All posts by Navin Kabra

Technical Seminar on Sun’s ZFS (file system) from KQInfoTech

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What: Technical seminar on ZFS (file-system) from Sun, presented by KQInfoTech
When: Friday, 9th October, 6pm-8pm
Where: Sadanand Regency, Opposite Balewadi Stadium, Bangalore Highway (note: this is not the same as Sadanand Restaurant)
Registration and Fees: This seminar is free for all to attend. You must register to attend.

Sun Microsystems
Image via Wikipedia

On ZFS Technologies

KQInfoTech invites everybody interested in storage and systems to join them in a discussion of ZFS from Sun. This is the second talk in the series. The first talk had discussed various features of ZFS and introduced basic of ZFS, while this seminar we will be attempting to take a deeper plunge into ZFS, trying to look at various aspects of ZFS architecture and getting a better understanding of the same.

However, it is not necesssary to have attended the first seminar to be able to attend this one. There will be a quick refresher for those who missed out on the first one, to bring everyone up to speed on the basics of ZFS.

There are no fees for participation. However in view of limited seats, prior registration is crucial.

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CORRECTION: ASIC Verification – guest post by Arati Halbe

punechips, , ,

Yesterday’s PuneTech post, “ASIC Verification: Trends and Challenges” was actually a guest post by Arati Halbe. Due to an oversight, I forgot to include the “About the Author” section in the post (in fact, I forgot to include any mention of the fact that the post was by Arati.) I apologize for the oversight.

Arati has close to 9 years experience in ASIC front end design and verification. Post silicon validation and FPGA prototyping is her recent area of interest and expertise. Arati has worked with Wipro Technologies and Conexant Systems. Arati did her B.E. from University of Pune and M.Tech from CEDT, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. See her linked-in profile for more details.

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Drupal Sprint India – 2-day coding event for Drupal developers

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Drupal Sprint India 2009 is a free for all gathering of Drupal enthusiasts from India, who plan to contribute to Drupal development and newbies who want to learn more about Drupal.

Drupal Sprint India will have a non-stop 2 day long sprint where you can contribute by fixing bugs, writing module, documenting upcoming Drupal 7 or helping in translating Drupal to local Indian languages.

Drupal
Click on the image to see all PuneTech articles about Drupal. Image via Wikipedia

Leading the Drupal documentation sprint is Addison Berry, lead of Drupal documentation project. So, if you are a technical writer or you are interested in documenting the best Open source CMS in the world, this is your chance to work with the real experts and learn a trick or two.

For those who love to code, there will be a large gathering of Drupal programmers around the country who will focus on improving upcoming Drupal 7 release by fixing bugs or migrating modules to Drupal 7. Those of you who love to code for Drupal, this is your chance to contribute and gain karma.

But that is not all. There are a few things in store for the non-geeks who love Drupal for its flexibility and extensive nature. Parallel to sprints, there will be talks and workshops to showcase case studies of successful Drupal implementation as well as Drupal’s capabilities beyond a CMS – including Drupal’s ability to integrate with third party softwares such as a CRM, as well as Drupal’s capability to integrate with third party services such as social networking wesbite. So, if you are planning to use Drupal for your next big venture, this is the event for you. Come and meet the best Drupal brains in the country.

So book your calender for October 30-31 2009 and join the gang at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune to be a part of the biggest Drupal event in India ever! And yes, do not forget to register for the event, it will take few minutes only but it will help the organizers in organizing things.

ASIC Verification: Trends and Challenges

In Depth, punechips, Technology, , , , , ,

(This is a guest post for PuneTech by Arati Halbe, who has close to 9 years experience in ASIC front end design and verification. Post silicon validation and FPGA prototyping is her recent area of interest and expertise. Arati has worked with Wipro Technologies and Conexant Systems. Arati did her B.E. from University of Pune and M.Tech from CEDT, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. See Arati’s linked-in profile for more details.)

