All posts by Navin Kabra

Key Legal Issues in InfoTech – Seminar, July 28

seap-logo-inWhat: Seminar on key legal issues in InfoTech – key clauses, law, enforcement, jurisdiction in tech agreements, and IP issues
When: 2pm to 5pm, Tuesday, 28th July
Where: Bhageerath, Persistent Systems, S.B. Road
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Send mail to tanvi@nishithdesai.com if you’re interested.

Details:
Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) and Nishith Desai Associates will hold a seminar on various legal issues an infotech business needs to worry about. The workshop aims to address issues related to intellectual property, trade secrets, usage of open source along with insights on key clauses pertaining to technology agreements from a legal as well as a commercial perspective. The workshop would also provide insights on enforcement and jurisdiction issues which are commonly faced in cross border technology agreements.

Agenda:

  • Protection of Intellectual Property, Confidential Information, Trade Secrets – Usage of Third Party IP and Open Source. Gowree Gokhale (Partner, Nishith Desai Associates)
  • Key Clauses in Technology Agreements along with negotiating tactics. Bharat Mehta (Vice President-Legal, Oracle Financial Services Software Limited)
  • Governing Law, Enforcement and Jurisdiction Issues in Technology Agreements. Shafaq Uraizee-Sapre (Senior Associate, Nishith Desai Associates)

About the Speakers

Gowree Gokhale

Ms. Gowree Gokhale heads the IP, technology, media and entertainment law practice of the multi-skilled, research-based international law firm, Nishith Desai Associates. Her specializations also include litigation and dispute resolution, franchising, pharma and life sciences laws, commercial laws, HR laws. Ms. Gokhale has led several IP, technology and HR litigations. She has been involved in negotiations of large BPO and technology contracts. She is involved in patent oppositions and devising patent litigation strategies for clients. She has assisted international media and productions houses and pharmaceutical companies in structuring of their India operations, including IP structuring, and advice on regulatory issues. She specializes in structuring of cross border outsourcing and franchising arrangements and has negotiated several transactions both for Indian and MNC clients. Ms. Gokhale is a Solicitor and a registered Patent & Trade Mark attorney and has been practicing for the last 13 years. She is a visiting faculty at Institute of Intellectual Property Law Studies at Mumbai. She has authored research reports and articles on variety of subjects and has presented at various national and international seminars and conferences on IP, pharmaceutical, media and technology laws. She has is a regular speaker at NASSCOM TLF seminars on technology contracts, CII on enforcement of IP in India.

Bharat Mehta

Vice President – Legal at Oracle Financial Services Software Limited is an experienced professional in legal and commercial matters related to IP and IT industry worldwide. Bharat has the opportunity of interacting, negotiating and concluding business deals globally with experience spanning across functions including mergers & acquisitions, intellectual property, customers, partners, vendors and employee related matters, corporate affairs, group integration, business practices, risk management and compliance. Bharat enjoys the continuous challenge and rewarding experience of working with professionals of different worldviews. He is actively involved as a speaker at various forums in spreading awareness about intellectual property, technology contracts and compliance. He is also one of the founding members of the Technology Law Forum (TLF). He graduated out of Mumbai University and has a Degree in Law.

Shafaq Uraizee-Sapre

Ms. Shafaq Uraizee Sapre is a senior member of the Technology, Litigation & Dispute Resolution, Fund Investment and Real Estate Practice Groups at the firm. Ms. Sapre received a Bachelors and Masters degree in law from the University of Bombay. Ms. Sapre’s practice focuses on cutting edge complex cross-border litigations and international commercial arbitrations. Ms. Sapre is a leading attorney in assisting clients to reach creative and pragmatic solutions and effective dispute resolution strategies. In addition to in-house representation, Ms. Sapre represents clients in Supreme Court, High Court and respective Tribunals in a wide-range of sectors including corporate, media, entertainment, franchising and oil & gas. Ms. Sapre’s practice includes a variety of transactions with both domestic and international venture capital and private equity funds. Ms. Sapre has advised and assisted clients on issues concerning the legal aspects of structuring and restructuring investments in India and globally, documentation, private equity investments and mergers and acquisitions across a multitude of sectors. Ms. Sapre has led several legal due diligence teams and often renders opinions on issues concerning litigation, arbitration, Indian labor laws and contract law.

