All posts by Navin Kabra

Event: “How to think like an MIT Media Lab Inventor” by Dr. Raskar of Media Lab – 10 July

Prof Ramesh Raskar, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and head of the Camera Culture research group at MIT Media Lab, will give a talk on “How to think like an MIT Media Lab Inventor” at COEP, on 10 July (tomorrow) from 11am to 12noon. (Note: the talk has been kept early to ensure that you will not get stuck in Palkhi traffic restrictions. There is parking at the venue)

Normally, I am not a fan of talk on “innovation”. But in this case, I would make an exception. Ramesh Raskar, has been involved in a number of innovations that are, to me, mindblowing. Like, the camera that can see around corners, visualizing individual photons in motion by recording video at a trillion frames per second, and much other such research. But, in addition to such high tech work, he is also looking at the bottom of the pyramid. For example, EyeNetra is a cheap (less than Rs. 100) accessory that anyone can snap on to an Android smartphone and use for detecting cataracts and other vision problems in places like rural India.

Most recently, he has started an initiative to bring innovation to solve real world urbanization problems in smaller towns in developing countries. This is Kumbhathon, which has been running in Nashik for the last few years.

Raskar is an alumnus of College of Engineering Pune.

The topic of this talk is to discuss Prof Raskar’s idea hexagon to let you build your own innovations the Media Lab way. Having been an inventor of 50 plus patents and author of numerous international publications, Prof Raskar proposes an idea hexagon that allows anyone to build game changing innovations.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1603875396527164/.

Event Details

  • Date: Friday 10th July
  • Time: 11 am to 12 noon (Updated timing)
  • Venue: CoEP mini auditorium near boat club
  • Fees and Registration: This event is free, and open for anyone to attend. Please register here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1603875396527164/

Intel & DST’s Launch Event for Startup Acceleration Programme (Pune/Bangalore) – 20 May

Pune’s startup community, and other technology innovators, are invited by Intel Corp., IIM-Ahmedabad’s CIIE, and the Government of India’s DST, to an event to launch the Intel and DST – Innovate for Digital India Challenge, at 11am on Wednesday, 20th May, at Westin Pune.

This event will feature Dr. Gopichand Katragadda, CTO of TATA Sons, Mr. Sachin Kelkar, Head – Developer & Partner Program (APAC), Intel India & other dignitaries.

The event will launch the Digital India Challenge – which is essentially an accelerator/funding/grant/mentorship program for startups in Pune and Bangalore. The program offers startups the following:

  • 3-month accelerator program in Pune and Bengaluru
  • Access to grants and equity investments of up to Rs. 1.5cr
  • Product kits based on Intel architecture to develop MVPs
  • Industry connect across various phases
  • Mentorship, field immersion, and productization opportunity

For more details about the program, see http://www.innovatefordigitalindia.intel.in/.

The launch event on Wednesday morning at the Westin is a free event. Please register here

Event: The Future of Scale Out Storage – by Ken Claffey VP&GM @ Seagate – 2 March

Seagate Technology, in conjunction with PuneTech and Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) presents a talk on The Future of Scale Out Storage by Ken Claffey, VP & GM of the Storage Systems Group at Seagate Technologies, on Monday, 2nd March, at 6pm, in Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

Abstract of the Talk

Big Data is changing the nature of storage infrastructure, traditional SAN and NAS systems are becoming obsolete. This disruption is creating opportunities for next generation scale out storage systems and converged infrastructure. Seagate as the world’s preeminent supplier of Disks Drives and Storage enclosures has a unique view point of this transition and the technology underpinnings that will be the foundation of a new data infrastructure designed to meet the challenges of big data. Seagate will present its view on this transition from the storage I/O device level all the way up the I/O stack to the application layer.

