Category Archives: Events

Call for Speakers: GNUnify – India’s Biggest Open Source Conference

(Sorry about the late notice. This CFP for GNUnify is open until Wednesday Feb 1st, so please hurry and register as a speaker.)

GNUnify, organized by Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) and SICSR is one of the biggest free and open source conferences in India. It will be held on 10th and 11th Feb in Pune and will feature speakers and attendees from all over the world (yes, it regularly gets international visitors).

This year, the theme is “Emerging and Next Generation Technologies in the World of FOSS,” and they are looking for speakers in these tracks/categories:

  • Mobile Computing
  • Cloud Computing
  • System Programming
  • Emerging Languages
  • Sys Admin
  • Security
  • Web Technologies

To register as a speaker, go to the Speaker Registration Page and follow the directions there. All you need to do is provide a short abstract of what you would like to speak about. This, you should be able to do, in spite of the fact that PuneTech has provided you with just 1 day notice 🙂

Benefits of being a speaker at GNUnify:

  • Accomodation and reimbursement of travel expenses for speakers from out of Pune
  • Get established as an expert in your area of work
  • Interact with some of the most passionate students and professionals in open source
  • Give back to the community that has given you so much.

Register Now. See the GNUnify Website for more details.

TechM presents i5 Talks: On Innovative Tech Ideas to better Society – 31 Jan

i5 Talks is a quarterly technology talk show organized by Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam that showcases innovative ideas which incite, ignite and inspire people to create a better society by using technology. The idea is to create something similar to TED, but specific to India and Technology. And this is not restricted just to Mahindra – the audience as well as the speakers are drawn from across the industry.

The next edition of i5 Talks is tomorrow (31 January, 2pm-5pm). The theme of this edition is social networking and collaboration. This event is free for anyone to attend. Please contact i5TalksHelpdesk@techmahindra.com to register. The event is at Tech Mahindra’s Hinjewadi corporate office: Plot no 1, Phase III, Hinjewadi.

Here is the description of the event from the website:

i5 Talks is a platform for the innovators and organizations dealing with technology to participate and share ideas. The Talks will draw in the best speakers and demonstrations from customers, partners, employees, scholars and other industry leaders. Theme will revolve around different topics each quarter and will be conducted at various centers of Mahindra Satyam and Tech Mahindra, across the country. Each talk, of around 15 minutes, will also be recorded and made available on the i5 Talks website.

We have 8 speakers from diverse backgrounds who shall each talk to us about their experiences in this area and of that one compelling idea or inspiration that motivated them in this field.

The speakers are:

  • Anirban Pal: SME, Emerging Trends & Technologies, MahindraSatyam
  • Atul Shah: Founder, Consumyze
  • Kiruba Shankar: CEO, Business Blogging Pvt Ltd
  • Mandar Tengse: Principal Architect, Oracle
  • Rohit Pandarkar: Deputy CTO, CanvasM
  • Shashank Srivastava: Manager, WW Industry Marketing, TIBCO
  • Suresh Babu: Founder, Web Marketing Academy
  • Vineet Jawa: CEO, Gaboli

For more details about the speakers see the speakers page. For more details about the event see the i5 Talks website.

As indicated earlier, the event is free, it is on Tuesday, 31 Jan, 2pm-5pm, Tech Mahindra, Hinjewadi. Please contact i5TalksHelpdesk@techmahindra.com to register.

ACM India Annual Event – at Pune, 25 Jan

This year, The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) (one of the top associations of computer science academics and professionals), will hold its annual India event on 25th January, in Pune with the help of ACM Pune, the local chapter. The event will be at the ‘O’ Hotel, Koregaon Park, Pune, from 9:30am to 5:30pm. This annual meet is attended by ACM Turing Award winners, ACM Office Bearers, ACM India members, and Researchers.

Note: this event is different from the ACM Compute 2012 Conference, which is also being organised by ACM Pune, in Pune, on 23/24 Jan.

Agenda for the Event

  • 0930 Welcome Alain Chesnais, John White, Anand Deshpande
  • 1000 Keynote by N R Narayana Murthy, Infosys
  • 1100 Tea break
  • 1130 Talk by Frans Kaashoek, MIT
  • 1220 Ramesh Mengawade, Opus Software
  • 1300 Lunch
  • 1400 Talk by Ravi Kannan, Microsoft Research
  • 1450 Talk by Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
  • 1540 Tea break
  • 1600 Capstone talk by Narendra Jadhav, Planning Commision
  • 1700 Concluding session, Vote of Thanks, Anand Deshpande, P J Narayanan
  • 1730 Closing

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.

