Category Archives: Live Blogging

Liveblogging CSI Pune Lecture: Applications of Business Intelligence

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I am liveblogging CSI Pune‘s lecture on Applications of Business Intelligence by Narender C.V. of SAS R&D India. These are quick and dirty notes of the lecture – not intended to be a well organized article, but hopefully it gives you enough of a flavor for the area to get you interested and excited enough to check it out on google and wikipedia.

The amount of data is doubling every 11 months. And we have easier and easier access to all this data from all over the world. The problem is making sense of all this data. The amount of time at our disposal remains the same. So we have to use sophisticated software and algorithms to figure out how to use this data to improve business and efficiency. That is Business Intelligence (BI).

This talk is the second in a series of talks on BI. PuneTech covered the first talk which gave an overview of BI and data warehousing. This lecture focuses on who uses BI and why. A major portion of this talk will be a bunch of examples of use of BI in real companies. So on to the examples:

Example 1: Getting a better grip on Reality (i.e. Seeing problems earlier)

First case study will focus on using BI to simply get a good picture of the situation as it exists. Seeing Reality. Last year, US based companies paid $28 billion in servicing warranties or recalls. This is money you don’t really want to spend. Biggest problem in this is identifying these problems as early as possible. Seeing reality early. Typically, an issue first appears. A little while later, the issue becomes visible to the company, and it is prioritized. Later it is “defined” and decisions taken by the decision makers. Finally the issue is resolved, and money paid out. A study by SAS shows that the “detect” part of this cycle takes about 90 days, the prioritize part takes 20 days, and the define part takes 75 days. That’s a total of 185 days to fix the problem.

A business intelligence system helps to reduce each phase of that sequence because of better data gathering and statistical analysis. This results in 27 days detection, 5 days, prioritization and 46 days to prioritize, for a total of 78 days. This is a huge improvement, and each day saved results in money saved.

How is this done? First simple reports: defects per thousand, per product. Dashboard with easy to see defect reports. Then a library of reports that various people in the company can use easily to see and analyze defects and warranty claims. Then a statistical analysis engine to detect “emerging issues”. Use algorithms that can detect, from early trends, issues that are likely to become “big” later on. Text mining and analysis to read unstructured reports of service technicians and being able to determine, simply by looking at the keywords, which product or part or defect was the cause of that particular incident. And there are other analytics, like forecasting and trend analysis that are used. Bottomline? Shanghai GM was able to reduce detection and definition time by 70%, resulting in reduction of costs by 34%. Which is pretty cool for simply running a bunch of mathematical algorithms.

Example 2: Manage and Align Resources to Strategy

Everybody agrees that it is important for a company to have a strategy. And that everyone should understand and execute according to that strategy. Obvious?

This is a reality based on a survey: Only 5% of the workforce of a large company understand the company strategy. Only 25% of the managers were incentivized based on the strategy. 60% of organizations do not link budgets to the strategy. 86% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy.

How can BI help in this case?

It is possible to define objectives for each person/team in the company. Then it is possible to define how this objective can/should be measured. Then BI software can be used to capture and analyze this data, and figure out how everybody is contributing to the end objectives of the business.

Example 3: Retail Optimization

The problem to be solved. Need to stock the exact quantity that people are going to buy. Stock too much and you lose money on unsold items. Order too little and you get out-of-stock situations and lose potential profits. Need to be able to forecast demand. Optimize which sizes/assortments to stock. All of you must have an experience of going to a shop, liking an item, and not having that available in your size. Sale lost. Profit lost. Can this loss be reduced?

Use BI for this. In case study, a department store sent the same mix of different sizes to all stores. SAS did clustering of stores, to create 7 different sub-groups that have different size mixes for each sub-group of stores.

Example 4: Personalized, real-time marketing

Take the example of marketing. Consider a traditional marketing mail sent from a company. Customers hate that and the success rate is a pathetic 3% or so. That’s just stupid, but exists when there is no alternative. Better is event based marketing. When you do something, it triggers a marketing push from the company. This is often convenient for the customer, and has a 20% success rate. But the best is customer initiated interaction which has a 40% success rate.

