All posts by Navin Kabra

SEAP Workshop – Intellectual Property – Management, Protection and Exploitation Strategies – Sept 17

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Click the logo for other PuneTech articles about SEAP
Click the logo for other PuneTech articles about SEAP

Later today, the Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) and Nishith Desai Associates present a workshop on intellectual property that will cover the following areas:

  • Creation and Identification of protectable Intellectual Property and means of protection
  • Acquisition of Intellectual Property
  • Intellectual Property strategy and commercialization
  • Use of third party IP – precautions to be taken
  • ICT Patents – Indian Scenario
  • Remedies for breach of Intellectual Property

This is today, September 17th, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Bhageerath, Persistent Systems, S.B. Road.

For further details of this event, including detailed profiles of the speakers, see the PuneTech calendar entry. Note: this is different from the POCC event on copyrights and patents that will be held on Saturday 19th September, 4pm, at SICSR.

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Pune-based startups, Onion.tv & Dubzer launch on the world stage – at TechCrunch50 and DEMO09

Featured, Miscellaneous

TechCrunch50 and Demo.com are easily the top startup conferences in the world and a chance to launch there is a huge opportunity that is available only to a handful of selected startups from all over the world. The bulk of these startups happen to be from the US/Europe, and it is rare for an Indian startup to feature in these conferences.

So it is a great feeling to be able to say that there are two “pure Pune” startups there this year, onion.tv that’s been selected for the TechCrunch 50 demopit, and dubzer.com that will launch during DEMO.com’s AlphaPitch next week. Both of these events are very difficult to get into, and being there will be a huge boost to these startups in terms of visibility, contacts, networking, feedback.

Onion.tv is the startup of POCC regulars Prashant Sachdev and Nilesh Diane, and it allows companies to publish out enhanced videos – with tags, and text and tables of content to give the users (viewers) a much better experience. Here is their pitch in their own words:

The content companies can integrate relevant information with audio / video and make their media more rich and useful. For example, educational companies can integrate a simple DVD-like table of contents with the videos, or even synchronize notes, code section and related material like Wikipedia pages with the video. This will help users enhance their learning experience. On the other hand, event companies can integrate tags, notes, comments to the event video and even synchronize a presentation with the video. This will help their users skim, filter, and search or even share parts of video with others, thereby making event videos much useful, as events typically cover wide range of topics and have diverse audience. Similarly, content companies in news, entertainment, and advertising can integrate their media with relevant content to enhance the experience of their users.

Here’s a tour of the features they offer.

Dubzer is the next venture of the team that brought us Bookeazy and Lipikaar. This time around, they are incubated by Persistent Systems, and as one of the 10 teams selected for AlphaPitch they are one of “the coolest earliest-stage companies around” according to Matt Marshall, Co-Executive Producer of DEMO. And as one of just 10 companies selected for AlphaPitch, they get:

  • sixty second pitch to the entire DEMO audience in the general session ballroom,
  • kiosk space in the DEMO pavilion,
  • two passes to attend DEMO, and
  • extensive promotional support on site and after the event on demo.com.

Unfortunately, they cannot tell us what they do until September 22nd (i.e. until after they’ve officially launched at DEMO), because that is one of the rules of launching at DEMO. Maybe we can have a fun contest guessing what they do (based on what we know about the founders – Santosh Dawara, Anjali Gupta and co., and their past activities.) Maybe it’s a software that allows easy dubbing of English movies into Hindi and easily creating subtitles for them in 18 languages (by people who don’t understand English). That will be fun!

(Note: we are not looking for “accurate” guesses here. We don’t want to encourage inadvertent breaking of their embargo. But it would be fun to get funny guesses. I think we can bring pressure upon Anjali to give a free Dubzer T-shirt to the funniest guess.)


Update: Dubzer has launched. See this PuneTech article for details. Shashikant and Rohan had posted comments that came too close to the truth for comfort, so we held them back in the moderation queue for a few days until Dubzer officially launched.

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Sharepoint Day 2009 by Pune Microsoft Technologies User Group – 19 Sept

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What: Sharepoint Day: Search, Share, Collaborate with SharePoint Server 2007, by Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group
When: Saturday 19th September, 2009, 9am-1pm
Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent System, S.B. Road (Bhageerath)
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Register here.

Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about Pune Microsoft Technologies User Group Events

Agenda

  • Reporting 9:00 AM
  • Introduction 9:30 AM
  • Keynote “SharePoint: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”,Michael Noel and Joel Oleson 9:00 AM
  • Tea Break 10:15 AM
  • Session 1: “Building the Perfect SharePoint Farm” By Michael Noel 10:30 AM
  • Q&A and Break 11:30 AM
  • Session 2: “Preparing for Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Today” By Joel Oleson 11:45 AM
  • Q&A 12:45 PM

Building the Perfect SharePoint Farm

by Michael Noel

SharePoint 2007 has proven to be a technology that is remarkably easy to get running out of the box. On the flipside, however, some of the advanced configuration options with SharePoint are notoriously difficult to setup and configure, and a great deal of confusion exists regarding SharePoint best practice design, deployment, disaster recovery, and maintenance. This session covers best practices encompassing the most commonly asked questions regarding SharePoint infrastructure and design, and includes a broad range of critical but often overlooked items to consider when architecting a SharePoint environment. In short, all of the specifics required to build the ‘perfect’ SharePoint farm are presented through discussion of real-world SharePoint designs of all sizes.

  • Learn from previous real world deployments and avoid common mistakes.
  • Plan a checklist for architecture of SharePoint environments of any size.
  • Build the ‘perfect’ SharePoint farm for your organization.

More Info

See the event homepage for more details.

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CSI Pune Lecture: The Evolution of the Open Source Movement – Sept 16th

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What: CSI Pune Lecture on the evolution of the open source movement by Atul Kahate
When: Wednesday, 16th September, 6:30pm-8:00pm
Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road
Registration and Fees: Free for CSI members; Rs. 50 for students & Persistent employees; others Rs. 100. Register here

Details:
The evolution of the open source movement:
Open source software is getting very prominent in the last few years, and is increasingly seen as the future. To truly appreciate the power of this, we need to understand its background. How and where did this whole concept of open source evolve? What were closed systems like? It is a roller-coaster journey with plenty of amazing stories and anecdotes. Apart from this, what are the commercial, legal, and other angles of open source software? This session would cover all these aspects.
Coverage:

  • How and where did this whole concept of open source evolve? (Evolution of “closed” systems)
  • Milestones in closed systems history
  • UNIX, C, and the beginnings
  • Richard Stallman and the Open Source Movement
  • Linus Torvalds and Linux
  • The Browser War
  • What is Open Source – The Commercial, Legal, and the Business angle
  • Future of Open Source

About the Speaker – Atul Kahate

Atul Kahate has over 14 years of experience in Information Technology in India and abroad in various capacities. He has done his Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics and his Master of Business Administration in Computer Systems. He has authored 23 highly acclaimed books on technology and cricket published by Tata McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Rajhans Publications on various areas of Information Technology (including editions), titled Web Technologies – TCP/IP to Internet Application Architectures, Cryptography and Network Security, Fundamentals of Computers, Information Technology and Numerical Methods, Foundations of Information Technology, Operating Systems and Systems Programming, Operating Systems, Computer Communication Networks, Introduction to Database Management Systems, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, and Schaum’s Series Outlines – Programming in C++, XML and Related Technologies. Two of these are published as international editions worldwide by McGraw-Hill and also been translated into Chinese. He has also co-authored a book in Marathi titled IT t ch jayachay (I want to enter into IT). Several of his books are being used as course textbooks or sources of reference in a number of universities/colleges/IT companies all over the world.

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Copyrights and Patents for Startups – POCC event Sept 19th

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on copyrights and patent issues that startups should be aware of.
When: Saturday, Sept 19th, 4pm-7pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Talk 1: Understanding Copyrights, by Navin Kabra

Pune OpenCoffee Club - POCC Logo
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Many startup founders are unclear on the details of what exactly copyright law entails. I’ve seen a few Pune startups get into significant trouble due to their ignorance. And I’ve seen a lot of them inadvertently indulge in very risky behavior.

In this talk I’ll cover the following points:

  • Basic introduction to copyrights
  • How copyrights are different from patents and trade secrets
  • Fair Use: What is and what isn’t a copyright violation
  • Understanding open source licenses: GPL, Apache, Affero GPL (for cloud computing), Creative Commons, etc

About the speaker: Navin Kabra

Navin is a co-founder and CTO at BharatHealth.com, a startup focused on creating online software products in the healthcare industry. He is also the creator of PuneTech.com, a portal for the tech community in Pune, India. In the past he has worked for large companies, and small; he has seen a successful exit, and he has seen a dotcom failure; he has done product development, and he has done research; he has written consumer software, and he has written enterprise software; and he has been a developer, he has been an architect, and he has been a manager (but hated it). He has a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin in 1999, and a B.Tech. in Computer Sciences from IIT-Bombay before that.