About the Speaker – Ken Claffey

Ken Claffey is Vice President and General Manager of Seagate’s Clusterstor™ HPC & Big Data business. Mr. Claffey led Seagate’s HPC initiative that started in 2009 and has led the successful execution of this strategy ever since. Mr. Claffey has also held senior management roles in Business Management, System Architecture, Business Development and Product Management functions at Xyratex, a storage and HPC technology company that was later acquired by Seagate. Prior to that, he held management positions at Adaptec and Eurologic Systems where he established and grew new businesses.

Venue

The event is from 6pm to 7pm on Monday, 2nd March, at the Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, Senapati Bapat Road.

Fees and registration

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

Open Source Job/Internship Mela (14 Feb) and Startup Job/Internship Mela (16 Feb) in Pune

GNUnify one of India’s biggest open source software conferences is happening in Pune this weekend (13-14 February). Immediately after that is Chrysalis, a startup/entrepreneurship event organized by SICSR.

As part of these two events, two job fairs (for students who have graduated, or will graduate this year) and two internship fairs (for students who are just looking for a 6-month internship) have been organized.

The first job/internship mela, on 14th Feb, is part of GNUnify and is for companies who work using free/open source software. The second one, on 16th Feb, is for startups.

Students from various colleges in Pune, and also from the rest of India will be present. This is a great opportunity to pick up students who are passionate about open source and/or startup.

Companies who wish to participate in one or both of these job/internship melas, please get in touch with Ms. Priyanjana Das: 07038066433, Ph: 020 25675601 Ext: 133, or write to placements@sicsr.ac.in.

Note: these events are being held in association with GNUnify, ARSH, POCC, NEN and Chrysalis

Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities Jürgen Mössinger

(This is a liveblog of SEAP’s event where Jürgen Mössinger of Bosch talked about “Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities”)

About the Speaker

Jürgen Mössinger is the Head of Business Unit at Robert Bosch Engineering and
Business Solutions, India. He has an extensive background in embedded SW, IT and product development. He has been with Bosch since the last 19 years. Jürgen headed several positions in platform and customer product development for control units and was the spokesperson of the AUTOSAR Consortium in 2008. Currently he is heading a business unit at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, responsible for products, services and solutions in the areas of Consumer Goods, Industrial Technology, Energy and Building Technology and Automotive Electronics. Beside the classical areas, Juergen is working on Smart Home, Smart City and Connected Industry (Industry 4.0).

About Bosch

Bosch group is a 40+ billion euro company with 280000 employees and 225 manufacturing sites. Automotive technology is their biggest sector, but they’re also in industrial sector, energy and building technoloyg, consumer goods – all over the world.

About the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the term given to small computing devices embedded in anything an everything around us which will all be collecting data about their environment and which will be connected to the internet – allowing for data collection and analysis at a scale never before seen, and of course fine-grained control of the environment.

Things, in the IoT, can refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric clams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, or field operation devices that assist fire-fighters in search and rescue. Current market examples include smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers that utilize wifi for remote monitoring.

Opportunities and Challenges in IoT

Here is a random collection of interesting points made during the presentation:

  • By 2020, 50 Billion devices will be connected to the internet. This forms the basis of IOT
  • IoT will be everywhere. Huge potential: Smart Cities, Smart Homes, Smart Industry, Smart Wearables, Logistics (e.g. transport fleets, tracking)
  • More than two thirds of consumers expect to buy IoT devices for their homes by 2019, and nearly half expect to buy wearable technology
  • The wearables market is expected to have reached $1.5 billion in 2014
  • By 2020 there will be over 100 million light bulbs and lamps worldwide that will be connected to the internet wirelessly
  • Just 1% improvement in an industrial setting via use of IoT can result in billions of savings in operational costs
    • $30B fuel cost saving in aviation industry
    • $66B fuel cost saving in gas powered fleets
    • $63B productivity improvement in healthcare
    • $90B reduction in capital expenditure in oil and gas exploration and development
    • $27B productivity improvement in rail industry

Examples of IoT usage in Smart Homes:

  • Appliance Information available on the cloud/smartphones
  • Appliances operate automatically / efficiently
    • Through the use of scheduling or historical patterns or sensors
  • Control House from Anywhere:
    • Customer is aware and fine-tunes the settings from anywhere

What all does IoT need?