As the complexity of Integrated Circuits (specifically ASIC and SoC) increases, and as their sizes keep reducing, the task of testing the chip gets more and more challenging. Engineers need to come up with better and different methodologies to ensure what goes to the factory for manufacturing is actually what they intended to deliver. Verification occurs at various stages in the ASIC development cycle. How much is enough at each stage is a problem that needs to be addressed on a case to case basis. A sound knowledge of various techniques and awareness of capabilities and limitations of each technique goes a long way in making decisions about when, where and what.

The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8...
Click on the image to see all PuneChips articles on PuneTech. Image via Wikipedia

Keeping this in mind, PuneChips had verification expert Jagdish Doma talk about “ASIC verification: Trends and Challenges” on 20th August 2009. Though impacted by the H1N1 scare we had a small but diverse audience. Jagdish discussed in detail the strengths and limitations of the various techniques, viz: ESL, Formal verification, Dynamic simulation, FPGA prototyping and Emulation.

ESL or Electronic System Level testing is the newest trend. Supporters of ESL claim that it is a highly powerful system level modeling tool. It enables fast software bring-up if combined with an emulation/FPGA prototyping platform. ESL has been used successfully to validate systems for mobile applications where only one peripheral/application is active on the processor bus. ESL does not seem suitable for systems where multiple processes and interfaces are active simultaneously, like for example in a networking system.

Formal verification, a static verification technique which is mainly assertion based, is useful to check control paths. It cannot be used to verify datapaths. Dynamic simulation is a very effective way of verifying functionality of every block in the ASIC including the datapath. Gate level simulations performed after the back annotated placement and routing data is available are used to identify timing related issues or omissions/errors in stating multi-cycle paths.

The need to find hardware bugs as early as possible in the ASIC lifecycle drives the emulation and/or FPGA prototyping effort. Both these techniques enable the testing of scenarios which are generally not possible to test in dynamic functional verification, well before the actual silicon comes back from the fab. Emulation or prototyping also accelerate fast software ramp up and the software team can get a development platform ready well before the actual chip is available. Emulation involves running test cases on hardware accelerated platforms like Palladium from Cadence and Veloce from Mentor. For FPGA prototyping, Single or multiple FPGAs are used to build a PCB system targeted for the testing of the ASIC/SoC. The ASIC code is then fully or partially programmed on the FPGA/s and functionality can thus be tested.

Scenarios with much longer simulation times than what normal functional simulation allows can be run on the emulation platforms. All the internal signals are available for viewing and debug, just like in functional simulation. The FPGA prototype platform does enable longer test time, but the debugging available is limited. The hardware accelerators are costly, and investing in them makes sense if a company has lot of ASIC programs running simultaneously. For companies which have similar chips planned back to back, investing in a home grown FPGA based emulation/prototyping platform makes sense. Another advantage FPGA prototyping is that the RTL goes through a complete synthesis and place and route cycle and testing is done on a circuit which is as close to the real ASIC as possible.

To ensure that a bug free product reaches the customer is a complex activity and poses multiple challenges. Coverage, legacy code, repeatability are issues that need to be tackled. Ensuring that the coverage is at an acceptable level is important. Code coverage is run to find out if all the possibilities of a written code are exercised in a test suite. Simulators from cadence (ius), synopsys(vcs) and mentor (modelsim) have their own code coverage analyzers. Functional coverage means to find out if each feature listed in the specification for an ASIC/SoC is verified. It is essential that the functional specification document has an individual numbered paragraph for each feature so that traceability is easier. Functional coverage is an activity that needs planning, reviews and careful test case designing. Methodologies like eRM (e reuse methodology – Specman based) and OVM (open verification methodology – System verilog based) do assist checking functional coverage, but the inputs provided need careful specification and reviews.

Reviews, not just for coverage, but at every stage in the ASIC cycle are extremely important. One of the challenges encountered while designing an ASIC is that the hardware team interprets a certain behavior from software and the software expects that certain things are taken care of in hardware. It is very important to involve members from design team, verification team, architecture team, software & firmware team for verification review.