Ms. Sapre has spoken at the Confederation of Indian Industry and actively writes for publications such as the Indian Venture Capital Journal. Ms. Sapre is a member of the Bar Council of Maharashtra & Goa and has been practicing as a litigator at the Bombay High Court since 2000.

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Proto.in Facebook Developer Garage is free & open to all (not just proto.in attendees)

Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you should be aware that Proto.in, India’s premier startup event, is happening in Pune this weekend. Around the end of proto.in, there’s an event for Facebook application developers, which is actually open to all developers, not just those registered to attend proto.in. So all Pune facebook app developers, or potential facebook app developers should make a beeline for this event – a great place to meet a lot of experienced facebook developers from not just Pune, but the whole country.

Proto.in will be partnering with Facebook to organize the Facebook Developer Garage. It will have Ruchi Sanghvi, senior product manager at Facebook participating as the speaker. She will talk about how developers can create web applications on Facebook with social utility and business potential targeted towards the rapidly growing Indian market on Facebook. According to Pune Mirror Ruchi is:

a Fergusson College pass-out now settled in San Francisco. Ruchi, the product manager for Facebook News Feeds, is one of the brain’s behind Facebook’s current look.

The Garage should be useful for web developers who are interested in the Facebook developer contest (which has a total cash prize worth US$14,000. For more details on the Facebook Developer contest, please visit http://www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.)

As a passionate web developer trying to make an impact, you certainly cant miss this opportunity.

It will be at 5pm on Saturday 25th July, in the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road. Just show up. It’s free, and no registration is required.

Pre-Proto Startup Networking event – July 24

Proto.in Logo
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Proto.in, the premier startup event in the country, is happening in Pune this Saturday, so the who’s who of the startup world will descend upon Pune. This is a chance for Pune’s entrepreneurs and wannapreneurs to meet interesting people. Unfortunately, proto.in had limited seats and they are all gone, so, on popular demand, proto. in has created a pre-proto networking event for all those who will not be at proto.in – to give them a chance to network with the visitors who are coming in to town for proto.in.

The event will be on Friday, 24 July, from 5pm to 7pm at Hall No. 5, MCCIA Trade Tower, ICC Complex, S.B. Road. A fee of Rs. 100 will be collected at the door. If you want to attend, send an email to Maya at maya.m@mentorsquare.com.

What to expect at the event? There will be some sort of a panel discussion on “Transforming Business Environments.” I have no idea what that means, and the topic is so generic that I’m sure the discussion will also be generic. But don’t let the prescribed agenda fool you. The agenda and panel discussion is only there to get all the people in one room. The real benefit of going to such events is the networking that happens before and after (and some of it during) the event. You meet people who can help you find customers, people who can provide some useful service to your startup, people who just generally give you some insightful piece of advice that can change the course of your startup, people who over time become advisors for your startup (we met the most important advisor of our startup at one such event).

3 hours and Rs. 100 is a low price to pay for all these opportunities.

Changing Landscape of Data Centers

Today’s post is a guest post by Suhas Kelkar, the Head of 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.

I had an opportunity to speak at the very first BMC India Technical Event held in Bangaluru on June 11th, 2009. At this event I talked about the changing landscape of data centers. This article is an excerpt of the talk intended to facilitate understanding of the presentation. The entire presentation is available here.

There are many factors causing the landscape of data centers to change. There are some disruptive technologies at play namely Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Virtualization has been around for a while but only recently it has risen to the level of making significant impact to data centers. Virtualization has come a long way since VMware first introduced VMware Workstation in 90s. The product was initially designed to ease software development and testing by partitioning a workstation into multiple virtual machines.

The virtual machine software market space has seen a substantial amount of evolution, The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization. To vSphere, the first cloud operating system, transforming IT infrastructures into a private cloud-a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds. Hardware vendors are also not too behind. Intel/AMD and other hardware vendors are pumping in lot of R&D dollars to make their chipsets and hardware optimized for hypervisor layer.

According to IDC more than 75% companies with more than 500 employees are deploying virtual servers. As per a survey by Goldman Sach’s 34 per cent of servers will be virtualized within the next 12 months among Fortune 1000 companies, double the current level of 15 per cent.