Note that as you go down that list, it gets more difficult to quickly, in real time, determine what marketing message exactly to push to the customer. If you call a pizza delivery place and they point out that that they have a buy-one-get-one-free offer, it might or might not be interesting for you. Better would be an offer focused specifically on your needs. Use BI to analyze individual customers and forecast their needs and then tailor the offer for you. An offer you cannot refuse.

Another example. Customer puts digital camera in online shopping cart. The online shopping software contacts the BI system for offers to push to customer. It looks at customer history. Figures out that customer is non-tech savvy customer who buys high-end products. Also, customer’s demographic information is consulted, and finally some accessories are suggested. Since this is very specific recommendation, this can result in a high chance of being accepted. This significantly increases profit on this transaction.

Example 5: Understanding Customers

Mobile company, simplistic view: Customer is leaving. Offer them a lower value plan. The might or might not leave. BI gives you better tools. Cost is not the only thing to play with. Understand why people are leaving, and also understand the effect of them leaving on your business. (Sometimes it might be best to let them leave.) And based on this, determine the best course of action – what / how much to offer them.

First, use predictive analysis to get an estimate of how much profit you are going to make from a customer over the course of next N years based on the data you have gathered about them so far. Use this figure, the “customer value”, to drive decisions on how much effort to expend on trying to get this customer to stay. Forget the low value customers, and focus on the high value ones!

Another possibility. If you have marketing money to spend on giving offers to some customers. Let us say there are 3 different kinds of offers. Use BI analysis to figure out which offers to send to which customers, based on customer value, and also chances of customer accepting that offer. This optimizes the use of the “offer” dollars.

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Liveblogging CSI Pune’s Entrepreneurship Seminar

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I’m at CSI Pune‘s Entrepreneurship Seminar. Please forgive the haphazardness and lack of flow/organization. I’m liveblogging. Hopefully, better structured articles will emerge after a few days.

Arrived late and missed Anand Deshpande’s Keynote address.

What do VCs look for

Manik Arora, Founder and Managing Director of IDG Ventures India is talking about how to approach a VC. How they decide who to fund.

How to contact a VC.
Don’t call or send email without any introduction. VCs like to hear about you from someone they trust. A customer, ideally. Or a known successful entrepreneur, seed investor, etc. Otherwise they have no idea how seriously to take you.

Also, ideally, a VC who is going to invest a huge amount of money in you, likes to feel that he knows you. So, he would be much more comfortable investing if he’s known you for an year or two. Which means that you should meet and interact with VCs even if you are not looking for funding. You don’t want funding right now, but an year from now, when you are looking, and if you’ve been “hanging out” with that VC for a while, he will feel much more comfortable.

The Business Plan
Is important. It’s main purpose is to ensure that VC wants to meet you. Should contain the:

  • Elevator pitch
  • Vision and Mission statement
  • Market and Industry Environment – Size, Segment, Growth, Issues/Trends
  • Value Proposition, Key Products/Services and Sustainable Differentiation
  • Competition strengths and weaknesses and Entry Barriers
    • Most Indian Business Plans don’t have this.
    • If this section is done really well, VC gets quickly interested.
    • Shows that you are a sophisticated business person, as opposed to a techie.
  • Business Model and Sales/Marketing Strategy
    • What is the revenue driver, and what is the cost drivers
  • Market Traction Achieved so far
    • This is hard for early stage investors
    • So you probably don’t have much, but important to show speed with which you got there
  • Management Team Bios/Details
  • Organization Structure
  • Financials – Historical Actuals, Forecasts; Cash Flow + P&L
  • Exit Options – Names, Comparables, Price Paid, Multiples
  • Capital Required – How much, for what, over what timeframe
  • Risks and Gaps – What could go wrong, what don’t you have

Details available at http://idgvcindia.com

Do you need experience? Yes.
Start in a large company, so you know what business is about, what process is about, and also what are weaknesses of a big business, that you can exploit.