  • Sensors: heat, temperature, light and various other things
  • Long battery life; can’t go around the house changing/charging batteries all the time
  • GPS
  • Local Network, Global Network
  • Software to tie it all together

IoT means Big Data:

  • 4.5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day
  • Youtube users upload 100 hours of new video every minute
  • By 2019 we’ll have 9.2 billion mobile phones
  • iTunes receives about 100 billion app downloads in one quarter
  • Huge in 3 different dimensions:
    • Volume: Raw amount of data generated
    • Velocity: speed with which the data is generated
    • Variety: the various different sources and types of data (sensor data, text, images, videos). Some of the data is structured and lot of it is unstructured.
  • We will need next generation algorithms and tools to make sense of all this data so that we can generate usable insights
    • Software and Algorithms
    • Data Modelers
    • Data Visualizers
    • Data Architects
    • Business Analysts

Actual examples of IoT usage by Bosch:

  • Fleet Management: 10% reduction of fuel cost per trip in underperforming routes – this was in Bangalore
  • 25% reduction of testing time in Manufacturing
  • 33% reduction in calibration cost of hybrid ECUs in automotive calibration
  • 15% reduction in inventory holding costs in a supply chain

Smart Cities:

  • This is a difficult area
  • Lots of countries/cities claiming that they want to become smart
    • Narendra Modi has also announced Smart Cities initiative in India
      based on the PPP model (Public Private Partnership)
  • Main problem is that these smart city initiatives do not have a business model. The investment has to be made by someone (the city, or the company in the PPP) and the benefits are reaped by others (the citizens). There is no direct return on investment for the investor
  • No city has really solved this problem.

Smart Industry:

  • We have already had 3 industrial revolutions:
    • 1st industrial revolution: the original mechanical industrial revolution
    • 2nd industrial revolution: the assembly line
    • 3rd industrial revolution: electronics
  • Now, with IoT we are ready for the 4th.
    • Smart production: communication between each part and the machine:
      • Dynamic optimization of scheduling of processes and machines
      • Customized processing for each individual product
    • Horizontal Integration
      • Communication between:
        • Parts Suppliers
        • Transportation
        • Within the Factory
      • When all of these are talking to each other and we have data, new optimizations become possible
        • Example: +10 increase in productivity, -30% reduction in stock

(Paid) PuneConnect 2014: Pune’s Largest Startup Showcase Event 8 Nov: Register Today

After 3 successful years, PuneConnect has quickly become one of Pune’s most important events for startups, and it is now back with PuneConnect 2014, the mega event for Pune’s startups to showcase their products and services to the world at large, specifically to larger companies in Pune, VCs and angel investors from all over the country, and others from the ecosystem.

Register today to be part of this show.

30 of Pune’s most promising startups have been selected from a huge pool of applicants, and they will be joining some of Pune’s established startups and companies in showcasing their products at the Westin, on 8th November from 9:30am to 2pm.

The keynote speech will be by Sharad Sharma, ex-MD of Yahoo! India, ex-MD of Veritas/Symantec Pune, and now an angel investor with 30+ investments and one of the driving forces behind iSPIRT, the national level forum for India’s software product startups. Dr. Omkar Rai, Director General of the Software and Technology Parks of India, and who has worked in various capacities with the Central Government, will also be speaking.

This is an ideal event to connect with the who’s who of the Pune Startup ecosystem. You will find lots of startup founders, successful senior entrepreneurs, potential recruits, angels and investors from all over, potential customers, mentors, business partners, affiliates, and investors from all parts of Pune’e startup and technology ecosystem – including SEAP, PuneTech, TiE Pune, PoCC, MCCIA, IPMA, HIA, IIMA’s CIIE, and SME Joinup.