It takes a good amount of effort to come up with a verification environment, and it is very common for a team to use what has worked before when schedules are demanding. Legacy environment saves lot of time, but it also handicaps the team. Talking about saving time, efficiency goes a long way in shrinking the schedules. The initial time and effort investment in automation of repetitive tasks save lot of time in future. Use of re-usable methodologies will definitely save time and effort.

Finally, while choosing the verification flow for a certain ASIC, team needs to look at what is available in terms of resources as well as time, understand the end user requirement, and make a decision on which technique to employ at what stage.

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ITpio.org Pune Event: Need of Networking for IT Professionals

Events,

What: Inaugural session of the Pune Chapter of ITpio.org – IT Professionals of Indian Origin, featuring talk on “Need of Networking for IT Professionals” by Khanderao Kand, Director of SOA at Oracle
When: Saturday, 3rd October, 5pm to 6pm
Where: Zinnia conference room, 4th floor, Building B, Symantec Software, near Hotel Mahabaleshwar, Baner Road
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Need of Networking for IT Professionals

By Mr. Khanderao Kand, Principal Architect/ Director SOA Architecture at Oracle Corp, USA.

Khanderao Kand, M Tech, IITB, is a Principal Architect / Director SOA Architecture at Oracle Corp, USA. He is involved in the development of Oracle’s SOA Suite. He provides Architectural consultancy to more than fifty projects of Oracle’s next generation Fusion Applications to architect their solutions around SOA and BPM. More than 50 Apps architects and almost two thousand developers work in the project. He has been involved in the development of various industry standards like BPEL 2.0, SCA-Assembly, SCA-BPEL etc. He is socially active and has a national level role in a leading voluntary organization.

About ITpio Pune

ITpio is a worldwide networking association of IT Professionals of Indian Origin. ITPio aims to bring professionals in the fields of hardware and software together for their career and personal development while contributing back to the IT profession and community. ITPio aspires to represent the interests of Indian IT Professionals in the policies and issues related to Information Technology.

For more information, call the coordinators :

Nihar Mehta, +91 98509 96348, nihar_n_mehta@yahoo.com
Anurag Agarwal, +91 98812 54401, anurag@kqinfotech.com
Ravindra Sahasrabudhe, +91 98903 81929, ravigs@hotmail.com
Swarraj Kulkarni, +91 98500 23426, swarraj_k@yahoo.com
Ajit Deshpande, +91 98224 48602, adeshp1@gmail.com

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Musings on why Cloud Computing will prevail…

In Depth, Technology, , ,
suhas kelkar headshot

Today’s post is a guest post by Suhas Kelkar. Suhas leads the Innovation & Incubation Lab at BMC Software India. Prior to BMC he was the Vice President of Product Management at Digite, an enterprise software company in the field of Project Portfolio Management. See his linked-in profile for details.

In the recent Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009 special report by Gartner, technologies at the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ include Cloud Computing! (For description of five phases of Hype Cycle look here) This means that Cloud Computing is on the verge of entering the “Trough of Disillusionment” phase. Many technologies have been unable to come out of this dreaded trough where they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Articles such as “Could the cloud lead to an even bigger 9/11” clearly indicate that Gartner’s analysis is right and that cloud computing indeed has reached the peak of hype!

This article has my musings on why cloud computing will eventually come out of this phase and would reshape the way we run business.

Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009
Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2009

I had an opportunity to attend VmWorld 2009 conference. During the course of this conference, VmWare announced its latest initiative, vCloud. vCloud is essentially using VmWare’s virtualization technology to create an ecosystem of cloud service providers. With this initiative VmWare joins already crowded space of public cloud providers such as Amazon, Rackspace Cloud and Savvis. Out of all the exhibitors at the VmWorld conference, almost everyone was trying to get on the bandwagon of Cloud Computing. And this was not even a Cloud Computing focused conference! The more you look into Cloud Computing the more you feel like it is indeed the next big thing after the internet gold rush of 90s.