The Pitch/First Meeting: “Credibility”

Preparation before the meeting

  • Show up a little early. (You’ll be surprised at how many people come late.)
  • Dress appropriately. 
  • Have practiced your pitch a couple of times. 
  • Have a presentation ready / bring a couple of print-outs

During the meeting

  • Don’t try to only make your points – listen to them too
  • Answer questions directly
  • Ask the VC questions – gauge the VCs knowledge and style. It is fine to decide that you don’t like the VC and would not want to work with him
  • Discuss the deal briefly, don’t worry about valuation/dilution just yet
  • Towards the end, ask the VC the process going forward 
  • Towards the end, ask the VC how he can add value
  • Leave with next-steps clear and follow-up if you think this is a VC you want to take money from

Panel Discussion

Moderator is Madhukar Bhatia of nFactorial Software. Panelists are Manik Arora of IDG Ventures (whose talk forms the top half of this article), Yoshima Somvanshi of NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network), Sandeep Kumar, MD of Product Dossier, Vishwas Mahajan, CEO of CompuLink, Ajay Phatak, MD of Jopasana, Rajeevlochan Phadke (CEO of Image Point Technologies, a very interesting company that I hope to write about in a separate post). 

What environment is needed for successful startups?

Manik: A risk-taking society is a must. A person must be willing to take a risk. His in-laws must be OK with this decision. People must be willing to fund him – angel, seed, VC. Another problem with startups in India is that biggest market, US is too far away. Having a large domestic market is key – and that is slowly growing. CIOs in India are now willing to buy locally. Must have large feeder companies, where people can be part of growth and experience it, and learn from it, and find co-founders at. 

Ajay: In the “risk taking society” an important ingredient is also risk taking customers.

Sandeep: Customers are not willing to trust Indian startups. Can’t be sure the company will be around after 10 years. And this isn’t just the customer’s problem, because success stories are not there.

Vishwas: Early advice he got: He had an idea, and went to someone for funding. Was told: don’t come to me until you have 5 customers. That will teach you a whole bunch of things. And you will be taken more seriously. You don’t know all the real requirements and complexities until you have real customers.

What are the trends?

Manik: I don’t look at trends anymore. Look at the team. For example, everybody thinks web is hot in India now. But the last time the web was hot, about 25 to 30 companies got funded, and only 4 or 5 are still around. And now if you see, most of the top 15 websites in the world are actually platform companies. What can you do that would really be new and interesting?

Students in Startups (How to attract people to startups, and retain them)

Yoshima: NEN just had a startup jobs program. In some college in Delhi they had a placement day just for startups. 25 jobs where offered and 18 were accepted. One of the things that worked well is the fact that students did internships with startups, and got an idea that the work is interesting.

(Very cool, I think we should try something like this in Pune -navin)

Manik: I see lots of people in Wipro who work 14-15 hour days. And salary is less than what the market pays. So why do they all stick around? Apparently, the answer lies in Premji’s philosophy – whenever a guy is 60 to 70% ready for the next level in the job, he is pushed into that responsibility. They are too busy with their responsibilities to worry about leaving.

How (and why) to bootstrap your own startup

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I am liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club saturday meetup, where we are discussing how to bootstrap your startup. We have invited three speakers who have experience with both bootstrapping a startup and VC funding: Anand Soman, Tarun Malaviya,  and Shridhar Shukla.  The following is a quick-n-dirty capture of some of the discussion that happened.

This is not intended to be a well thought out, well structured article – hopefully that will happen after a few days, when hopefully someone blogs about this event.

Update: The hope has come true. Here are two other blog posts on that event: A post by Santosh (or maybe Anjali) of Bookeazy, and one by Rishi from Thinking Space Technologies (ActiveCiti and EventAZoo)

Getting funded vs. bootstrapping your own startup:

Anand: Take funding when you want to do something that you cannot do without funds. This can be VC funds, or any other source of funds. But make sure that the goals of the financer are the same as your goals, otherwise you’ll get into trouble.