Agenda

  • 09.00a.m Registration
  • 09.30a.m Welcome Note, Also, Start-up Alley (Demo Room) Open
  • 09.45a.m Guest of Honor
  • 10.00a.m Book Launch
  • 10.15a.m Keynote by Sharad Sharma, Co-founder Ispirt & CEO BrandSigma
  • 10.50a.m Panel Discussion: “Cloud and Mobility: Reason to Cheer or Fear?”
    • Suhar Kelkar: CTO BMC
    • Mukul Mukar, Co-Founder Pubmatic
    • K Vishwanathan: VP Operations, Eaton
    • Ankur Agarwal: CEO, Clarion Technologies
    • Nandu Kulkarni: Independent Consultant, Banking & Payments Tech
  • 11.45a.m Break. Also: Registration for Ispirt Roundtable
  • 12.00p.m How do we Support Startups?
  • 12.45p.m Lunch Break
  • 1.45p.m Student Entry Opens. Also: VC RoundTable starts
  • 2.30p.m On-stage Startup Shootout
  • 3.30p.m TiE Nurture Startups Presentation
  • 4.30p.m Awards
  • 5.00p.m Show Ends

Background

PuneConnect started in 2011 and is held in late October/early November every year. In 2011 we showcased 12 startups, and had attendance of about 250. In 2012, we showcased 21 startups, and had to close delegate registrations at 600 because of space limitations. In 2013, we showcased 27 startups, out of 104 applications, and had to close registrations at 1055 due to space limitations. Click here for more information about past PuneConnect events.

PuneConnect is a joint initiative of Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), TiE Pune, PuneStartups.org (POCC), PuneTech, and NASSCOM, SME Joinup, CIIE Ahmedabad, and MCCIA Pune, IPMA, Hinjewadi Industries Association, and IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE (which will soon have an Pune presence) – basically all the important players in Pune’s startup ecosystem. PuneConnect represents a one-of-its-kind activity that bridges the gap between the new companies and the established ones.

Entries to other prestigious events: Companies featured in PuneConnect have been selected to be on TV (e.g. an episode ETNow Channel’s Starting Up show), or in national-level conferences (e.g. one organized by Zinnov), where they got to demo their products to companies from all over India, or for mentorship programs (like the TiE Pune Nurture Initiative), or even got funding (e.g. AppSurfer, a company from the first PuneConnect that got Rs. 1 crore in funding on the SuperAngels show) – all as a result of being featured on PuneConnect.

Some of our past winners will also be featured at the show.

Fees and Registration

This event costs Rs. 1000 if you want to be part of the lunch, Rs. 500 if you want to just attend the event, and is free for students with a college ID card.

The event is from 9:30am to 2pm at the Westin, Pune.

Register here

Converged Infrastructure: Talk by Bala Ganeshan, CTO QLogic

This is a live-blog of an event organized by Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), in which Dr. Bala Ganeshan, Vice President and CTO of QLogic Corporation talked about Converged Infrastructure, which has also been called as Integrated Systems, or Unified Computing Systems. Specifically, he focused on the idea of having compute, storage and networking into one preconfigured package which can be delivered to the data center. This approach provides a major transition that complements the shift to cloud and virtualized computing. These trends together with new I/O centric applications and solid state storage have the potential to revolutionize computing. Many IT organizations have started using converged infrastructure for various reasons ranging from centralized management of IT resources to consolidation to lowering costs. Gartner estimated the growth by more than 50% in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion. Another research firm IDC estimates that, total worldwide spending on converged infrastructure will hit $17.8 billion in 2016.