Cloud computing similarly existed as a concept for many years now. However various factors finally coming together that are now making it ripe for it to have the most impact. Bandwidth has been increasing significantly across the world that enables faster access to applications in the cloud. Thanks to success of SaaS companies, comfort level of having sensitive data out of their direct physical control is increasing.

There is increasing need for remote work force. Applications that used to reside on individual machines now need to be centralized.

Economy is pushing costs to go down. Last but not least, there is an increasing awareness about going green.

All these factors are causing the data center landscape to change. Now let’s look at some of the ways that the data centers are changing.

Data centers today are becoming much more agile. They are quick, light, easy to move and nimble. One of the reasons for this is that in today’s data center, virtual machines can be added quickly as compared to procuring and provisioning a physical server.

Self service provisioning allows end-users to quickly and securely reserve resources and automates the configuration and provisioning of those physical and virtual servers without administrator intervention. Creating a self-service application and pooling resources to share across teams not only optimizes utilization and reduces needless hardware spending but it also improves time to market and increases IT productivity by eliminating mundane and time consuming tasks.

Public clouds have set new benchmarks. E.g. Amazon EC2 SLA for availability is 99.95% which raised the bar from traditional data center availability SLA significantly. Most recently another vendor, 3Tera came out with five nines, 99.999% availability. Just to compare Amazon and 3Tera, 99.999% availability translates into 5.3 minutes of downtime each year, the different in cost between five 9’s and four 9’s (99.99 percent, or 52.6 minutes of downtime per year) can be substantial.

Data centers are also becoming more scalable. With virtualization, a data center may have 100 physical servers that are servicing 1000 virtual servers for your IT. Once again due to Virtualization, data centers are no longer constrained due to physical space or power/cooling requirements.

The scalability requirements for data centers are also changing. Applications are becoming more computation and storage hungry. Example of computation sensitive nature of apps, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query involves 700 to 1,000 servers! Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

Or another example is Facebook, where more than 200 million photos are uploaded every week. Or Amazon, where post holiday season their data center utilization used to be <10%! Google Search, Facebook and Amazon are not one off examples of applications. More and more applications will be built with similar architectures and hence the data center that hosts/supports those applications would need to evolve.

Data center are becoming more fungible. What that means is that resources used within the data centers are becoming easily replaceable. Earlier when you procured a server, chances were high that it will be there for number of years. Now with virtual servers, they will get created, removed, reserved and parked in your data center!

Data centers are becoming more Utility Centric and service oriented. As an example look at Cisco‘s definition of Data Center 3.0 where it calls it infrastructure services. Data center users are increasingly going to demand pay as you go and pay for what you use type of pricing. Due to various factors, users are going to cut back on large upfront capital expenses and instead going to prefer smaller/recurring operating expenses.

Most organizations have either seasonal peaks or daily peaks (or both) with a less dramatic cost differential; but the cost differential is still quite dramatic and quite impactful to the bottom line. In addition, the ability to pay for what you use makes it easy to engage in “proofs of concept” and other R&D that requires dedicated hardware.

  • As the discrepancy between peak usage and standard usage grows, the cost difference between the cloud and other options becomes overwhelming.

Technology is changing; the business needs are changing, with changing times organization’s social responsibilities are changing. More and more companies are thinking about the impact they have on the environment. Data centers become major source of environment impact especially as they grow in size.

A major contributor to excessive power consumption in the data center is over provisioning. Organizations have created dedicated, silo-ed environments for individual application loads, resulting in extremely low utilization rates. The result is that data centers are spending a lot of money powering and cooling many machines that individually aren’t doing much useful work.

Cost is not the only problem. Energy consumption has become a severe constraint on growth. In London, for example, there is now a moratorium on building new data centers because the city does not have the electrical capacity to support them!

Powering one server contributes to on an average 6 Tons of carbon emissions (depending upon the location of the server and how power is generated in that region) It is not too farfetched to claim that every data center has some servers that are always kept running because no one knows what business services depend on them but in reality no one seems to be using them. Even with the servers that are being used, there is an opportunity to increase their utilization and consolidate them.