Tarun: Most of you will not get funded. Officially there are 45 million businesses in India. Unofficially, 85% of 350 million people are in the unorganized sector – so they are businesspeople.

I don’t want to be a mom-and-pop show in a corner. I want to be a big business. But remember Reliance is a bootstrapped company. Finance is a good thing at a certain time, not always. I’ve seen too many people fixated on getting funded. It is better to be fixated on running your business well – keeping customers happy.

Shridhar: You get funding only if you’ve proved that you have a viable business. Which means that you have to bootstrap until you reach that point. So you need to figure out how to do this in any case.

What are the disadvantages of VC funding?

Tarun: You have to build a bridge across a river. You need a million dollars. You get funds for only 50k. What do you do? Fold the business? That’s what a financial investor will suggest. An entrepreneur will do anything to keep the business running. Buy boats to get across. Run a boating service. Change tactics to make some progress.

VCs insist on big returns. Leave you with no choice.

Q: If someone wants to build a lifestyle business, then you don’t need VC funding. But if you want to build a product, there are many people across the world with the same idea. If they are funded and you are not, then you are at a major disadvantate.

Lifestyle business = this is a lifestyle choice for the founders. They are doing this just because they enjoy doing this, and they are making a little money. They are not interested in giving a huge exit to their investors.

Don’t worry about lifestyle or not. Focus on building value for customers. As long as you can do that, and create significant value, you will do fine, and you will attract investors. If the value created is not significant, you’ll find out soon enough, and you’ll change your strategy.

There is a major trade-off involved here. You must believe in yourself. But not to such an extent that you are blind to realities and are not listening to anybody at all. So you need to balance this – believing in yourself vs. listening to feedback. That is difficult.

So why take VC funding?

Tarun: Family businesses get ruined by all the informal/unprofessional structure. VC funding is a great way of getting a professional corporate structure that is necessary for success.

VCs have wisdom, if you select wisely. They open doors to contacts. They are advisors. Some of them can be given a stake without being given money. So that is important.

Every VC that I’ve talked to has helped me in some way. So even if you don’t take funding, take advice from them. Go through the process.

Anand: VCs are not the only source. Many other sources.
One good source is raising money from your first customer. Win-win situation. He invests because he can direct you to build a product he wants. This is good because the understands your product and understands the business requirements. And he is happier giving you a contract because he actually has control over you 9since he funded you).

Bootstrapping your product through services.

Shridhar: Do services. Charge high. Don’t worry about good quality work. Do boring work because it doesn’t take up too much of your time (so you have time to work on your product). Don’t have qualms about doing this. Even when you do your product, keep the structure in place for keeping the flow of money from services. Money from any source is good. Don’t give up on that.

Another possibility for bootstrapping is to moonlight. Work somewhere. Have a day job. Work at night. Don’t create pressure on your own savings or your friends savings. Many businesses got started that way. Many people are worried about being fast, and first to market. That is not so important. But be ethical. Don’t do your current employer in

Anand: 14 of the top 15 companies in the world were started by part-timers.

Tarun:
Q: Why do you want to do product?
A: Exponential returns. Build once, and sell many times. Product encapsulates a service. You can bootstrap this. Sell your product as a service to the first few customers. Or maybe, start by selling your expertise.

Shridhar:
Don’t tell your customer that you are going to build a product in the space that you are doing a project in. Be smart. Don’t sign a contract that gives away your IP.

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Overview of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

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I am liveblogging the CSI Pune lecture on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. These are quick-n-dirty notes, so please forgive the uneven flow and typos. This page is being updated every few minutes.

There’s a large turnout – over 100 people here.

Business Intelligence is an area that covers a number of different technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to data that will help an large company make better business decisions. Includes decision support systems (i.e. databases that run complex queries (as opposed to databases that run simple transactions)), online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining. This is a huge market, with major players like Microsoft, Cognos, IBM, SAS, Business Objects, SPSS in the fray.

