All posts by Navin Kabra

TechForSeva: Technology for the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid: 2-day-conference

Events, , , ,

VijnanaBharati.org, Seva Sahyog, Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Sanstha (MKSSS) and MCCIA, are pursuing a new initiative called Tech for Seva under the leadership of stalwarts like Dr. Anil Kakodkar, Dr F C Kohli, Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, Dr. Jagannath Wani, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar and many more.

Tech for Seva is a platform allowing academic & research institutions, individual & corporate innovators, NGOs & grass root operators to come together on a common platform and share their success stories and problems that need scientific solutions to help the bottom of the pyramid of our country to share the fruits of development.

Please visit the web site for more details.

This is a two day conference in Pune on 28th & 29th September 2013 where all the three stakeholders i.e. innovators, corporates & NGOs will jointly share their success stories, problems and will try to come up with some partnership proposals.

This platform will be an ongoing activity even after the conference is over and will be monitored by a special task force set up by Tech for Seva.

The topics chosen for deliberations / presentation are education, health,livelihood and environment.

The topic of Environment is further classified as energy, water, waste management and bio-diversity.

A grand expo, “Padma Vibhushan Dr.Verghese Kurien Expo”, student competition, “IET TFS Student Competition of Innovative Ideas”, and Leadership dinner will be major highlights of the conference.

In TFS expo individuals/institutes/VOs/NGOs/corporates will showcase their equipments, prototypes, models, products, processes and information about the schemes/programs, success stories, etc. for the delegates and other stake holders.

Event website: http://techforseva.org

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

(We do not post all tech events in Pune to the PuneTech blog. Many other events are listed on the PuneTech Calendar. To ensure that you do not miss the other events, subscribe for announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.)

PuneTech Event: Data Analytics in Location & Intent Aware Mobile Promotions

External Visitors, , ,

This Friday, we have a distinguished visitor from the Silicon Valley – Sanjay Mittal, a serial entrepreneur, investor, advisor to startups, with a highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. He will talk about his current interest – use of Data Analytics in Location and Intent aware Mobile Promotions.

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm to 7pm, at MCCIA, ICC Trade Towers, SB Road.

Abstract of Talk

Search, Location and Mobile Ads can be put together to create targeted promotions for mobile users. Measuring and improving performance of these promotions is a different matter altogether. Join us to hear Sanjay Mittal (Chairman & CTO of Spotzot Inc) walk you through importance, methods and instruments of data collection, analysis and ad tuning, and how it can create a win-win situation for retailers, advertisers, publishers and consumers.

About the Speaker – Sanjay Mittal

Software Entrepreneur, Technologist, Private Investor, Advisor to Startups. Highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. Strong technology background in internet and artificial intelligence technologies.

Sanjay is currently a co-founder, Chairman of the Board, and CTO at mobile startup SpotZot. SpotZot has built a network of 30 million high-intent mobile shoppers who regularly make their purchases offline at brick and mortar retailers. Spotzot reaches these shoppers by providing a location based in-app shopping service to high traffic shopping, search and game applications. Spotzot allows retailers and brands to help consumers discover the hottest trends, best offers and coupons and find a store nearby.

Sanjay has been a co-founder and CEO of NASDAQ-listed company Selectica which makes software products to help the largest companies in the world improve the effectiveness of their sales and contracting processes.

In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Sanjay has been a senior researcher at Xerox PARC, a director of TiE Silicon Valley, and many other achievements which can be seen on his linkedin profile

Sanjay has done his B.Tech. Electrical Engineering from IIT-Delhi in 1975, and an MS in CS from the University of Nebraska, USA.

Fees and Registration

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm-7pm, at MCCIA Hall No. 5, 5th Floor, A-Wing, ICC Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Get notifications of future event announcements. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.

C-DAC unveils Mercury Nimbus online healthcare software

News, ,

Pune-based C-DAC has launched Mercury Nimbus, which appears to be an online EMR (electronic medical records) software suite, on the Windows Azure cloud platform, that doctors and hospitals can use to share patient data – according to a report in the Times of India

Excerpts from the article:

Gaur Sunder, principal technical officer at C-DAC, said that if a cancer patient goes to a nearby clinic and the doctors refers him to a hospital outside his present location, town or state, than in such a case, through ‘Mercury Nimbus,’ the doctor can virtually refer his case to the specialty hospital along with all the details of the patients, records and reports.

The doctor at the specialty hospital can study the records and through video conferencing prescribe immediate treatment to the patient and also give the next date of visit. The next time the patient visits the clinic, his reports would be sent again to the hospital and accordingly the specialty doctor can give him the time and details of his treatment or surgery date.

and:

The subscription charges range from $15 to $150 per month.