All this hype for Cloud Computing feels like a déjà vu. Turn the dial few years ago and the area of Software As A Service (SaaS) went through very similar transition. After SaaS reached the trough of disillusionment skeptics were raising doubts. Many argued that they would never consider putting their competitive data (CRM) in a software system outside of their corporate networks. Salesforce had to fight an uphill battle as it tried to establish its SaaS products. However the value proposition of SaaS, in terms of zero install and pay-as-you-go was too attractive to ignore. Today SaaS is the architecture of choice for many enterprise software products and last time I checked Salesforce is sitting pretty at a massive market cap of 7.13 billion dollars!

Let’s look at the benefits of Cloud Computing,

  • Lower Costs – OPEX not CAPEX: Cloud Computing avoids capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software and services by renting it from a third party provider (such as Amazon). Consumption is usually billed on a utility (resource based like electricity) or subscription (time based, like a monthly cable subscription) basis with little or no upfront cost. You pay as you go and pay for what you need. This seemingly straight forward benefit has deep impact on business models and strategy.
  • Self service and Agility: Provisioning a server used to take days if not weeks. With Amazon you can procure a server on their public cloud in minutes! Users can generally terminate the contract at any time (improving ROI and eliminating financial risks), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.
  • Focus on your business: Cloud computing abstracts away underlying resources (server, network and storage) and management of it so that you can focus on your core business. Win-win for Providers and Consumers.

    • Cloud Infrastructure and services are by default multi-tenant enabled, with multiple customers sharing resources and the costs associated with these. Providers run centralized infrastructure at low cost locations and make use of expertise of providers in terms of utilization and efficiency of infrastructure. Providers benefit with increased efficiency due to economies of scale and are able to provide the same service at lesser costs to happy consumers.

  • Elastic Scalability: Hosting your applications on Cloud Infrastructure enable dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources that can be done at near real time, without having to waste server resources engineered for peak loads. This enables small business to start offering their services on the web with low entry barriers and then scale as and when their load demands are higher.

    • Consider for example that you want to start a small web based business selling toys. Your business plan calls for exponential growth with number of customers ramping from few hundred in the first year to thousands in 2-3 years to million plus in 5-7 years. Ofcourse this plan does not even include wild fluctuations during peak holiday seasons. Until today, planning for this type of scenario involved lot of upfront costs that created huge barriers of entry for start ups. Now with cloud computing and public cloud infrastructure, such small companies can dream of doing exactly what they want to do and provides them with unlimited elasticity!

Similar to SaaS success story, it will be the benefits of the “cloud” that will eventually win over the skeptics due to underlying benefits. Of course an important factor would also be for an eco system to evolve in a timely fashion. One of the reasons why SaaS was successful was the fact that an entire ecosystem made itself available that rendered well to the SaaS Model including Web Standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) and architectures such as AJAX.

Similar to the platform wars of the eighties (followed by browser wars of nineties), Cloud Computing is currently going through a war with each player trying to establish itself as the destination. Some efforts have started to promote interoperability and openness of cloud. Open Cloud Initiative is one such example. However it remains to be seen how the industry as a whole matures and adopts such efforts…

Cloud computing is here to stay and will succeed as a concept eventually. It has the power to establish new business models and change existing processes. More will have to be written about what does it mean for enterprises of tomorrow to manage their businesses in cloud. Do provide feedback via your comments if you would like to hear about it more…

See also: Suhas’ previous PuneTech article: The Changing Landscape of Data Centers.

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Allow your marketing department to produce translated versions of your website with Dubzer

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Do in half an hour what would normally take weeks!

dubzer-logoNormally, making a website available in multiple languages is the last thing on the minds of a web developer. It costs time and money, is boring work, is error prone, and in the mind of a developer, it does not add any new features, or sexiness to the website. So, the developer drags his or her feet over this.

Of course, marketing does not see things the same way. Large chunks of the market are excluded when a website talks just in English. And trying to get engineering to produce the other language versions is a struggle.