What kind of decisions does this help you with? How to cut costs. Better understanding of customers (which ones are credit worthy? which one are at most risk of switching to a competitor’s product?) Better planning of flow of goods or information in the enterprise.

This is not easy because amount of data is exploding. There’s too much data. Humans can’t make sense of all of them.

To manage this kind of information you need a big storage platform and a systematic way of storing all the information and being able to analyze the data (with the aforementioned complex queries). Collect together data from different sources in the enterprise. Pull from various production servers and stick it into an offline, big, fat database. This is called a data warehouse.

The data needs to be cleaned up quite a lot before it is usable. Inconsistencies between data from different data sources. Duplicates. Mis-matches. If you are combining all the data into one big database, it needs to be consistent and without duplicates. Then you start analyzing the data. Either with a human doing various reports and queries (OLAP), or the computer automatically finding interesting patterns (data mining).

Business Intelligence is an application that sits on top of the Data Warehouse.

Lots of difficult problems to be solved.

Many different data sources: flat files, CSVs, legacy systems, transactional databases. Need to pick updates from all these sources on a regular basis. How to do this incrementally and efficiently?  How often – daily, weekly, monthly? Parallelized loading for speed. How to do this without slowing down the production system. Might have to do this during a small window at night. So now you have to ensure that the loading finishes in the given time window.

This is the first lecture of a 6-lecture series. Next lectures will be Business Applications of BI. This will give an idea of which industries benefit from BI – specific examples: e.g. banking for assessing credit risk, fraud, etc. Then Data Management for BI. Various issues in handling large volumes of data; data quality, transformation and loading. These are huge issues, and need to be handled very carefully, to ensure that the performance remains acceptable in spite of the huge volumes. Next lecture is technology trends in BI. Where is this technology going in the future. Then one lecture on role of statistical techniques in BI. You’ll need a bit of a statistical background to appreciate this lecture. And final session on careers in BI. For detailed schedule and other info of this series, see the Pune Tech events calendar, which is the most comprehensive source of tech events info for Pune.

SAS R&D India works on Business Applications of BI (5 specific verticals like banking), on Data management, on some of the solutions. A little of the analytics – forecasting. Not working on core analytics – that is only at HQ.

We are trying to get the slides used in this talk from the speaker. Hopefully in a few days. Please check back by Monday.

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Liveblogging the POCC meeting on Usability

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I’m liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on usability. About 30 people in the room now. These are quick-n-dirty notes, not really well structured. Hopefully in a couple of days, more coherent reports will emerge from me or other bloggers. For background on some of the speakers, see the meeting announcement page on punetech.

Jhumkee: This field started around World War-II. Aircraft accidents. Instead of saying that pilots are idiots, the engineers decided to change the design so that mistakes don’t happen. Instead of engineers designing a system by themselves, involve the users in the process. Don’t just think about what they want. Instead, ask them. Or watch them using the product.

Military, aerospace, and other fields really embraced this field. In India, this is a fairly new field. Especially in IT.

But it is common sense.

Shashank: In the era of electronics and IT, it is very easy to put in new features. This is a problem. In general, in most product companies, engineers first create a product, and then go around looking for users who are interested in that product.

But adding features, normally results in reducing usability. So, especially for small startups, there is a choice to make – add features or add usability?

Harrshada: How did you start your startup? Did you find a need and try to fill it, or did you have a cool technology/algorithm that you wanted to implement? Usability says that you should always have a target audience in mind, and work towards solving their problems. Your technology is not the important part. Constantly be in touch with users and keep observing them.

It’s rather trivial to say that we should keep users in mind when designing the product. But, how to actually go about this?

Jhumkee: You must get a real user, and then there are a number of techniques that are used to get information out of the user. First of all: You are not a user. Many designers of systems are under the impression that they are a user. Because, they are actually using their own product. In fact, Steve Yegge argues passionately that you should only build products that you yourself want. But, the problem is that as you are designing the system you become an expert. You know everything about the system. You are not a regular user. Hence, you must spend time with real users.