Read the full article

See also: CoEP unrolls online health management portal for 1800 hostelites

RailsGirls Pune – The Gold and the Beautiful

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(This event report of RailsGirls Pune – a one-day conference for women working on Ruby-on-Rails, first appeared on the Josh Software Blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

I was skeptical! Just from my experience of organizing RubyConf India and some local meetups, I was sure the turnout would be low and the event would be ‘casually boring’. If only I knew how crazily wrong I was!

A few days before the event, seeing about 250 registrations was itself a revelation. Then the turnout of over a 100 girls was exhilarating to say the least. I mean, how often does one get a chance to address a crowd at a techie event with ‘Hello Ladies!’. I am indeed lucky.

RailsGirlsJosh Software was one of the sponsors along with ThoughtWorks and CodeIgnition. It was great to see a LOT of mentors turn up for the event — which in my opinion was one of the success factors of Rails Girls Pune – EVERYONE got attention and there was never a case where someone was sitting idle or looking around for help.

The demographics of the crowd was varied – quite a few girls had come down to Pune for this event, some even travelling most of the night to get here!. There were a lot of girls with a prior technical background but none in Ruby. And there were 5 people who were entirely new to programming and they too managed to code, gleefully if I may add! It’s not often you get to hear an artist talk about controllers and methods. 🙂

kid2

One good cultural change that stood out was the kids running around an event with their dad’s baby-sitting them while the mom’s coded!

Proceedings were kick-started off  by Gunjan from ThoughtWorks. She spoke about Women in Technology and Leadership and why such events are so important for everyone.

railsgirls1

After a brief introduction from other sponsors, all participants were divided among various tables and each table was assigned a mentor, though I saw at least 2 or 3 mentors at each table. Everyone was eager to help and answer questions.

RailsGirls3As the mentors were aware of the RailsGirls teaching process, it started of with getting familiar tryruby.org before moving on to other things like BentoBox and explaining basic concepts of Rails. Before long, everyone was busy working hard!

There were lot’s of discussions happening amidst kids running around, regular trips for getting more coffee or tea or some snacks. Before long, it was time for lunch and a breather.

chickendanceThoughtWorks organized an awesome lunch and after lunch, it required more than just Ruby to shake everyone up. What better than a ChikenDance for 5 minutes that started slow with a little bit of shyness among the audience but reached a crescendo with everyone joining in!

 

 

lighteningtalkThere were three Lightening Talks to get the crowd back into the coding groove. I spoke about why we love Ruby with the talk ”My Grandmother can read my code“.  Praveena  gave a talk on “Perks of being a Programmer” and Nishita gave a talk about “How the Internet works!”.

The afternoon was one busy session and everywhere you went, you heard only about Controllers, Scaffold, Bootstrap etc. – music to my ears!

Towards the end of the session, we had some participants showcase their work after uploading on Heroku. A few mentions of some really good work are  http://vast-mesa-2265.herokuapp.com/ideas and http://shrouded-cove-2185.herokuapp.com/

mentorsThe mentors did a wonderful job and got a lot of appreciation from all. Well, at the end of the day, a lot of people mad new friends. (Do not miss the “I <3 Matz” on the bottom right corner of the photo!)

Anup and Prathamesh wound up proceedings with introducing everyone to Pune Ruby User Group and after the prolonged networking that ensued, everyone called it a day and probably slept the night dreaming of instance variables!

A special thanks to Shilpa Nair and Hephzibah who did a wonderful job organizing RailsGirls. Hope to see more of these events soon. Do like the Rails Girls Facebook Page  and show your appreciation!

CoEP unrolls online health management portal for 1800 hostelites

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COEP – The College of Engineering Pune, has unrolled a program called AyushDeep – an online health management portal for 1800 students living in hostels with the help of a local software company Ayushman aka IndiaOnlineHealth.com.

The portal will hold an electronic medical record of the students online, which can also be viewed by parents and doctors, and it is hoped that the students will continue to use and update this record for the rest of their life.

“The first and most obvious motivation is the identification of any health problem in our students that require special attention. Secondly, we want students to inculcate a habit of building their EMR, which will form the core of continuity in healthcare for them for the rest of their life. The platform of connected healthcare we offered to our students can render them help from appropriate specialists, if needed, using the online health platform,” college director A D Sahasrabudhe said at an Idea Exchange held at The Indian Express office here.

More info:

Event Report of @GhoseB’s 2-Day Clojure workshop – by @SwaroopCH

Event Reports, , , , ,

Last weekend BG aka @ghoseb conducted a 2-day free Clojure workshop – which was “sold out” and many people had to be disappointed.

Swaroop C H (who is famous for many things, one of which is A Byte of Python a free online book that has helped many people learn Python), was apparently in town, and attended the two sessions.

He has written a detailed and insightful event report. Here is his report of day 1 and report of day 2.

BG has promised to conduct another workshop for the people who couldn’t be accommodated in the first one due to space constraints.

