researcher at IISc, faculty at NERIST, Itanagar, and Professor at IIT Guwahati.

YourNextLeap – Smart Career Counseling and College Decisions

YourNextLeap is a recommendation engine which acts as a virtual career counselor to help students make smarter career and college decisions. It involves a suite of applications, which use psychometric evaluations and math models on past admission patterns, to give out personalized suggestions. Team YourNextLeap is excited about its mission to enhance the way millions of students and young professionals treat their careers. The team comprises of students from top US and Indian universities like BITS, NID, COEP, PICT, USC and Stanford University. More at http://yournextleap.com

About the Speaker – Mohit Gundecha

Mohit is the CEO & Co-founder of YourNextLeap. He was an early team member and head of India Operations for mig33, a mobile community with more than 50 million users. Prior to mig33, Mohit studied at Stanford University, where he co-founded Mobile Momentum with Prof. Tom Kosnik. Mohit has also co-authored a widely referenced mobile industry report, ‘Future of Mobile VAS in India’.

My Open Campus – Online Community for Faculty, Students, Employers and others

My Open Campus brings seamless collaboration to colleges, communities and closed user groups . MOC aims to bring all stakeholders (for e.g: students, faculties & administrators in a college) on single easy to use unified platform, where they can communicate and carry out all regular activities online.

MOC offers secure messaging, online assessments & exams, Information repository, student & Alumni groups, event management, Student database management, discussion forums, placements along with host of other features..

The vision of My Open Campus is to create employable intelligent students. There cannot be knowledge enhancement in an isolated and restrictive environment. Hence MOC brings together all stakeholders on a single platform to make learning a fun & social activity.

About the Speaker – Arun Prabhudesai

Arun is the CTO of Enhanced Education, the company behind MyOpenCampus. Having worked for over 15 years in I.T Industry across the globe, Arun returned back to India to pursue his dream of starting on his own. He has been quite active in Startup and Entrepreneur community is always in forefront in advising upcoming Entrepreneurs.

About InnoVidya

InnoVidya is a group of educators and industry professionals who want to reach out to students, teachers, trainers and working professionals and catalyze significant improvements in their learning ecosystems. In addition to the InnoVidya website and the InnoVidya mailing list, we also hold public lectures on the 4th Saturday of every month. Lectures usually involve talks by senior educators, industry visionaries, or social and/or for-profit entrepreneurs working in the space of higher education.

We are currently based in Pune, but we expect that this initiative will expand all over India.

More at: http://innovidya.org

And please join the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/innovidya

Venue Sponsor – Venture Center

Entrepreneurship Development Center (Venture Center) – a CSIR initiative – is a not-for-profit company hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Venture Center strives to nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the Pune region in India. The Venture Center is a technology business incubator specializing in technology enterprises offering products and services exploiting scientific expertise in the areas of materials, chemicals and biological sciences & engineering.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here. And join the InnoVidya mailing list (optional).

Code Retreat Pune – Day Long Programming Event

Pune is participating in the Global Code Retreat day 2011. It’s a day-long programming event based on principles of good design. Its on Dec 3, from 9am to 6pm at Thoughtworks, Pune. The event is free but has a Rs. 200 deposit which will be refunded if you actually attend the event (to prevent people from registering if they’re not serious).

You only need to bring a laptop with the development tools you require to write code using your chosen programming languages. A breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Please spread the word amongst other developers and mailing lists.

This event is hosted by ITT (Innovation Technology Trust) and co-sponsored by ThoughtWorks and C42 Engineering. If you have any problems registering, or have any other questions, contact niranjan@c42.in

What is a Code Retreat?

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

This is a language-agnostic event. Each session, the pair chooses what language they want to work in. So, no matter what your language of choice, you are welcome. We practice the fundamentals: TDD and the 4 rules of simple design – these are applicable regardless of language.

The idea of day long practice sessions for programmers was formalized by Corey Haines. Read more on his blog about How does Code Retreat work?

Do read this blog post by Corey as well.

This 3:21minute video from Code Retreat Orlando is another wicked cool introduction!

What’s the deal with the Rs. 200 registration deposit?

CodeRetreat is a free event paid for by sponsors. For larger events, though, it is important to have an accurate view of attendance. This helps us purchase the right amount of food, snacks, etc. If people register, but don’t show up and don’t cancel, then we waste a lot of food, as well as have to turn some people away that want to come. To this end, we are asking for a Rs. 200 deposit to hold your space.

The Rs. 200 will be refunded to you at the event. Don’t worry, though, you may cancel your registration and get a refund up to 7 days before the event. If you want to transfer your registration to someone else, we can do that, too.

Fees and Registration

This event is open to anybody and has a Rs. 200 refundable deposit. Please register here

Location: ThoughtWorks Technologies, GF-01 and MZ-01, Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada. December 3, 9am – 6pm.