Shashank: There is a science behind this. There are a bunch of techniques for doing this. Some of them are obvious, and some hidden means by which you can get usability information out of users. You need to think through this process. But it doesn’t have to be anything very fancy. Interview your users. Ask open ended questions about what they were trying to achieve, what they felt, what made them happy, and what frustrated them. Use this to determine some broad areas of concern, and then start digging deeper.

Jhumkee: There is no silver-bullet here. Some of this comes from experience. A lot of this differs based on the But there are some broad guidelines. It must be an iterative process. Make changes. Test with real users. Repeat.

There are a lot of guidelines on individual things (e.g. font sizes, navigation architecture, accessibility factors) etc. But you can’t simply apply them without a deeper understanding. Because usability is a holistic thing. Even if the parts are all OK, the whole system might still not be very usable.

But, the guidelines are a good starting point. There are some good basic guidelines at Yale. And also at usability.gov.

RouteGuru: Usability is a huge issue for us. How to present information about an entire route in SMS form, and how to do this in a way that the route gets built up in their head. Another big hassle is the 80-20 problem. The last mile is significantly more complicated than the rest of the directions. Also, some users are only interested in the last mile, as they know how to get to the general vicinity. Others want all the directions. We are still grappling with this issue.

Somebody I don’t know: For usability, keep only one action per page. One page should be for one purpose only (except for the home page). If there is a form, there should be only one button. Use a tool from google that is used to serve two layouts of the same page to different users and then study their behavior. Use this information to decide what works and what doesn’t.

Shashank: This last technique is a very quantitative mechanism. Analytics, heat-maps, etc. give you a lot of data. You don’t always know how to use this data. The world is moving towards qualitative analysis.

Manas: Users don’t always know what they want. So how do you handle this?

Jhumkee: What you do is task-based analysis. Find out what the users want to do, and then figure out how long it takes them to do it, and whether they get frustrated doing it, and whether they are successful or not. This will give you good insights. So the real work is in figuring out what these tasks should be.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the meeting at this stage to get back to my kids. Hopefully I’ll be able to fill in the gaps with notes taken by someone else.

POCC meeting (Footprint Ventures and Google) report

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I’m liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting organized by nFactorial. There are over 50 people and SEED Infotech‘s classroom is overflowing. They are having to bring in more chairs for people who are still standing.

Neill Brownstein of Footprint Ventures is giving a pitch about his company

  • Footprint has created $30 billion in value over 35 years. 20% IRR. 23 IPOs
  • Among other companies, Footprint has invested in our own Veritas Software.
  • Average run-rate of companies they fund is currently in the $1 million

Neeraj Arora, works in Mergers and Acquisitions at Google, focusing on APJ – mainly Australia and India

  • They don’t invest in startups. They acquire. But they work closely with some seed funds.
  • These are the guys that did the acquisition of a company in Australia which ultimately became Google maps
  • They are not looking for anything in particular. Consumer, enterprise, early stage, late stage. Is all OK. Pre-revenue is good. But must be a product company.
  • Question: do they only acquire companies with technology that is compatible with theirs? Answer: if it needs to integrate with Google products, then yes, the technology does need to be compatible.
  • The company needs to relocate. Either to Mountain View, US, or Bangalore, in India. (in most cases)
  • They sometimes buy companies just because they think it is cool, even if they can’t figure out where it will really fit in
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Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra conference 2008 – Day 2

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Hi-Tech Pune Maharastra Conference 2008

Yesterday, I live-blogged about Day 1 of this conference. That was more about the speeches given by dignitaries. Today I am attending one session, and this one promises to be more technical talks.

To refresh your memory, this is the Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra 2008 organized by Suresh Kalmadi backed Pune Vyaspeeth, this is the 5th installment of this conference, and in addition to IT, the focus this time is on Bio-Technology and Animation. The conference is spread out over three days (18th June to 20th June) and there is a fairly interesting schedule of presentations by a diverse set of speakers.

I am live-blogging this conference so, 1) refresh on a regular basis if you’re reading this on Wednesday evening (Pune time), and 2) please excuse the terse and ungrammatical language.