Talk 2: Become Patent-Smart Entrepreneur – by Hemant Chaskar

In this talk audience will receive practical knowledge on patents. Basics of patents will be covered, followed by guidelines on pursuing effective patent strategy for startups and early stage ventures.

About the speaker: Hemant Chaskar

Hemant has been in the computer and networking industry for more than a decade. His experience spans research, product design and engineering, intellectual property management, technical marketing, and standardization. He is currently Director of Technology at AirTight Networks. Hemant holds PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC and is also a patent agent registered with the US Patent Office.

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Credenz’09: PICT’s 3-day tech event for students – 18-20 Sept

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Credenz is PICT‘s annual technical event for students of Computer Engineering, Electronics & Telecommunication and Information Technology. It is one of the more popular collegiate tech fests that happen in various engineering colleges in the state.

This year, they are trying something new. They are going online and free. There are a number of contests that are open for participants from all across the country. This includes paper presentation contest, business plan proposal, technical quiz, and programming contest. Prizes worth Rs.2.5 lacs (and counting), in cash and in kind will be distributed to all the event winners. In addition, there will be seminars and workshops that will be broadcast live online, including sessions on Silverlight, Azure, Android, Google Wave, Ethical Hacking, and more.

The event is from 10:30am to 5pm on September 18th to 20th. You can register at http://credenz09.info/registration.asp. Detailed schedule and speaker profiles are available here: http://credenz09.info/sem_work.asp.

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Tech Trends for 2015, by Anand Deshpande, Shridhar Shukla, Monish Darda

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On Monday, I participated in a Panel Discussion “Technology Trends” organized by CSI Pune at MIT college. The panelists were Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, Shridhar Shukla, MD of GS Lab, Monish Darda, GM of BladeLogic India (which is now a part of BMC Software), and me.

Anand asked each of us to prepare a list of 5 technology trends that we felt would be important in the year 2015, and then we would compare and contrast our lists. I’ve already published my own list of 5 things for students to focus on last week. Basically I cheated by listing a just a couple of technology trends, and filled out the list with one technology non-trend, and a couple of non-technology non-trends.

Here are my quick-n-dirty notes of the other panelists tech trends, and other points that came up during the discussion.

Here is Shridhar’s list:

  • Shridhar’s trend #1: Immersive environments for consumers – from games to education. Partial virtual reality. We will have more audio, video, multi-media, and more interactivity. Use of keyboards and menu driven interfaces will reduce. Tip for students based on trend #1: don’t look down on GUIs. On a related note, sadly, none of the students had heard of TED. Shridhar asked them all to go and google it and to checking out “The Sixth Sense” TED video.
  • Shridhar’s trend #2: totally integrated communication and information dissemination.
  • Shridhar’s trend #3: Cloud computing, elastic computing. Computing on demand.
  • Shridhar’s trend #4: Analytics. Analytics for business, for government, for corporates. Analyzing data, trends. Mining databases.
  • Shridhar’s trend #5: Sophisticated design and test environments. As clouds gain prominence, large server farms with hundreds of thousands of servers will become common. As analytics become necessary, really complicated, distributed processes will run to do the complex computations. All of this will require very sophisticated environments, management tools and testing infrastructure. Hardcore computer science students are the ones who will be required to design, build and maintain this.

Monish’s list:

  • Monish’s trend #1: Infrastructure will be commoditized, and interface to the final user will assume increasing importance
  • Monish’s trend #2: Coming up with ideas – for things people use, will be most important. Actually developing the software will be trivial. Already, things like AWS makes a very sophisticated server farm available to anybody. And lots of open source software makes really complex software easy to put together. Hence, building the software is no longer the challenge. Thinking of what to build will be the more difficult task.
  • Monish’s trend #3: Ideas combining multiple fields will rule. Use of technology in other areas (e.g. music) will increase. So far, software industry was driven by the needs of the software industry first, and then other “enterprise” industries (like banking, finance). But software will cross over into more and more mainstream uses. Be ready for the convergence, and meeting of the domains.
  • Monish’s trend #4: Sophisticated management of centralized, huge infrastructure setups.

