All posts by Navin Kabra

Joomla!Day India 2011 – Joomla conference in Pune on 12th March

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Joomla!Day India 2011 is a large conference targeting developers, designers, administrators and users, Business owners & technologists as well as end users of the Joomla! Content Management System. For those who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a software program that allows easy creation of very flexible, very customizable websites which can be administered and modified by non-technical end users. It is written in the PHP programming language.

Joomla!Day India is an annual conference and delegates will come from a range of public and private sectors, both national and international, in various markets, actively seeking information about Joomla! and other areas of web-based technology.

The list of speakers for this conference is rather impressive, and click here for the detailed schedule

Joomla!Day happens this weekend, 12th and 13th March, at Bajaj Gallery at 5th Floor of the ICC Trade Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

myEshala – an eLearning package oriented towards SSC board students

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Technology pervades all aspects of our lives, and now even educational institutions are actively adopting technology based systems. Pune’s Millenium School, Pune after scouring the market for an e-learning tool and unable to find a suitable one, decided to develop one on its own, and it is now available for all children at http://myEshala.com.

Basically, myEshala has video lectures, which they try to make interesting for the children, and quizzes/testing after every small segment to get an idea of whether the child has understood the lecture. Parents get a detailed report of what the child has studied, whether s/he has understood it, and whether they need to repeat any segments.

Why build myEshala when so many eLearning software packages already exist? This is the reasoning:

We have observed that there are lots of e-learning software product which sell “concepts”. Children are expected to use these concepts as and when necessary. We, on the other hand, have developed a product specifically targeting the Maharashtra State Board (SSC) for now. We provide a chapter by chapter tutorial for every subject (Hindi and Marathi excluded for now). We also do the same for quizzes. This makes it very tedious for us to make the content, but, the children get a huge benefit of seeing a monolithic lesson rather than picking up broken pieces here and there. This is especially true for the SSC Board, which is the most under-rated and the most neglected board in the country, for no apparent reason (there is an in-depth explanation of the same on our sister site)

This innovative tool – myEshala has thus been created people who have the software skills as well as hands-on experience in education and teaching. Nikhil Karkare, coordinator at Millennium National School, (and a very active member of CSI Pune and Pune Open Coffee Club) says, “Many of the e-learning tools in the market now, seem to have been developed by persons who do not have much experience in the education sector. Concepts are not set down in a child friendly manner and lectures tend to be long and boring – they don’t seem to really know what will or will not work in a classroom environment. So as engineers who could teach, we decided to combine our software and teaching skills to build this tool on our own.”

Once they developed and started using myEshala, the school found that parents and children benefited greatly from it. Students could take tests, view lectures (more than once), and play with widgets on the tool. Student performance and progress could now be accurately monitored and teachers too had more time to develop creative methods of delivery. “After implementing myEshala we have seen a significant improvement in the performance of students with the overall percentage increasing from 65% to 75%.” Nikhil Karkare happily adds.

The news spread and students from other schools as well requested to try out the tool. “This drove us to think that other children could also benefit from myEshala and we decided to put it on the retail market. Now other schools have started implementing myeshala as well.” Says Nikhil. Another goal in mind is to take myEshala to the rural areas as well where educational infrastructure is poor and challenges exist in imparting even basic education. “We want to make sure basic education reaches non-urban areas at a very low price.” Says Nikhil.

The use of technology however, is not new at Millennium National School. In fact they have always put it to use in a number of ways. Software was used to map each student’s home address on Google Maps, and then bus routes were planned accordingly. “This means saving of fuel and time, which is not only good for us, but for the environment as well.” Says Nikhil. They also predict the quantity of food to be prepared depending on the number of students present and certain other factors, by means of software. But, there are challenges too. “The end users are children of ages from Kindergarten to Std. 10. So usability sometimes becomes a big challenge. Again spending on technology is always limited, which is why we use Open Source technologies in most places.” Says Nikhil.

You can see the myEshala FAQ for more details.

PHPCamp – the biggest PHP conference in India – in Pune on 5th March

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PHPCamp is back.

PHPCamp is the biggest PHP conference in India and happens in Pune every year. Why should you go?