I missed the morning sessions. There were two sessions on innovation (which I’m glad to have missed – I am bored of talks on innovation), one on biotech, and one that sounded very interesting – because it was case studies on animation (“Golden Compass”, “Tare Zameen Par”, “Little Krishna”) that was done out of Pune.

This is the last session of the day.

Wipro Technologies.Image via Wikipedia

First up is P.S. Narayan, Head Sustainability Practice, Wipro, talking about “Does Green make business sense?” While a lot of the talk was general Al Gore-ish “you should help the environment” lecturing, there were a few points that I found interesting.

He is making the point that Green companies perform better. There are examples of businesses who focused on energy savings and managed to not just reduce energy costs, but also improved on a bunch of other measures. Also, he is showing that green companies do better on the stock market too. I’m not sure whether this is just correlation or there was some causation involved. (I mean it is possible that companies that think about going green, are also the same ones who are smart enough to reduce their costs, and the ones who are not going green are generally the companies that are not well run.)

What is Green IT? It’s not just designing your systems to consume less power. It is also about software solutions to reduce energy consumed in other parts of your company (e.g. did you think about re-designing your supply chain to minimize energy consumption?) Also, other things like green accounting (if your accounts department kept track of energy usage in addition to simply dollars spent, that would reduce consumption. Currently, most people don’t even know the details of their consumption.)

The next up is Dr. S. Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC with a talk entitled “From Innovation to Deployment: Case Studies from C-DAC”. In their Language Computing initiative they have designed more than 3000 TrueType and Unicode fonts for Indian languages. In Speech Technologies, they not only have to worry about speech-to-text of Indian languages, but also speech-to-text of Indian English! C-DAC’s ATCS (Area Traffic Control System) brings advanced concepts in traffic control to Indian conditions. It uses vehicle detectors to optimize traffic signals. These kinds of signals are only present in two place in India – Delhi (63 signals, imported from UK) and Pune (34 signals, developed by C-DAC). The signals are controlled from a central location using wireless communication – which is really good because it reduces road digging. (Anyone driving around Pune these days will know how big a deal this is.) There is also a telemedicine project but he did not get time to go into that.

Dr. Anupam Saraph, CIO of Pune, making a case for having strong IT in government in Pune. To allow growth faster than the 7% that we are currently experiencing (it should be double digits), but also to ensure that we do not run into the problems that are caused by the growth when it happens. After the initial pitch, he is jumping ahead and talking about his vision for Pune in 2015, and then following it up with the specific projects that he has initiated. He mentioned how this is a partnership between government and businesses – he sees how it is sustainable when someone is making money off these cool services. He also mentioned the Design for Pune competition (which I am working on) and PuneTech. Cool.

In the plenary session, Rohit Srivastwa, head of IT for the Commonwealth Games, and Airtight Networks, gave a talk on how information security is very important these days. He talked about ClubHack (an online community for bringing security awareness to common people). He pointed out to Anupam Saraph how some government websites had security loopholes. This led to a nice back-and-forth between the two of them about the need to balance security vs. use of new technology – a refreshing change from the blandness that afflicts other presentations. But while the session was interesting, I was not entirely sure why it was a plenary session, instead of being a presentation in one of the regular sessions.

Vijay Kumar Gautam, COO, Commonwealth Games, Delhi 2010, gave a brilliant speech about the use of IT in sports, and brought out very nicely the huge difficulties involved in managing the IT for a sports event. Imagine a company that has 50,000 employees, and 1 billion customers. The company is built from scratch in 3 years, and is operational for only 3 weeks. Unlike most other IT projects, the deadline does not slip – the dates are fixed and remain fixed. Unlike most other software products, you don’t get a chance to do a bugfix or a patch release. You don’t get a chance to tune your system based on experience in the field. You don’t have an alpha or a beta release. And now imagine 10,000 journalists following your every move and ready to report on every gaffe.