The evolution of IT infrastructure for the data center

  • Initial system implementations for “open” infrastructure were inflexible, had CPUs with limited power, networking that was slow and unreliable, and storage was captive – it wasn’t easy to share data.
  • SANs (Storage Area Networks) evolved to address these limitations. Here, the data and storage was divorced from the servers, and powerful and flexible standalone storage systems were set up that could be accessed by any servers from anywhere else on the network. But SANs are complex and expensive, required specialised skills, relative high effort to provision new infrastructure, and ended up requiring lots of efforts to manage operationally in large environments. Over time, interoperability between different pieces of the SAN became more and more difficult.
  • Converged Infrastructure was a response to the problems with SAN. The focus of the new systems was ease of use, faster time to deployment, and ease of management.

Factors that drove the disruption of SANs and IT infrastructure:

  • Web Scale: Suddenly, the requirements on the IT infrastructure grew by orders of magnitude, requiring radically different solutions and architectures
  • Open Source: Putting pressure on proprietary solutions
  • Software Defined Networking in particular, and in general Software Defined Everything
  • Storage Scale-out: more storage generated in the last 2 years than the history of computing before that.
  • Server vendors started incorporating storage in their offerings
  • Storage vendors started building intelligence and apps in their hardware

Converged Infrastructure

  • No end user specialized skills required. No zoning, no LUN masking.
  • Automated provisioning: use of single-click, drag-n-drop interfaces for creating new storage and associating it with servers and applications
  • Tightly integrated management
  • Focused on application deployment: the business doesn’t really care about disks and LUNs and servers. They care about their sales orders, and websites, and SAP instances. So all management and deployment should be in terms of the applications, and the details of the underlying infrastructure should be hidden, and automatically handled by the system
  • Combines compute, network, and storage resources
  • Improves time to deploy new applications

Not all of these goals are easy to achieve, but any progress on any of these parameters is a huge improvement.

There are three approaches to converged infrastructure.

  • SAN based infrastructure
    • Where servers and storage an infrastructure unit contains a bunch of servers and the storage is hidden under the servers, and the servers expose virtualized storage
    • This gives a flexible architecture. Servers and storage can be expanded independently
    • Reduction in OpEx
    • Management is convoluted, and is at the level of the virtualized storage
  • Appliance:
    • Here hardware appliances contain both storage as well as compute nodes
    • The convergence across appliances is provided via a software management layer
    • Provides an Application Centric view to the users
    • Fixed granularity of scale – need to add appliances; can’t scale the storage without scaling the compute, and vice versa
  • Open Source Technologies:
    • The kinds of technology being built/used by Facebook/Google
    • This is currently a small fraction of the worldwide infrastructure
      market

A lot of small startups are playing in the “Appliance” space, because the ease of management is an important consideration in the SMB market. Larger, more established companies are doing SAN based converged infrastructure.

Other Points

Here is a random collection of interesting points made during the discussion, captured in no particular order:

  • Although the impact of the cloud has been growing, enterprises have still been slow to adopt the cloud. Security is one of the problems, but also the need to move lots of data across the network is a bottleneck. So, private clouds are getting good traction; and Microsoft is one of the companies that is responding quite well to this demand.
  • For now, applications like SAP will continue to be in-house and will not easily move to the cloud. This is notwithstanding the fact that SAP does run on the cloud – it’s just not an ideal setup. Initially, the applications that are moving to the cloud are things like websites, mobile apps, and other low-hanging fruit.

Panel Discussion

There was a panel discussion on converged infrastructure. The panelists were:

  • Aalop Shah: Technical Director at Druva; handling the laptop backup product.
  • Maneesh Bhandari: Angel Investor.
  • Nitin Deshpande: President, Allscripts India.
  • Viswanthan K: Vice President, Corporate IT, APAC, at Eaton Corp
  • Yogesh Zope: Group CIO for Bharat Forge Limited, and CEO of Kalyani Technologies.