Anand’s list:

  • Anand’s trend #1: Sensors. Ubiquitous tiny computing devices that don’t even look like computers. All networked. And
  • Anand trend #2: The next billion users. Mobile. New devices. New interfaces. Non-English interfaces. In fact, non-text interfaces.
  • Anand’s trend #3: Analytics. Sophisticated processing of large amounts of data, and making sense out of the mess.
  • Anand’s trend #4: User interface design. New interfaces, non-text, non-keyboard interfaces. For the next billion users.
  • Anand’s trend #5: Multi-disciplinary products. Many different sciences intersecting with technology to produce interesting new products.

These lists of 5 trends had been prepared independently, without any collaboration. So it is interesting to note the commonalities. Usability. Sophisticated data analysis. Sophisticated management of huge infrastructure setups. The next billion users. And combining different disciplines. Thinking about these commonalities and then wondering about how to position ourselves to take advantage of these trends will form the topic of another post, another day.

Until then, here are some random observations. (Note: one of the speakers before the panel discussion was Deepak Shikarpur, and some of these observations are by him)

  • “In the world of Google, memory has no value” – Deepak
  • “Our students are in the 21st century. Teachers are from 20th century. And governance is 19th century” -Deepak
  • “Earning crores of rupees is your birthright, and you can have it.” – Deepak
  • Sad. Monish asked how many students had read Isaac Asimov. There were just a couple
  • Monish encouraged students to go and read about string theory.
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Web Scalability and Performance – Real Life Lessons (Pune TechWeekend #3)

In Depth, Live Blogging, Technology, , , ,

Last Saturday, we had TechWeekend #3 in Pune, on the theme of Website Scalability and Performance.  Mukul Kumar, co-founder, and VP of Engineering at Pubmatic, talked about the hard lessons in scalability they learnt on their way to building a web service that serves billions of ad impressions per month.

Here are the slides used by Mukul. If you cannot see the slides, click here.
Web Scalability & Performance

The talk was live-tweeted by @punetechlive and @d7ylive. Here are a few highlights from the talk:

  • Keep it simple: If you cannot explain your application to your sales staff, you probably won’t be able to scale it!
  • Use JMeter to monitor performance, to a good job of scaling your site
  • Performance testing idea: Take 15/20 Amazon EC2 servers, run JMeter with 200threads on each for 10 hours. Bang on your website! (a few days later, @d7y pointed out that using openSTA instead of JMeter can give you upto 500 threads per server even on old machines.)
  • Scaling your application: have a loosely coupled, shared nothing, stateless, distributed architecture
  • Mysql scalability tip: Be careful before using new features, or new versions. Or don’t use them at all!
  • Website scalability: think global. Some servers in California, some servers in London, etc. Similarly, think global when designing your app. Having servers across the world will drive architecture decisions. When half your data-center is 3000 miles from the other half, interesting, non-trivial problems start cropping up. Also, think carefully about horizontal scaling (lots of cheap servers) vs vertical scaling (few big fat servers)
  • memcache tip: pre-populate memcache with most common objects
  • Scalability tip: Get a hardware load balancer (if you can afford one). Amazon AWS has some load-balancers, but they don’t perform so well
  • Remember the YouTube algo for scaling:
    while(1){
    identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
    eat_drink();
    sleep();
    notice_new_bottleneck();
    }
    there’s no alternative to this.
  • Scalability tip: You can’t be sure of your performance unless you test with real load, real env, real hardware, real software!
  • Scalability tip – keep the various replicated copies of data loosely consistent. Speeds up your updates. But, figure out which parts of your database must be consistent at all times, and which ones can have “eventual consisteny”
  • Hard lessons: keep spare servers at all times. Keep servers independent – on failure shouldn’t affect other servers
  • Hard lessons: Keep all commands in a script. You will have to run them at 2am. Then 3am. Then 7am.
  • Hard lessons: Have a well defined process for fault identification, communication and resolution (because figuring these things out at 2am, with a site that is down, is terrible.)
  • Hard lessons: Monitor your web service from 12 cities around the world!
  • Hard lesson, Be Paranoid – At any time: servers can go down, DDOS can happen, NICs can become slow or fail!

Note: a few readers of of the live-tweets asked questions from Nashik and Bombay, and got them answered by Mukul. +1 for twitter. You should also start following.

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Seminar on Google Wave: Intro, Gadgets, Robots – Pune GTUG Meet – Sept 12

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Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logoWhat: Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents a seminar on Google Wave – Introduction, Gadgets and Robots
When: Saturday, 12th Sept. 4pm to 6pm
Where: Synerzip. Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189, Near Mirch Masala Restaurant , Opp Vandevi Temple, Karve Nagar (Map).
Registration and Fees: The event is free for all, no registration required.