He gave some idea of the complexity of the whole set up – hardware, software, processes. I’d love to get my hands on his presentation, not sure where I can get it from. They are planning on using the Commonwealth Youth Games in Pune later this year as a Proof-of-Concept test ground for the system.

The most interesting thing he said was this – such games happen all the time. There are Olympics (summer/winter) every two year. There are Commonwealth or Asian games every two years. Take into account world championships and other events and you have games all the time. And, it is very difficult to find people who have the experience of building IT systems for such a requirement. And they charge astronomical rates. You should get into this business. That was the main thrust of his talk.

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Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra 2008 Conference – Day 1

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Hi-Tech Pune Maharastra Conference 2008

The Hi-Tech Pune Maharashtra 2008 conference got underway today. Organized by Suresh Kalmadi backed Pune Vyaspeeth, this is the 5th installment of this conference, and in addition to IT, the focus this time is on Bio-Technology and Animation. The conference is spread out over three days (18th June to 20th June) and there is a fairly interesting schedule of presentations by a diverse set of speakers.

I am live-blogging this conference so, 1) refresh on a regular basis if you’re reading this on Wednesday evening (Pune time), and 2) please excuse the terse and ungrammatical language.

The event is being live-webcast by the organizers. Go to the Pune Vyaspeeth homepage and click on the broadcast link at the bottom of the page.

The first day is mostly talks by dignitaries – Suresh Kalmadi, Jyotiraditya Scindia (Minister of State for Communications & IT Government of India), Dr. Ashok Kolaskar (VC UoP), Narayan Murthy, Dr. K. I. Varaprasad Reddy (MD, Shantha Biotechnics).

The talks:

  • Missed talks by Deepak Shikarpur, Suresh Kalmadi and Dr. Kolaskar
  • Anand Khandekar Director Pune Development Center & Chief Mentor NVIDIA: “Animation is going to be the next big thing. Especially in Maharashtra and Pune. And it is not restricted to the elite – it will create jobs for the rural sector too. The government must extend the same incentives for the budding animation industry as it did for IT industry earlier”
  • Mr. Ashish Kulkarni, CEO, BIG Animation: “Animation for a bunch of recent movies was done in Pune. Dashavatar, Golden Compass. All of the animation for the upcoming Krishna movie will be in Pune.
  • Lifetime achievement award for Narayan Murthy
  • Lifetime achievement award for Dr. Reddy.
  • Dr. Reddy heard comments that India was a beggar country begging for vaccines from the west. At that time one of the vaccines (I forgot which one) cost $28 – completely out of the reach of most of the poor Indians. Stung by the criticism, he gave up his career in Electronics and started Shanta Biotech. He tried to acquire the technology and was told by the company that recombinant DNA technology was so far ahead of the capabilities of Indian scientists that it would take them 20 years to absorb the technology – and hence there was no point in transfering the technology to India. Miffed, Dr. Reddy hired local scientists and developed the technology indigeneously in about 5 years and introduced it at a price of Rs. 50. Today it sells for Rs. 20.
  • But Dr. Reddy worries that the situation today is less than ideal. Due to the booming IT sector and the huge salaries offered there, people are no longer opting for careers in sciences. (At least not people that you would actually want to hire.)
  • Jyotiraditya Scindia: is a great speaker. Spoke very well about innovation. Spoke about India’s tradition of innovation and education. Said that in modern times, our temples should be the IITs and other great educational institutions. Spoke about the need for greater collaboration between industry and educational institutions. I am not doing justice to his speech – maybe someone else who attended will do that tomorrow.
  • William A. Haseltine, President, Haseltine Foundation:  India is not a subset of the world. India is a representative of the world. You have everything, from large business, and high tech to tribals and poverty. You solve the problems in India and you solve the problems of the world.

The scheduled presentations are over and I am heading off to the “networking dinner”. I hadn’t expected on getting an invitation for this conference, so I have not really made place in my calendar for the attending the next two days of the conference. I might drop in for a couple of hours each day, but can’t stay the whole day. If anybody reading this is attending the conference and would like to write a report on the sessions, please let me know.

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