Like they say, the best person to do something is the person who is most passionate about it. Which means that it would be great if the marketing department could translate the website without having to involve the developers.

That is the promise of Dubzer, which launched at Demo Fall 09’s Alpha Pitch today, and become the latest Pune startup to hit the world stage (after onion.tv that debuted at TechCrunch50’s demopit) from Santosh Dawara and Anjali Gupta, who previously brought us Lipikaar (the software for typing in Indian languages, which my mom loves), and Bookeazy (the much loved, but now dead, movie ticket booking service).

Dubzer will allow non-technical people to create translated versions of a website, or parts of a website, without requiring any significant changes to the backend of the website. It appears that this will be a hosted service, where you provide Dubzer with the URL of your website, they crawl it and then provide you with an online platform where you can start translating and publishing portions of your website (start with the most popular, or most important pages first). There are a whole bunch of features indicating that enterprise users are also being targeted – specifically, ability to translate intranets, fine-grained access control (i.e. who has permission to translate which portions of the site). Another interesting feature is that they allow you to implement different mechanisms of translation – i.e. free & paid translation methods, such as machine based (e.g. google translate), volunteer driven (e.g. what facebook is doing), crowd-sourced (as in wikipedia), or professional translation (sometimes, you get what you pay for).

Unlike Bookeazy and Lipikaar, Dubzer is actually incubated by Persistent Systems, which means that the team sits in Persistent Systems’ premises (except Anjali who has left Pune, traitorously defected to Bangalore). Their board of advisors includes Anand Deshpande, Founder and MD of Persistent, Abhijit Athavale, President of Markonix, and creator of PuneChips, and Jugal Gupta, CEO of Databyte.

One interesting point to note: Last year the Lipikaar founders ran into the problem of translating their website into all the various Indian languages (they are after all trying to sell software for writing in 18 different languages, so they better have their own website in those languages). When they did not find a decent solution, they decided to build it themselves and Dubzer was born. Similarly, Arun Prabhudesai was looking for a way to monetize his blog, trak.in with in-text ads, and did not find any appropriate solution. So, he decided to build it himself and hover.in was born.

There-in lies a lesson for us all…

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38 organizations where a tech startup can apply for funds

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The Venture Center is a not-for-profit technology startup incubator hosted in the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune. One of the services they provide their incubatee startups is a guide to the various government funds and schemes that a technology startup can avail of at different stages of their development, depending upon meeting certain criteria.

This is information that most entrepreneurs are not aware of. With this in mind, Venture Center has put out this guide to the Financing Landscape in India for Technology Ventures. This guide is a must read for all startups interested in funding.

You can simply browse this information, and read the rules and regulations of each of these 38 funds/organizations. Or, if you want to be handheld your way through the maze, you can avail of Venture Center’s advisory services.

For more information about Venture Center, you can see PuneTech’s interview of Kaushik Gala, the business development manager for Venture Center.

Interview with Arun Prabhudesai of trak.in and hover.in (via BlogAdda)

In Depth, Interview

“India Business Blog”, trak.in, with 7000+ rss/email subscribers from all over the world, and many more visitors coming directly to the website, is easily one of the top blogs emanating from Pune. Just last week, trak.in celebrated its 1000th post.

Arun Prabhudesai, the creator of trak.in, is also the CEO of Pune-based startup hover.in, and is very active in the tech/startup community in Pune.

A few weeks back, Indian blog aggregation site BlogAdda.com interviewed Arun Prabhudesai. We are reproducing the interview here, with permission. You should also check out the other interviews at BlogAdda – there are a bunch of interesting ones, including Vijayanand, of proto.in fame, Om Malik, of GigaOM, and Pune bloggers Preeti Shenoy of Just a mother of two, and meetu of wogma.com

Q: When and why did you start blogging?

A: My first post was written in the last week of April 2007, however, officially Trak.in celebrates its anniversary on May 1st.

There were couple of reasons why I started blogging. Firstly, I was in US since 2002 and wanted to come back to India and start something of my own. I also needed to keep abreast with the latest happenings, to understand the opportunities that were cropping up here.