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Life & Work of 2008 Turing Award Recipient Barbara Liskov

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In 2008, Barbara Liskov was given the Turning Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

Ajay Deshpande, Chief Architect at Persistent Systems will give a talk on the life and work of Barbara Liskov, on 31st August, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 31 August.

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

Credenz’13 : 3-day tech fest at PICT College 30 Aug-1 Sept

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Credenz is the annual technical symposium organised by the PICT IEEE Student Branch. With 4000+ students from 50 different colleges attending, it is one of the top student tech fests, not only in the city, but in the country too.

Credenz this year will be from 30 August to 1st September.

From the Credenz website:

Inaugurated in 2004, with an aim to celebrate talent, it has prospered to become one of the finest technical events in the country. Credenz not only infuses a competitive spirit among participants, but it also provides an informative edge through various seminars and workshops conducted by eminent industry professionals. Participants get to experience a diversity of events like Clash, Bplan, Roboliga, WebWeaver, Pixelate, Mad Talks and seminars on recent technologies.

The IEEE Student branch at PICT has always believed in encouraging students to think beyond the academic domain and challenge their potential. The team changed the entire face of Credenz in the year 2009 when the entire event was hosted online due to the pandemic swine flu, which had made social gatherings impossible. Following the legacy, their juniors made Credenz’10 a great success. Now the PICT IEEE Student Branch presents to you Credenz’13 with an even wider platform to let students showcase their skills and talents.

More Info about Credenz 2013:

There is also an online software/app development contest that you can participate in right now

For full information, see the Credenz Website

11 Tech/Startup Events in Pune this weekend

Events, ,

If you’re not subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar, you might not have realized that this weekend is packed with tech and/or startup events in Pune – 11, in fact.

Unless otherwise specified, these events are free and open to anybody who’s interested in attending. A few are paid events, and this is clearly mentioned below.

Here’s a quick overview. To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

Friday, 23 August, evening

  • 6:30pm: TiE Pune Event – A New Model of Leadership

Saturday, 24 August

  • Pune’s Microsoft Technologies User Group – PUG has a 2 day DevCon that kicks off on Saturday morning and continues on until Sunday evening.
  • A 2 day free Clojure workshop by Baishampayan Ghose of Helpshift at BMC Software. Unfortunately, this workshop had limited seats and got full almost immediately after being announced. They are hoping to have more such workshops in the future. Make sure you’re subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar so you don’t miss the announcement.
  • RailsGirlsPune – a One Day Ruby-on-Rails workshop for Women
  • A Paid Sales and Marketing Beginners Workshop for Entrepreneurs
  • Part 2 of a Workshop on Big Data with Hadoop
  • A Paid Hands-On workshop on the GIT distributed version control system
  • Part 3 of A Hands-On Session for Amazon AWS Developers
  • SAP HANA get-together

Sunday, 25 August

  • A meetup of everybody interested in the Corona SDK (a leading mobile development framework)
  • Internet-of-things Meetup: Hands-on with Beagle Bone Black + Python + OpenCV

To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

About the PuneTech Calendar

If you got this update in your email or RSS feed, but you did not see any of the above events, that means that you’re subscribed to the PuneTech main blog, but you are not subscribed to the PuneTech events calendar. Since there are many tech events happening in Pune, we don’t put all the event announcements on the main blog. Hence, if you’re interested in attending events, you should subscribe to
get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.

Opinion: Pune’s IT industry must focus on electronic design (ESDM) – Gouri Agtey Athale

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Gouri Agtey Athale has an interesting article in the Pune Mirror pointing out that following the success of the “animation and gaming” niche sector, the IT industry in Pune should start focusing on other niche sectors – for example electronic design.

Excerpts:

[The] niche area of animation and gaming has worked out for Pune the way the software industry worked on the existing industrial base: combining the existing dormant and untapped potential and build a whole new business out of it.

Pune’s arrival on the animation and gaming scene has received recognition at the international level: two animation films made by companies based in Pune have made it to the list of Oscar nominations, Krayon’s Delhi Safari and Reliance Big’s Krishna and Kaunsa.

and

That was in the past: the move now is to move on and the next wave could be a convergence of the hardware and software sectors to create ESDM, or Electronic System Design and Manufacturing. Cmde (retd) Anand Khandekar, former member of the IT committee of the MCCIA, who helped draft the state’s IT policy over a decade ago, suggested that existing expertise in embedded software and the presence of the hardware sector in the city could be married to the city’s industrial culture and the educational base to create an industry around ESDM.

The blue print that ESDM is looking at is that of the automotive sector, where there are vendors who supply to the original equipment manufacturer, the OEM. On these lines, local entities could become vendors to global companies, the example usually cited being that of Taiwanbased companies who work on projects for global majors like Apple, Oracle-Sun Micro and Google- Motorola.

and finally:

And the sector needs a champion, a strong, non-partisan platform, which in the case of Pune’s software industry was the MCCIA.

Read the full article