  • If you’re a student interested in web development, you should go to find out what’s going on with the most popular web development language in the world.
  • If you’re a motivated student who would like to do some interesting projects, and are looking for a mentor/guide/advisor from Industry, PHPCamp would be a good place to find some
  • If you’re a web developer and would like to interact with other passionate web developers and find out what interesting things they’re working on, then the hallway conversations at PHPCamp should attract you
  • If you’re a non-technical founder of a startup and are looking for technical co-founders, this is the place to be.
  • If you’re looking for a development partner, or a small company to which you’d like to outsource web development work, then PHPCamp is the place to find the most interesting ones

What is PHPCamp?

It is a barcamp for those interested in PHP. A barcamp is essentially a conference but without a pre-determined schedule or invited speakers. Anyone can attend. And on the morning of the conference, there is a whiteboard put up with all the open slots (for speaking), and anybody who has an interesting topic can write down their name and the topic and sign up as a speaker.

See the PHPCamp FAQ for more details.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. It’s on Saturday, 5th March, from 9:30am to 5pm, at SICSR, at model colony. Please register here.

Economic Times wants to know the stories of Pune Entrepreneurs

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The Economic Times, writes articles about entrepreneurship on its page Emerging India, and they want to increase their coverage of entrepreneurship from Pune and bring the city’s entrepreneurs to the forefront. Omkar Sapre, Senior Correspondent, of The Economic Times in Pune is keen to interact with entrepreneurs in Pune and know more about their businesses. The newspaper wants to focus on trend stories about various developments in entrepreneurship.

Omkar is interested in hearing form readers of PuneTech – please write to him at omkar.sapre@timesgroup.com, with an introduction of yourself and what business or startup you are in. Even if you are not entrepreneurs, you are requested to write in to him, with an introduction, where you work, what work you do, and whether you’re involved in anything apart your work. Please write the work PuneTech as the first word in your email subjectline, for easy management.

Any publicity is good for an entrepreneur, and more generally, publicity for Pune’s entrepreneurs is good for Pune as a whole. Hence, this is a great opportunity for the tech community in Pune to raise its collective profile. Hence, I would suggest, get in touch with Omkar, and talk to him not only about what you are doing, but if you happen to know somebody else who is doing exciting/interesting work, then talk about that too.

For more information about Omkar see his linked in Profile. And click here to email him: omkar.sapre@timesgroup.com.

Create a Startups Forum (“Open Coffee Club”) in your locality

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Santosh Dawara, one of the founders of (and the primary driver behind) Pune Open Coffee Club, the very successful forum for Pune Startups, is challenging the entrepreneurs of Pune to create smaller Open Coffee Clubs for each region of the City. The idea being that Pune’s startup ecosystem is big enough that it can support independent events for Aundh/Baner, or Koregaon Park (which is already active), or Kothrud.

The Pune Open Coffee Club (and PuneTech) will support and publicize your initiative, and hopefully this will be the start of something big. This is your chance to strengthen the startups ecosystem in your area, and in the process help yourself by helping others.

Here is Santosh’s message:

The Pune Startup eco-system has taken on a new life and has been growing in leaps and bounds. Startup events have been drawing record audiences of 100+ entrepreneurs and enthusiasts every time. I believe this is a story unique to amchi Pune and credit is really due to those supporting the eco-system by attending events, making useful contributions by speaking, organizing and making monetary donations. A special word goes out to the Startup Saturday folks who are putting together great events besides the POCC.

Here’s an opportunity for all of us to jumpstart an Open Coffee Club in our own way and share in this phenomenon.

For the month of March I would like to invite you to create an Open Coffee Club in your own locality.

Why do this? Originally, the Open Coffee Club was really a small group of entrepreneurs who met up regularly at a coffee shop to network, get to know each other and help each other out. The Pune Open Coffee Club is now just too big to ever meet at a single cafe, or for one person to run. However, the need for a local support group of entrepreneurs has not gone away.

To make it easy for you to get the group started, I am offering to collect all the local OCC’s and spread the word to all the entrepreneurs on PuneStartups.org informing them about the local groups, when and where they plan to meet so that they can select the most convenient or interesting group.