Thats when I started blogging to share my point of view on knowledge I had gathered.

Also, at that time, there was no other Indian blog catering to this space. so I jumped in 🙂

Q: What topics do you generally blog about?

A: Trak.in started as a business blog that presented my point of views on latest buzz in India that was purely analytical in nature. However, over a period of time it has evolved to become much broader than that.

Trak.in has lot of subscribers who are Indians living abroad and want to come back. I receive so many emails asking for help and information on how to get (business) started in India. So a lot of my posts are also informative reports that give them purview of current situation in India.

Q: Do you ever get stuck when writing an entry? What do you do then?

A: Ohh…that happens far too often with me. I dont know whether it can be called a writer’s block, but many times I am just not in the frame to write – and I don’t.

The good thing is that trak.in has good community – when I am unable to write, I request one of our regular visitors or guest bloggers to write a post, and more often than not they are happy to do so.

I ensure that I do not post something just for the sake of it – Only if I am happy with what is written does it get published on the blog

Q: What promotional techniques work best for you and why?

A: I am sure you must have heard this often – Content, content and more quality content. That is the best way you can popularize your blog. Yes, you also need to take care of other things like SEO, but all that comes later. If you have quality content, traffic will come.

Thats exactly what I try to do with trak.in – Write good content – I don’t use any other specific promotional techniques.

Yes, In last 6-12 months Social Media applications like Twitter and Facebook have started sending in good amount of traffic as well – so presence in social Media space does help.

Q: How important is it for the blogger to interact with their readers? Do you respond to all the comments that you receive?

A: It is extremely important to interact with your readers – that’s how you build a loyal readership. I don’t (or can’t) respond to all the comments, as there are far too many. But yes, any comment that is thoughtful and brings in a different perspective than what I have written gets my attention and I do make it a point to respond. Generally I respond to 3-4 comments on average daily.

Q: How, in general, would you rate the quality of Indian blogs? Share your favourite five blogs.

As of today, India does not have any blog that is followed internationally except Labnol. Indian Blog Ecosystem is still evolving. The idea that one can blog for living is still not there in India.

When I started blogging, I used to follow lot of blogs, but in last year or so, the number has come down drastically. My feed reader has less 15 blogs in it.

Some of the blogs that I follow which are written by Indians (but may not be an India centric blog) are:

Q: What do you find to be the most gratifying aspect of blogging?

A: They are the “Thank You” mails from people who tell me that the posts that I have published have helped them a lot. It makes all the effort worthwhile.

Other aspect is the exposure that a bloggers get, especially if you are a popular.

Q: Do you earn revenue through your blog? How does one go about it?

A: Yes, I do earn revenue from my blog. Its simple, if you have good traffic, revenue will come. And for good traffic you need good content.

Q: hover.in was born out of constant frustration that most bloggers and web publishers face regarding their content presentation and monetization. How does hover.in help the bloggers and publishers?

A: Yes, that’s right. When I started getting traffic on trak.in, I wanted to have a monetization channel other than Google Adsense. One aspect about adsense is, it sometimes turns off visitors from your blog.

hover.in, being an in-text customized content and Ad delivery platform, helps bloggers to add revenue to their blog by showing in-text content & ads, without taking any real estate on the blog. hover.in automatically hyper-links keywords chosen by the publisher and shows relevant content & Ads when visitor hovers over that keyword.

Q: Not many know that you a photography enthusiast as well. There are many photo walks happening and you take an active part in most of them. India with its beauty all over, which are the best places and the best photos which you have captured. Can you share your experiences and a few photos with our readers?

A: Actually my love for photography started when I went to U.S and over years it has become kind of a creative outlet for me. Unfortunately, after coming to India I am unable to spare as much time as I would have liked. My startup and my blog keep me amply busy. 🙂

(See photowalk.trak.in for Arun’s photos)

Q: Many Indian companies were not affected by recession and a few of them posted profits. How does a startup survive in such times and what goes into making a startup a success in the long run?