Here are some of the comments made by the panelists:

  • Yogesh: For years, different companies have called this concept by different names. And yet, it is still not something that is really useful for a company like Kalyani. Converged Infrastructure and all this flexibility might be useful for a company that needs to handle big data and lots of unpredictability as far as the storage and compute requirements are concerned, but that is not really an issue for many companies. So we’re happy with the old style infrastructure. Another important point is that the whole issue of “manageability” is more of a consideration in the west. In India, talent is much cheaper, and we don’t have the same problems.
  • Bala: The needs and the trade-offs in the Indian market might be different. While some of the problems being solved by the current players in the converged infrastructure might not be pain-point in India, there are other problems that are faced here. So while the current players are not really addressing those requirements, at some point they’ll start addressing India and then they might make inroads in the market.
  • Vish: One of the aspects of this that has not yet been addressed is the power requirements. The data-center requires a lot of power, and the requirements of a converged infrastructure data-center are unique. We (i.e. Eaton) are now playing in this space, and providing “convergence” not just at the level of the software/hardware infrastructure, but at the level of the entire physical data-center, including the power.

PuneConnect 2014: Startup Showcase Event for Pune’s Startups: Apply Now

After 3 successful years, PuneConnect has quickly become one of Pune’s most important events for startups, and it is now back with PuneConnect 2014, the mega event for Pune’s startups to showcase their products and services to the world at large, specifically to larger companies in Pune, VCs and angel investors from all over the country, and others from the ecosystem. PuneConnect 2014 will be on 8th November 2014, and the idea behind the event is to allow the best startups in Pune a platform where they can find customers, mentors, business partners, affiliates, and investors amongst Pune’s established companies, successful senior entrepreneurs, and angels and investors from all over.

This event is free for startups selected by PuneConnect. If you are unsure of whether this event is appropriate for you or not, please go ahead and apply, and our selection committee will figure out whether you’re a good fit or not.

Any startup company from Pune or nearby areas, who has a product that they would like to demo, should submit a proposal at http://db.PuneConnect.com. A panel of selectors drawn from experts in the industry will select the most promising startups who will be allowed to set up a demo at PuneConnect on 8th November 2014.

Benefits to selected startups include:

  • Exposure to Pune’s top companies, potential customers and potential mentors
  • Exposure to Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors who are being
    invited to the event
  • Press and media coverage before and after the event
  • Winners of the event get automatic entries to other country-level events (e.g. those organized by NASSCOM)

PuneConnect started in 2011 and is held in late October/early November every year. In 2011 we showcased 12 startups, and had attendance of about 250. In 2012, we showcased 21 startups, and had to close delegate registrations at 600 because of space limitations. In 2013, we showcased 27 startups, out of 104 applications, and had to close registrations at 1055 due to space limitations. Click here for more information about past PuneConnect events.

Media Coverage: Economic Times, Indian Express, The Financial Express, the Financial Chronicle, Business Standard, and the top Marathi newspapers Sakal and Maharashtra Times all carried detailed articles about PuneConnect and the companies. All 12 companies got mentions in various articles. Click here for more information about media coverage resulting from PuneConnect.

PuneConnect is a joint initiative of Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), TiE Pune, PuneStartups.org (POCC), PuneTech, and NASSCOM, SME Joinup, CIIE Ahmedabad, and MCCIA Pune – basically all the important players in Pune’s startup ecosystem. PuneConnect represents a one-of-its-kind activity that bridges the gap between the new companies and the established ones.

Entries to other prestigious events: Companies featured in PuneConnect have been selected to be on TV (e.g. an episode ETNow Channel’s Starting Up show), or in national-level conferences (e.g. one organized by Zinnov), where they got to demo their products to companies from all over India, or for mentorship programs (like the TiE Pune Nurture Initiative), or even got funding (e.g. AppSurfer, a company from the first PuneConnect that got Rs. 1 crore in funding on the SuperAngels show) – all as a result of being featured on PuneConnect.

Apply now. It costs nothing.