If you are interested in getting an OCC up and running, all you need to do is the following:

  • Select a date + time + coffee shop in your area
  • Add the event on PuneStartups.org
  • Ensure that you have enabled RSVP’s on the event to collect the contact information of all those interested in your OCC
  • E-mail me at [sdawara at gmail dot com] with the link to the new event
  • I’ll make sure the word gets out
  • Just show up at the appointed date and time and be yourself
  • Make sure your personal profile has a clear photograph so people can recognize you!

For example,

Grubshup Cafe Open Coffee Club,

Law College Road,

co-ordinator: “Your Name”

“Date / Time”

Sounds interesting? Look forward to getting in touch with you!

I would add the following tips:

  • Use the Pune Startups mailing list to find other founders in your vicinity, and publicize your event.
  • Use the PuneTech Calendar to ensure that your event does not clash with another important event
  • In my experience, establishing a regular venue is one of the most important things you can do. That allows you and other people to schedule an event with a minimum of fuss. The venue could be a coffee shop as Santosh suggests, or it could be a meeting room in some startup or company that is generous enough to allow their premises to be used. Or you can use an old school or a college.
  • Coffee/snacks/tea etc. are not a requirement for an event. Somehow, I’ve noticed that many people feel that organizing snacks, and creating posters, and other paraphernalia is necessary for holding an event. These things add significant overhead, not to mention expenses, and don’t really add that much value to events. I’ve found that for sustaining volunteer driven forums like open coffee clubs, doing away with all these overheads is the best thing, and reduces the effort it takes to organize the event.
  • Don’t give up too early. The first few events will have only a few people attending. Keep at it, and as long as you’re having meaningful conversations at the events, you will succeed eventually.

Updates: The following POCC branches have been created so far. They’re listed below with the date of the first meeting and the person who took the initiative to start the branch.

MARCH 19th:
Aundh Open Coffee Club
to RSVP and to see who is attending: http://punestartups.org/events/pocc-aundh
Pimpri-Chinchwad Open Coffee Club
18 are attending
to RSVP and to see who is attending: http://punestartups.org/events/poccpimprichinchwad-1
MARCH 26th:
Kothrud Open Coffee Club
31 are attending
to RSVP and to see who is attending: http://punestartups.org/events/pocckothrud-meetup
APRIL 2nd:
Tilak Road Open Coffee Club
to RSVP and to see who is attending: http://punestartups.org/events/pocctilakroad-1
Yet to meet:
Kalyani Nagar Open Coffee Club
To join the group and fix up a meeting: http://punestartups.org/group/pocckalyaninagar
Pashan-Sus Road Open Coffee Club
To join the group and fix up a meeting: http://punestartups.org/group/poccpashansusroad

National Science Day at IUCAA with demos, talks, Q&A, experiments – 28 Feb

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What – Open day at IUCAA with science made interesting for kids and adults

IUCAA is the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and is housed in University of Pune. On 28th Feb, on the occasion of science day, they have organized a full day of various interesting sessions for people to see. For free.

Basically: “IUCAA takes its research to the masses”.

Anyone can visit the campus to attend and participate in popular science lectures, demonstrations, screening of scientific films, Q&A sessions etc. Work at IUCAA is showcased through a poster exhibition. A sky watching session wraps it up.

Why?

IUCAA is one of the best institutions in the country for pure science, and includes such greats as Jayant Naralikar, Naresh Dadhich (a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences), Thanu Padmanabhan (Padma Shri winner).

It also includes people like Arvind Gupta who have a genius for taking scientific principles and then applying them to “common” things like toys for children (made from everyday objects found in Indian homes).

A chance to visit an institution of this caliber, and interact with actual scientists engaged in cutting edge research, and with links to the best institutions in the world is something that most people in the world don’t have – and we in Pune are lucky to have that opportunity.