A: You know for a startup it does not really make a difference unless you are out in the market looking for funding.

Startup Entrepreneurs are by nature frugal (they don’t have an option), and that’s what keeps a company afloat during tough times – Conserve cash as much as possible, cut expenses wherever you can and offer equity to employees. Recession is actually a good time when a startup can get talented people on board.

It would not be prudent for me to write on how to “make a startup a success in the long run“, because there are 100s of element that go in a startup success. Good Product, Investment, Market size & need, competition etc. etc. All these ingredients have to come together in right proportion for a startup to be successful.

Having said that, for me the most important aspect for a startup success is PEOPLE. If you have right people with right knowledge & attitude, you have already won half the battle.

Q: ‘India in 2020 – A Report’ was one of the posts that caught our eye. What’s your vision about India and which startups do you think will be a name to reckon in 2020?

A: It will be very unfair for me to talk about certain startups only, but if I’ve to name a couple of startups that have some real potential are LearnNext, Tringme and off-course my own startup hover.in . All these startups have a differentiating product in their own domain area . Having said that it is difficult to give a long term perspective on any startup, as market conditions (aka need/requirements) are changing very fast. The startups that will continuously evaluate will be the ones who will have a great chance to be successful in future.

One other Indian company (not a startup) that I think of is Zoho. That is the name to reckon with even now and 10 years down the line might be as well.

Talking about Vision for India in 2020. The current and the most important thing for us now is the Internet (read Broadband) Penetration which is extremely low. We have 10 different posts at Trak.in talking about Internet Penetration. We are moving ahead albeit slowly. Government is trying to push ahead. TRAI has recently declared that 2 Mbps is the minimum speed to be called as broadband. This is where government needs to start.

About Startups: Like I mentioned earlier, innovation will be the key. The Startups need to evolve themselves continuously with the changing market conditions.

Q: Trak.in is one of the top business blogs in India. You were having a successful career in the East Coast. What made you think that you need to return in your homeland and start Hover apart from managing Trak?

A: 2 reasons: There are abundant opportunities in India currently and my love specifically for Pune. I have been born and bought up here. I am a social person by nature and all my family & friends are here. I will always prefer my children growing up here in India and have the same values that I grew up with (although, things are changing, India is getting too westernized too fast).

Q: Do you earn revenue through your blog? How does one go about it?

A: Don’t start a blog just because everyone else around you is starting. If you are unsure, start micro-blogging on twitter/Facebook etc instead. That is far more gratifying than blogging.

90% people tend to quite blogging in a month or two, primary reason being no traffic. If you want to start a blog, be patient, write consistently and passionately.

Most importantly, dont compare yourselves with other bloggers and worse never try and copy what other bloggers are doing. That will not take you anywhere.

Q: Let’s conclude off with a few favorites.

Color: Black

Movie: The Last Samurai, Godfather, Finding Nemo

TV Show: Prison Break, Simpsons

Book: The Power of Now (Eckharte Tolle),

Time of Day: Aha…its Night time 🙂

Thanks a lot Arun for taking out time for this wonderful interview. Budding entrepeneurs and bloggers would have got a lot of insights from this wonderful interview. Do drop in your questions and feedback. We would love to have them.

Comments on this entry are closed. Please leave your comments for Arun and/or BlogAdda at the original post.

Do you understand copyrights and patents? Take this quiz

Events, , , ,

On 19th September, the Pune Open Coffee Club will host a presentation on copyrights and patents. The focus will be on clearing up common misconceptions POCC members have about copyrights and patents.

Do you have any misconceptions? Our survey so far indicates that most people have some really major blind spots. Try the quiz below – the answers will be discussed during the meeting tomorrow and will be published on PuneTech next week.

If you don’t see a form above, then click here to view the form in a browser window.

Please fill out the form – your answers will help us get a better understanding which parts people are most unsure about, so we can tailor the presentations accordingly. The correct answers will be discussed during the presentation on Saturday, and then published on punetech.com