Barcamp Pune is Back: 27 Sept #BCP8

What is a BarCamp

A BarCamp is an unconference. Basically, it is a crowd-sourced conference; which means that the date, time and theme of the conference are announced but the actual talks and speakers are not decided until the day of the conference itself. On the morning of the conference, a whiteboard is put up with the rooms and speaking slots, and anyone who feels like talking on any topic (that is in line with the theme of the conference) can add their topic and name to any of the open slots.

And then people are encouraged to go to any talk they find interesting, and use the “Law of Two Feet” – i.e. if a talk is not interesting, walk out, and go to the next talk, or start your own informal talk in the corridors.

What this really does is that you get a much more dynamic and diverse conference. The speakers and topics are not the same old ghisa-pita stuff – You discover new topics and new speakers and make new friends. You find enthusiastic and genuinely interested people – not corporate types who attend because their company requires them to attend.

More about Barcamp Pune

BarCamp is happening in Pune after a gap of about 6 years and we are expecting that this time around BarCamp Pune 8 will be more focused on early-stage web and mobile apps. However, the BarCamp is open for a variety of other topics, including healthcare, education, banking, real estate, Social Media, lifestyle, Auto, Aeroplanes, environment, Police, Anti-terrorism, Songs, Movies, Books, etc. Practically anything and everything under the sun (and even beyond) can be discussed in BarCamp.

What Should you expect?

Apart from networking and meeting people from various walks of life in different sectors, a BarCamp is probably the only place where ideas evolve during the course of the event. Nothing is planned in a BarCamp – Every participant has right to talk on the subject they love (and think that others may also like). While this format can be chaotic sometimes, it also opens doors to something you may never have known or been exposed to in an event.

And yes, BMC Software, the place where we are hosting the event have sponsored us with Free Lunch and beverages.

BCP8 Details

  • Where: BMC Software, Wing 1, Tower ‘B’, Business Bay, Airport Road, Yerwada, Pune
  • When: 27th Sep 2014 (Saturday) 10:00 to 5:00pm
  • *Map: http://bit.ly/BarCampPune8

Venue Instructions

BMC Software office is based in a large complex and the participants of the event need to follow certain rules and regulations. Please read below carefully.

  • While arriving from Yerwada, the venue is on your right and if you are coming from Airport it is on your left.
  • When you reach the building, use gate #3 to go to Parking level 2.
  • 2 wheelers & 4 wheelers must enter through Gate #3
  • Pedestrians can enter through Gate#3 or Gate #4
  • Tell the security you are going to “Barcamp at BMC software”

Keep in Mind

  • Being an IT company, registration is important
  • To facilitate that, online registration for the event is a MUST
  • Due to security reasons, you’ll be asked to provide laptop serial number etc. at reception. Do not carry if not necessary
  • If you want to talk on something and need presentation, do carry your own laptop.
  • Internet connections will NOT be provided by the organizers or venue sponsor. Make your own arrangements or talk to volunteers in advance
  • Event will be on 4th floor & lunch will be served on 5th floor
  • Entry will not be allowed on any other floor apart from 4th & 5th

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. However Please register here: http://bcp8.explara.com/

TechMarathi wants tech articles in Marathi for their e-Diwali-ank

TechMarathi.com is a sister site of PuneTech – a site that focuses on publishing technology articles in Marathi for the benefit of people who are not yet entirely comfortable in English, but would still like to stay abreast of the latest in technology.

This year, in the time-honoured tradition of Marathi periodicals, TechMarathi is planning a “Diwali Ank” – a Diwali Special “bumper” edition of articles.

If you are a techie who can write in Marathi, please consider contributing an article. You can even translate an existing English article to Marathi – even that can be quite valueable.

The article can be humorous, informative, experience sharing, or a short story. It can be an article, poem, cartoon, or any other form of content. Please send short articles of about 250-300 words, or longer ones of 400-500 words.

Please get in touch with pallavi@techmarathi.com for details.