Now that we have seen some of the ways that the data centers are changing, I am going to shift gears and talk about evolution of data centers. I am going to use the analogy of evolution of web to changing landscape of data centers. Just like web evolved from Web 1.0 where everyone could access, to Web 2.0 where people started contributing to Web 3.0 where the mantra is everyone can innovate.
Image showing Web-3.0 and DC-3.0
Applying this analogy to Data Centers we can see how it has evolved from its early days of existence to where we are today,
Evolution of a DC
Using the analogy of Web world, we can see how data centers have evolved from their early days till now.

  • In the beginning, Data centers were nothing but generic machines stored together. From there it evolved to blade servers that removed some duplicate components and optimized. Now in DC3.0, they are becoming even more virtual and cloud based.
  • So from mostly physical servers we have moved to Physical and Virtual servers to now where we would even treat underlying resources as virtual.
  • Provision time has gone down significantly
  • User participation has changed
  • Management tools that used to be nice to have are playing a much important role and are becoming mandatory. Good example once again is UCS where Bladelogic Mgmt tool will be pre-installed!
  • The role of a data center admin itself has changed from mostly menial work into a much more sophisticated one!

Slideshow for “Changing Landscape of Data Centers”

If you cannot see the slideshow above, click here.

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TechStart.in: Microsoft Azure Training Program for 2009 CS graduates

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

As a part of the Techstart initiative (visit http://techstart.in for rationale and more details), a program for training on Application Development on the Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing platform is being offered to computer science students graduating in 2009. This initiative is based on the lines of a very successful initiative at Stanford University.The idea is that there will be a 6 to 8 week Azure training and application building course consisting of classroom lectures interspersed with self-study programming assignments. The course will be co-ordinated by Monish Darda, Director and CTO of Websym technologies, with help from Persistent Systems, the Pune User Group (a Microsoft Technologies user group in Pune), and will be run by volunteers from across the industry,

To facilitate this, a “Train the Trainers” program is being planned, to build mentoring expertise for people who want to volunteer to help in this initiative. This is a free program, and volunteers would be needed to teach the course and/or guide the students. This needs people who have industry experience and are ready to spare some time for teaching/handholding/mentoring the students on the Azure platform. To participate, you should have the following prerequisites:

a. Basics of .NET framework platform

b. Basics of C#.net and Visual Studio IDE

c. Basic Understanding of WCF (windows communication framework)

Volunteers should be able to spare approximately a total of 16 hours during the eight week TechStart program, tentatively scheduled to begin on July 27.

The Train the Trainers program details follow:

Date: Saturday, July 18, 2009 – 9.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.

Venue: Persistent Systems Ltd.

‘Aryabhata Pingala’

9A, Erandavane, Near Nal Stop, Off Karve Road

Pune 411004

To register please mail kaustubh_bhadbhade@persistent.co.in with “TechStart: Microsoft Azure Training Program”

First PIRST: Pune Information Retreival and Semantic Technology meeting – July 18

Click on the image to get all PuneTech articles related to the Pune Open Coffee Club
Click on the image to get all PuneTech articles related to the Pune Open Coffee Club

PIRST – the Pune Information Retreival and Semantic Technology – is a special interest group within POCC (the Pune Open Coffee Club), that is focused on search technologies, and the semantic web. PIRST has it’s first kickoff meeting this Saturday, July 18th from 9:30am-2pm, at SICSR, Model Colony. The event is free for all to attend, but you must register here.

This meetup is geared towards learning about IR & ST, networking of professionals interested / active in this area and brainstorming on various possibilities and ideas in this area. The following information is tentative:

Speakers

  • Shashikant Kore, Co-founder, Bandhan.com
  • Abhay Shete, Founder, FortyTwo
  • Rajan Chandi, Founder, OpenWeb Labs
  • Bhasker Kode, Founder, Hover.in
  • Atul Tulshibagwale, Founder, Web2rank

If you are interested in speaking at this event, please contact Atul Tulshibagwale (atultulshi gmail)

Agenda

Each individual talk is expected to be 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for Q&A.