Schedule

  • Bhaskara 1
    • Virtual Astronomy tools Demonstration
  • Bhaskara 2 & Outside
    • Optics experiments Demonstration
    • Experiments in Radio Astronomy
  • Lobby between Bhaskara 2 & 3
    • Research at IUCAA + Astronomy Posters Presentation
  • Bhaskara 3
    • Talks by Astrophysicists (duration 30 min each)
    • 11:30 p.m. Brahmaand ki Pehli Kiranen – CMBR: Pranjal Trivedi
    • 12:30 p.m. Our Expanding Universe: Varun Sahni
    • 1:15 p.m. Things around us and elsewhere: Gaurav Goswami
  • Chandrasekhar Auditorium
    • Astronomy explained through Videos
    • Science Toys & Experiments demonstrated by school children.
    • 12:00 p.m. IUCAA Observatory Live telecast
    • 2:30 p.m. Astronomy Quiz for Public
    • 3:30 p.m. “Ask a Scientist”
  • Muktangan (Science centre)
    • Spectroscopy Demonstrations and model making
  • Science Park
    • Various Scientific playground models explained by volunteers.
    • 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. Sky Watching (passes necessary)
  • Chandrasekhar Auditorium
    • 6:00 p.m. Public Lecture: Nobel Prize in Physics – 2010 (A N Ramaprakash)

This event is free and open for anybody to attend.

Event Report: Startup Saturday Pune on Technology in Education

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(This report of the Feb 2011 Startup Saturday Pune, by Vishwa Vivek Garg, first appeared on eventNU, and is republished here with permission)

For the Feb 2011 Startup Saturday Pune on Technology in Education, we got speakers from IndicThreads, Millenium School/ myEshala, NextLeap, Synthesis Solutions & kPoint.

IndicThreads – Harshad Oak

It started with Harshad Oak of IndicThreads.

IndicThreads organizes tech conferences such as java, cloud computing, mobile computing, etc. As of now it is only within Pune but in long run they want to spread all across India. These conferences are paid and the overall response is good. Harshad used to work for Cognizant before he started (along with his wife) IndicThreads. He is basically a Java guy and got some renowned certifications. He also authored a Java book. While sharing his entrepreneurial journey, he mentioned that writing a book on Java helped him a lot starting his venture.

So do something & participate in various things so that people start recognizing you.

Millenium School – Nikhil Karkare

2nd presentation was from Nikhil Karkare of Millenium School. He talked about the concept of ‘no school bags’ for children of Millenium School. It is a day boarding, state board school where kid gets almost everything within the school campus. Kids don’t take any school bags to school. They give books/ copies within the school and kids practice it.

He mentioned that since the concept of no school bag was new, initially they faced some difficulty convincing the crowd.

A related query arised, “how do parents know what their kids are doing in the school?”. They daily send sheets of whatever their kids have done during the day.

He also talked about their learning tool called myEshala where they provide video CD to parents for the syllabus and child can practice it at home as well.

NextLeap – Suruchi Wagh

3rd presentation was from Suruchi Wagh of NextLeap.

NextLeap is a recommendation engine for students seeking admission in American universities. They work on freemium model where they suggest 3 universities free of cost. They have 2 other accounts called economy & advanced where they suggest more universities and support on phone as well.

They have 3 guys on advisory board and Alok Kejriwal of Games2Win/ Mobile2Win/ Contest2Win is one of them.

Synthesis Solutions – Swapnil Patil

4th presentation was from Swapnil Patil of Synthesis Solutions.

Swapnil talked about his new venture in education field called GetAdmission.in

kPoint – Avijit

Last presentation was from Avijit of kPoint.

kPoint is a product of GSLab (a soft. dev. comp.). It is a cloud-based solution for multimedia learning and sharing in fast moving organizations. kPoint enables easy capture of expert knowledge into multimedia kapsules, which provide searchable video and flexible navigation of content for informal learning. kPoint effectively overcomes the barrier for creating and sharing content.

With that we came to an end of the event and then participants networked with each other over cold-drink and snacks. It was a successful event with around 80-90 participants.

Next meet will focus on how to take your idea/ product into the market.

About the Author – Vishwa Vivek Garg

Vishwa has 11 yrs. of rich web development experience in which he has worked at various levels from software engineer to project manager. He has worked with startups as well as well-established software companies. He loves the startup culture and tries to help the ecosystem. He has managed startup meets in Pune, India for more than a year through Startup Saturday Pune Chapter.

Vishwa co-founded eventNu.com as a hobby project and it helps him understand various aspects of running a business. He is very hopeful that this will help him in his journey towards entrepreneurship.

He consults with startups on development and business strategy.

Event Report: TechWeekend Pune 7 – Mobile Application Development

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TechWeekend Pune 7, on Mobile Application Development was held on Saturday, 19th Feb. These are the live-tweets, collected here for your benefit. Remember, they are live-tweets that were being typed while the event was happening, so they’re not necessarily as coherent and as well-organized as a regular article.