Details
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.  A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Seminar Topics

  • Introduction to Google Wave
  • Building Extensions to Google Wave
  • Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
  • Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot
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5 things that Computer Science Engineering students should focus on

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What should students be really focusing on? Somebody asked me this question recently – Imagine students who are in 2nd or 3rd year of their degree course right now. They’ll spend a few years finishing college, and a few years just learning the ropes at their first job. So it will really be about 5 years before their career really starts. What will the software technology world be like at that time, and what are the skills that students can work on acquiring right now to ensure that they are well positioned to thrive?

Of course, 5 years is a long time, and to quote Neils Bohr, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Still I think some general trends are clear, and there are some other timeless skills that are worth looking at. Based on that I’m giving my list below.

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Click on this icon to see all PuneTech articles related to tech education in Pune

But wait!

Let me not bias your thoughts. Before you read my list, skip to the comments section below, and put down your list. Then read my list and critique it again in the comments. Hopefully we can have a good discussion that will benefit students.

So, here’s my list of areas students need to be thinking about:

  • The next billion customers: The IT revolution has probably reached a billion people of the world so far. In the next 5 years, it will reach the next billion. These will be a very different set of people. Many of them will be illiterate – so you need to focus on non-text, non-English interfaces – video, animations, voice recognition. Search for “English Seekho” to get an idea of what I mean. Most won’t have money or electricity for computers, so mobile devices will rule – so you need to start playing with mobile platforms like Android. In general, search for the “the next billion” and you’ll find some interesting material put together by the likes of Nokia, and MIT giving you ideas on what to focus on.
  • Usability: As IT touches the lives of more and more people, less and less of them will be “computer savvy”, and less and less of them will view computing devices as something that needs to be learnt. Consequently, the products that will succeed, will be the ones that are easy to use. And making something easy to use is rather difficult. It is a sub-discipline of computer science, and there is a lot of theory, and a bunch of well-defined algorithms and practices you can use to make things easy to use. The whole area is called HCI (Human Computer Interaction), and UCD (User Centered Design) is a part of it. It’s an area that you must be familiar with
  • Computer Science Fundamentals: This will never go out of fashion, and yes, when I look at students coming out of our colleges, this appears to be a rather neglected area. Far too much emphasis on specific programming languages, and specific “technologies” is a mistake. Whatever the future holds, you will be well served by knowing the basic theory of computer sciences. Learn data-structures and algorithms. If you don’t have a favourite data-structure, and an algorithm that you find beautiful, then your computer science education is incomplete. If, after seeing an algorithm, your first thought is not about the complexity of the algorithm (O(n), O(log n), etc.), then you need to hit your books again. If you’ve only learned Java and C#, and you don’t really understand pointers, heaps, stacks, you will sooner or later be at a disadvantage. Understand the basics. And while you’re at it, also learn mathematics and statistics.
  • Presentation skills: This is not a computer science skill, but this is one of the most important skills that computer science students are missing. You must treat presentation as equally important, or more important than your program, design, and algorithms. And you must spend as much time learning presentation (from books, in classes, and in practice) as you spent on programming languages, and computer science subjects. I’m sure you haven’t done that, hence this item in my list. You should know how to write well. Not just papers and documents, but much more importantly, emails, and blog posts, and facebook wall postings, and tweets. You must think about what the user/reader/client wants to know (instead of what you know and want to tell). And of course, you must know how to speak well. How to tell a story instead of listing some arcane facts about your work. How to leave out stuff that you find extremely interesting, but the listener doesn’t.
  • Economics: Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert says: “When you have a working knowledge of economics, it’s like having a mild super power.” Basically, if you understand the fundamentals of economics, you can see and understand what drives people and technologies and success and failure a lot better than people who do not understand it. I hated the fact that I was made to study economics in IIT for my computer science course. It seemed like a complete waste of my time. Now, looking back, I think it was probably the most important course.

What do you think students should be focusing on?

(Note: I’m supposed to be participating in a panel discussion in MIT on Monday, 7th Sept, on this topic. Instead of going there and spewing my gyaan, I thought I would take this opportunity to have a larger discussion on this topic, and your comments will help me do a better job (or go there with a better list), so please leave comments. Thanks.)

(Update: Please note: Many comments on this article are by 12th std. students who want to know how to select an engineering college or branch. In response to all of those, I’ve written an article on how 12th std students should select an engineering college/branch. Please read that article, and ask your doubts there. I will be deleting any comments on this post that are related 12th std choices.)

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