  • 9:30am – 10:15am – Survey of startups in IR&ST – Atul Tulshibagwale
  • 10:15am – 11:00am – Survey of various semantic technologies – Rajan Chandi
  • 11:00am – 11:30am – Tea Break
  • 11:30am – 12:15pm – – Lucene primer – Shashikant Kore
  • 12:15pm – 1:30pm – Roadmap of required Math – Abhay Shete
  • 1:30pm – 2:00pm – Panel: Future of IR&ST – All Speakers
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TechStart Internship Mela: Connect with 200 CS graduates for your projects – 18th July

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

Last week we wrote about the hundreds of CS engineering graduates who are temporarily idle, and the techstart initiative where we are hoping to connect up companies, startups or individuals who can use these engineers for their projects. To facilitate this, an ‘Internship Mela’ will be held on Saturday, 18th July, from 2pm to 6pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road.

The basic idea behind the ‘Internship Mela’ is as follows:

  • All those who would like to find engineers for their projects are invited to attend
  • All engineers who are interested in getting internships will attend
  • From 2pm to 4pm: Each potential company/startup/mentor/guide gets to present to the engineers for 3 minutes. Give a quick introduction of yourself, your company, what projects you plan to do with the interns, what kind of skills you are looking for, and whether you will be paying a stipend or not, and your contact info.
  • From 4pm to 6pm: Open networking. The potential interns will walk up to the mentors that they are interested and discuss details and set up a follow up meeting.

The idea is that this is a marketplace designed to allow mentors to find students quickly.

To register as a company or individual offering internships, please follow these steps

  • Join the techstart mailing list (click on “Join this group” link on the right side of the page)
  • After joining, go to the TechStart Internship Mela Registration Page and add yourself to the list there. (Click on the “Edit this page” button, then add your info just above the last line in the list.)
  • Come to Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road at 1:45pm on 18th July. Prepare a 3-minute talk that can help the potential interns decide whether they are interested in your project. Be as specific as possible. (Note: there will be no slides/projector)

Students interested in this program – just show up at the venue (see details above). No registration required. Bring multiple copies of your resume.

About TechStart

Anand Deshpande of Persistent started this initiative to help out the computer science engineering students who graduated in 2009, but had their job offers deferred or rescinded. The idea is to give the engineers some industry experience, and at the same time allow the industry to get some useful work done. See http://techstart.in/ for details. TechStart consists of many volunteers from across the industry, and a whole bunch of other Pune organizations (like CSI Pune, Pune Open Coffee Club) are also helping out.

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Mentor India internship in system programming – Entrance exam on 20th July

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

Pune-based KQInfoTech is an organization started by Anurag Agarwal and Anand Mitra, both of whom chucked high-paying jobs in the industry because they felt that there was a desperate need to work on the quality of students that is being churned out by our colleges. For the 2 years or so, they have been trying various experiements in education, at the engineering college level. All their experiments are based on one basic premise: students’ ability to pay should not be a deterrent – in other words, the offerings should be free for the students; KQInfoTech focuses on finding alternative ways to pay for the costs of running the course.

This week, KQInfotech launches the second edition of “Mentor India: An Internship Program in System Programming”,  for the people looking for making a career in the system programming.

It is a program in “Gurukul” tradition of education. There are two unique features of this program.

  • Cost: Your education does not depend on your capacity to pay. Not only your education is free, you also get stipend during this program.
  • Work experience: You are also getting real industry work experience during your education. During this course, you will get one year worth industry experience.

Does working in Linux Kernel, writing device drivers for Unix and Windows, writing system level programs that interacts closely with operating system interests you? But you don’t have right skill sets for this.

KQInfotech is lead by people who have spend decades working in the area of file system, kernel programming, Linux kernel etc. They are ready to educate you in “Art of System Programming”. Are you ready for all the hard and interesting work required?

It is a unique post graduate program for one year, which would provide you education as well as work experience. This program will cover Unix internals, Linux kernel programming, Multi-threading, Windows internals, Writing device drivers etc.

Please visit www.kqinfotech.com/mentoring/ for more details.

Candidates for this course will be selected based on an entrance exam and interview.
Entrance will be based on C, Data Structure, O/S concepts and aptitude test.

Entrance Exam details:
Date: 20th July
Time: 10:00 AM
Duration: 90 Minutes
Venue: A-201, Mitrangan, Near Kapil Malhar, Baner Road, Baner, Pune 411045
Email: mentoring@kqinfotech.com

If you’re interested please fill the Online Registration Form for Entrance Exam.