Windows Phone 7 by Mayur Tendulkar

The first talk was by Mayur Tendulkar talking about Windows Phone 7

  • This talk is a basic overview of Windows Phone 7. Important now, because Nokia has now thrown its weight behind it.
  • “If windows is not behaving well, you format your drive and start again. MSFT did same with its Mobile OS. Win Phone 7 is completely new”
  • Mobile phone world suffers from large number of devices of different resolutions that behave differently. This is not true of Win Mobile 7. Windows Phone 7 insists on a standardized hardware & screen configuration. So your Win Phone 7 will always look and behave the same.
    • WinPhone7 screen config: 480×800 or 320×480. No other sizes allowed. S-LCD/AMOLED capacitive touchscreen. 4-point multi-touch
    • WinPhone7 will always have these sensors: A-GPS, proximity sensor, accelerometer, compass, light.
    • All WinPhone7 devices must have these three buttons: Start, Back, Search. (As usual, to shutdown, you press Start 🙂
  • App Development for WinPhone7: regular apps using Silverlight, and game apps using XNA.
    • “Silverlight is just like Flash”. Modern app UI framework. Apparently has 500,000 developers spanning windows, web (and now mobile)
    • Visit the Tata Nano site or the Hard Rock Cafe New York site to see some cool uses of Silverlight
    • The XNA framework for game development is mature and widely accepted – because it was in XBox 360, Windows and Zune.
  • WinPhone7 developers get all the goodness of Visual Studio for developing mobile apps with Visual Studio 2010 Express for WP.
  • Other developer tools: Silverlight Dev Kit. XNA Game Studio 4.0. Expression Blend 4.0. Also VB for WinPhone7.
  • All these development tools for WinPhone7 are free.

This was followed by a walk through of building a WinPhone7 app using Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight.

Some interesting audience Q&A:

  • Q: What languages are supported for WinPhone7 development? A: At this point, only Visual Basic and C#
  • Q: Does WinPhone7 support multi-tasking. A: No. Some standard system services can run in the background; but apps don’t multitask.

Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development by Rohit Ghatol

Next up: Rohit Ghatol talking about cross-platform mobile app development using phonegap, titanium etc.

  • Two ways of developing cross-platform apps. 1. Develop html5 apps for webkit. 2. Use a translator that translates your app to native code.
  • For now, all major mobile platforms have a webkit based browser (except WinPhone7). So writing an app targeting webkit is “cross-platform”
  • Q: Will a webkit based app work with WinPhone7? A: No. But Mango release of WinPhone7 will support html5, so you should be close.
  • Translating common codebase to different native apps – Titanium. Write in JavaScript, and translate to Native.
  • PhoneGap = HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript + special ability to make calls to access phone sensors etc.
    • Note: HTML5/CSS3 development for mobile apps works because all phone browsers are much more advanced on this issue than desktop browsers
    • Features supported by phonegap: accelerometer, camera, compass, contacts, file io, geolocation, audio recording, sound, vibration, storage. Note: not all these features are supported on all mobile phone platforms
    • PhoneGap prerequisites: Need to be a html/javascript expert. Also, it doesn’t help you with UI, you need to be able to develop that
    • So with PhoneGap app development, you’ll probably be doing UIs by using JQueryUI or something like that.
    • Note: PhoneGap ultimately creates a native app that users install. Not just a website that they visit in the browser.
  • At this point, Rohit, showed actual PhoneGap code for a mobile app – to write an app that shows a google map of my current location.
  • Big challenge of PhoneGap is that you need to bring your own UI development framework. This is an advantage also! – PhoneGap allows you to have same UI framework for website as well as your mobile app.
  • Rohit’s suggestions for UI framework – 1. GWT 2. jQueryMobile
  • With Titanium, you write apps in Javascript. This is interpreted by MozillaRhino on Android, and by Webkit JavascriptCore on iOS
    • You have two different directories for images – one for Android, & one for iPhone, because they handle images differently.
    • iPhone requires just one size of images. Android allows different images for different screen sizes/resolutions/orientations.
    • Titanium problem – layout is absolute. For people used to the great layout capabilities of Android, this is a big step down
    • Titanium uses native UI (iPhone and Android), where are PhoneGap uses non-native (html/css) UI. Former gives better experience…
  • PhoneGap/Titanium both use Javascript Interpretation, so both can’t do multi-threaded apps
  • Building your own webkit based cross-platform framework makes sense if you want to overcome limitations of phonegap/titanium.
  • This won’t be as clean as phonegap/titanium, but might be good for your specific case. Steal phonegap/titanium code if required!
  • Comparison of PhoneGap vs Titanium. Titanium more proprietary, limited UI, …
    html5/css3/javascript is the future; but not there yet. Until then, write to webkit specs…