Check out previous PuneTech articles on KQInfoTech. You might also be interested in the techstart program.

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IIT-B-AA Presents: Introduction to the Venture Center incubator – 10 July

What: IIT-Bombay Alumni Association Pune presents an introduction to the Venture Center (see recent PuneTech coverage of Venture Center)
When: Friday 10th July, 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Where: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road. To reach Venture Center, go past NCL towards Pashan, pass the cricket ground adjacent to NCL and then you’ll find NCL Innovation Park / Venture Center on the right hand side. Map
Registration and fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Details:

Venture Center is an incubator housed in NCL Pune, created with the purpose:

“To nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises for India by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the region”

Kaushik Gala, Business Development Manager at Venture Center is looking for all innovators in the areas of biology, chemical, and material sciences. The IIT-Bombay Alumni Association of Pune has organized a talk by Kaushik at Venter Center to speak about their activites

For more information about Venture Center see recent PuneTech coverage of Venture Center.

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200 CS graduates want to help you with your pet project

Hundreds of B.E. (Computer Science) students who graduated in 2009 are now idle for a few months because their job offers have been deferred by their future employers. What is a potentially nasty psychological and social problem can easily be converted into a win-win situation for everybody concerned if people in the industry come forward and provide projects for these graduates to work on in the intervening period. If you are an experienced industry person, by providing a few hours of guidance, you can get some useful work done, and and the same time help the graduates improve their skills, and become more employable.

Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, who is the driving force behind this effort, points out that there are over 200 students in this situation right now, and the industry could help itself while at the same time helping the students by coming up with, say, 3-month projects that small teams of students could complete. He points to web-2.0, e-Governance, and the cloud as potential technologies that might be rather well suited for this purpose. As an example of something like this working well, and producing useful, real-world output, he points to the Stanford class where 80 students created 50+ facebook applications, with over 20 million installs, and 5 of them had 1 million+ installs. There is no reason something like that cannot work with our crop of students.

It must be pointed out that many of these students are the star students who got recruited straight from campus, but now find themselves in this situation because their job offers got defered of revoked.

So what should you do?

We have created a mailing list called TechStart.in that will be used to co-ordinate this effort.

  • If you can guide small student teams, and if you can commit to giving at least a couple of hours per week for the next three months, then join the techstart.in mailing list, and post a small mail introducing yourself.
  • In a few days, we will specify how and where to post information about your project and/or how to find the appropriate students for your project. This information will be posted on the mailing list.
  • If you don’t have any specific project in mind, but would generally like to help out with this effort, please join the mailing list and give a brief background of yourself. We can use all the help you can provide
  • If you can think of any other ideas that can help out in this situation, please suggest those on the mailing list. All proposals are welcome.
  • This program is only going to work if we are able to collect at least 30 to 50 mentors who can guide the students. We will start work seriously on this only after a reasonable number of people have shown an interest on the techstart.in mailing list. If there’s not enough interest shown on the list in the next few days, this program will die. So if you’re interested, please send a mail on techstart.in. If you know somebody else who might be interested, please forward this mail to them.

Benefits

This is really a win-win situation

  • You get good CS graduates from good colleges working for you
  • If things work out and the team does a good job, you get a great, tested employee
  • The student learns valuable industry skills, gets guidance, and becomes more employable
  • There is no necessity to pay the students for this work. (However, you could give a stipend if you are possibly interested holding on to the student for a long-term job.)

Logistics and other details

Here are some details that I glossed over in the write-up above:

  • This program is targeted towards Computer Science graduates of the class of 2009.
  • Anand Despande has already contacted the colleges and they have all indicated a willingness to help out with this effort. Persistent is also willing to help with some resources. Other companies are expected to follow suit. So rooms, facilities, and other logistics help will be available if required.
  • If you can conduct 3-month Stanford-style course for one batch of students building a bunch of facebook apps, or Microsoft Azure apps, or Google android apps, or anything else, please come forward. As long as you’re willing to drive, appropriate resources can be made available to you.
  • If you have any other ideas, please suggest them on the mailing list.

Conclusion

This is a great opportunity to do something socially useful and get something in return. So join. And make others join. Right now, all you need to do is indicate your availability and willingness. More details will become available soon.

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