Android Performance Tuning by Anand Hariharan

Next speaker was Anand Hariharan talking about Android Performance tuning.

  • For app performance: first focus on what the user wants, don’t just improve performance for the sake of improving performance. Optimize only after measuring performance, and having specific performance goals. A lot of performance tuning, is really about managing user perception. When doing something that will take time, keep user engaged.
  • Don’t optimize everything for performance – you don’t have the time. Focus on the most important user visible features and fix those. In mobile world – reduce features and use the time saved on fixing performance.
  • Manage user perception better: e.g. Apple’s use of loading a bitmap image of app at beginning to give impression that app has loaded. At app startup time, load a bitmap that looks like your app without the latest data. Gives impression that app load is fast.
  • Performance tips: All platforms have a “recommended best practices” doc. Read that – many developers dont 🙂 e.g. Android best practice: for tasks that take time, use a background service (not an activity).
  • Anand talking about how to avoid an “Application Not Responding” (ANR) dialog for your app
    • An android app is single-threaded. So don’t do io (network or disk) synchronously. Use an async mechanism.
  • Keep activities small. Don’t overload activities. Use different activities to do different things.
  • Use the minimum number of views. Do not use a deeply nested view hierarchy. Your view hierarchy shouldn’t be more than 3 levels deep. If you’re views are getting complicated, consider writing custom views.
  • Track memory allocations. Garbage collection happening during user activity causes slowdowns.
  • Close your cursors. Otherwise garbage collector cannot reclaim memory. Then you get GC cycles, and slowdowns.
  • use onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() to retain large amounts of data between device orientation changes (landscape to portrait)
  • Use SoftReferences to cache data so that the garbage collector can reclaim the memory when required.
  • Avoid database writes as far as possible. Writes take 5ms to 200ms. And full SD card has slower writes.
  • Avoid using data from mutiple tables in a single list (AdapterView). First copy data from multiple tables to a single table and show that. e.g. in Email app, subject and body came from different tables. This really slowed down the inbox view (which shows first line of body).
  • Tools to help with android app optimization: Fix your views using: hierarchyviewer, layoutopt. Check flow & times using: traceview. Use zipalign to optimize your apk (improves app load time).
  • Above all, you must understand what you’re optimizing and why. Measure, measure, measure.

TechWeekend7 (#tw7): Mobile Application Development – 19 Feb

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TechWeekend 7 (#tw7) will focus on Mobile Application Development, and we have these talks lined up:

  • Application Development for Windows Phone 7 & Marketplace – by Mayur Tendulkar. With Nokia throwing all its weight behind Windows Phone 7 for all its smartphones, Windows Phone 7 has suddenly become a much more important platform than it was before. Get an overview of what Windows Phone 7 is in this talk. Mayur works on various mobile and location aware technologies at Zevenseas India. Click here for Mayur’s full background
  • Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development – by Rohit Ghatol. With the smartphone market becoming increasingly fragmented, frameworks like PhoneGap and Titanium are becoming popular as means of writing an app just once and deploying it across different mobile platforms. Rohit will talk about his experiences with using PhoneGap/Titanium, and will also touch upon how you could create your own cross-platform framework. Rohit is an associated architect for QuickOffice – the mobile office software suite. Click here for Rohit’s full background
  • Performance Tuning for Android Applications – by Anand Hariharan. Performance is a very critical factor for success of a mobile app, since cellphones are still under-powered as compared to the desktops. This talk will cover Java/Android performance tips, best practices; benchmarking and tracing tools, and what areas to look at in your app for improving performance. Anand is Director of Engineering–Product Development at the India office of Android-based tablet software maker TapNTap. Click here for Anand’s full background
  • Using HTML5/CSS3 for Mobile App development – Arnab Chakraborty. HTML5 is fast becoming an alternative to native apps for mobile app development. This talk will cover the specific features of HTML5 and of CSS3 that make it appropriate for development of mobile apps. Arnab is a senior developer at Thoughtworks. Click here for Arnab’s full profile

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

About Techweekend

TechWeekend Pune is a volunteer run activity. TechWeekend talks are held on the 3rd Saturday of every month from 10am to 2pm at Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, ICC Trade Center, SB Road. Each TechWeekend event features 3 or 4 talks on advanced technical topics. These events are free for all to attend. See PuneTech articles about past techweekends to get an idea of the events.

Join the techweekend mailing list to keep in touch with the latest TechWeekend activities.

About the Sponsor – Microsoft

Many thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring the venue for Techweekend. Microsoft wants to get more closely involved with the tech community in Pune, and particularly the open source enthusiasts – with the intention of making everybody aware that their cloud technologies (like Azure) actually play well with open source, and that you can deploy your php applications, your drupal/joomla installs on Azure.

Register

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

Profile: Harshad Oak – Conferences, Tech Portals, and bringing technology to NGOs

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(In this article, Nina Mukherji profiles Harshad Oak, who is very active in the tech community in Pune, who has done many things rather different from what most software technologists usually do, and who has started a number of interesting initiatives. Specifically, we would like to draw our readers’ attention to the TechNoProfits initiative, and his work with the Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti, which, we hope, at least some of our readers will get involved with.)

Harshad Oak has always chosen the road less travelled. After completing Computer Management in 2001 he worked for IT firms like I-flex & Cognizant for about two years. But he’d always felt a strong urge to venture out and do something on his own. He wrote tech based articles for many newspapers and magazines and even managed to get a number of certifications under his belt.

Harshad then decided to quit his job and set up Rightrix Solutions, a software development firm. By this time, he had also authored a few books on Java and Oracle. This gave him additional credibility and helped him land some good projects for his newly set up firm.

He was invited to participate and speak at various technology conferences abroad. This made him realize the criticality of having such forums in India – such independent conferences were non-existent till then. So with zero experience in the field, he launched the first Annual IndicThreads Conference on Java in 2006. After that they have had many more conferences in the different areas like Mobile Application Development, Upcoming Technology & Software Quality.

Now Rightrix does IT research and advisory services, software outsourcing services, technology portal (IndicThreads), 4 different and technology conferences every year.

Another recent initiative on his part has been starting TechnoProfits – a non-profit entity dedicated to connecting software professionals and NGOs. TechnoProfits enables volunteers to make a positive contribution to society and also come out feeling enriched from the experience. Harshad believes that technology today can connect and enhance lives like never before. “However, most non-profit organisations use no technology beyond making calls from a cell phone. The overwhelming majority of organizations run on passion & dedication but no technology” says Harshad. Please register as a volunteer.

Being of an analytical and rational mind, Harshad abhors superstitious and credulous behaviour. That a ring or pendant will ensure success or modifying their homes so that a bathroom faces X direction will end marital disputes were beliefs that left Harshad feeling frustrated and irritated. “A bathroom door can affect my health only if I accidentally bang into it” he jokes. But this was a serious matter to him and he decided to do something about it.

He started working with Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (ANiS) a 20 year old organisation. Though they have done remarkable work in Maharashtra towards eradicating blind faith and promoting scientific temperament amongst the youth, Harshad believes that technology awareness is very low. “At the recent ANiS 20 year anniversary event, more than a thousand people from all over Maharashtra turned up, but I probably was the only one using the web and writing about the event on my smartphone. I have been pushing for some kind of an Internet awareness workshop so that the ANiS team can not only leverage the net to reach more people but also be able to convey it’s point of view swiftly and accurately” says Harshad

In order to address this need, TechnoProfits is conducting an Internet Awareness Workshop for ANiS this Saturday the 19th of February (1-5 pm). The topics for the workshop include Internet Basics, Search, Email, Chat, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Using Indian languages Online, and How to make best use of the Internet for social work. Harshad told me: “While the workshop is planned for ANiS, anyone else wishing to use this learning for social good is most welcome”

(You can get in touch with Harshad by emailing harshad aT rightrix doT com)