Fees and Registration

This event open for anybody to attend – the fees are Rs. 300 for ACM members and Rs. 800 for non-members. Please register here

ACM Compute 2012 academic conference in Pune – 23/24 Jan

ACM Pune, the local chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) one of the top associations of computer science academics and professionals, is holding Compute 2012, the first edition of its annual conference, on 23 and 24 January 2012. The theme for this conference is Intelligent and Scalable Computing Systems. Prof. R. K. Shyamsunder, TIFR, Mumbai and Dr. Lokendra Shastri, Infosys Ltd are general co-chairs for COMPUTE 2012.

Agenda

Keynote speakers:

  • Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Deputy Director General of Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI)
  • Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT-Bombay

Other speakers include Dr Aditya Abhyankar, HoD, Department of Technology, Pune University, IITB, Dr Deepak Khemani, Professor IIT Mandi, Dr Abhay Jere, Persistent Systems Ltd, and Dr Girish Palshikar, Tata Research Design and Development Centre.

These are the papers that have been selected for presentation at Compute 2012:

  • Scalable Lock-Free FIFO Queues using Efficient Elimination Techniques
  • A Robust Neural Network Classifier to Model the Compressive Strength of High Performance Concrete Using Feature Selection
  • Mining Research Abstracts for Exploration of Research Communities
  • A Generic Topology Discovery Approach for Huge Social Networks
  • Multimodal Biometric System Based on Hand geometry, Palmprint and Signature
  • A Review of Path Planning and Mapping Technologies for Autonomous Mobile Robot Systems
  • A Knowledge-based Formalization of UBL Processes using Hybrid programs
  • GPU implementation of a novel hybrid lattice Boltzmann method for non-isothermal flows
  • Texture Edge Statistics for Efficient Retrieval of Biomedical Images Recognition and Classifier
  • Enabling High Performance Computing using Microsoft HPC Server
  • RobExT: A tool to customize microarray data for Cell Designer and Cytoscape
  • FIRA – A novel method for benchmarking the cache hierarchy.
  • Insertion and Querying Mechanism For A Distributed XML Database System
  • Parallel Algorithm to Evaluate Contextual Features for Term Weighting
  • Reconstructing the Software Environment of an Experiment with Kameleon

For selected posters, the program committee, and other details of the conference, see the conference website

Registration and Fees

The conference is open to anybody. Fees are Rs. 3500(2500) for professionals, Rs. 2500(2000) for academics, and Rs. 2000(1500) for students. (Numbers in parenthesis indicate rates for ACM Members). Register here.

The conference will be at YASHADA, on Baner Road, near University Circle.

Demo Space for Pune Startups

ACM Pune also invites technology startups in Pune to exhibit their products to the ACM audience for a fee of Rs. 5000 for one day. Selected startups will be provided with one table and a standee for the exhibition. This is a chance for a startup to reach out to a very select audience of computer science professionals from all over the country. For more details, watch for an announcement on the Pune Startups mailing list.

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.

Call for Speakers: JSFoo JavaScript Conference Pune

HasGeek, the folks who brought us high quality tech conferences like DocType Html5 and DroidCon, are organizing [JSFoo] a JavaScript conference in Pune on 21st January. Considering that JavaScript is one of the most important programming languages in the world today, anyone who is interested in technology should consider attending this conference, and if you have done some work in JavaScript, they you should definitely speak at the conference.

More details below.

About JSFoo

JSFoo is a one day conference on building full size apps in JavaScript. Come over for a full day with the smartest geeks from across India who have figured it out and will show you how. We have sessions covering the range from pure JavaScript apps in Node.js to real-time streaming of data to building entirely in the client side with Backbone.js.

This is an event for serious JavaScript programmers who want to learn from their peers.

The JSFoo conference series began with a Bangalore edition on October 1, 2011, followed by [Pune][http://jsfoo.in/pune2012/] and Chennai (upcoming).

Call for Speakers

Why be a speaker at a conference. First, you get a free ticket. Second, you instantly establish yourself as a expert in your area. Finally, this is a great way to meet the most interesting people working in this area. All you need to do is talk about some experience you’ve had with building JavaScript apps, or a tool, or a platform. The talk is expected to be 30 minutes, with additional 10 minutes for Q&A. At this point, all you need to do is submit the title of your talk at the JSFoo Speaker Submission Page

Schedule and Tickets

JSFoo is a paid conference. Regular tickets cost Rs. 800 and you can register here.

To get an idea of the talks and speakers lined up see this page. Note, this is still a partial list and more will get added based on further speaker submissions.

Other Details

The event is on 21st January, all day, at 7th floor, SICSR, (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, near Om Market, Model Colony). Register here

There is also a JavaScript Hacknight on 14th January (one week before the actual conference) which gives 30 of the attendees a chance to spend an entire night hacking on interesting JavaScript projects. See hacknight videos from JSFoo Bangalore to get an idea of what a hacknight is. Hacknight is open to all registered participants of JSFoo Pune, but requires separate registration because the venue (Office of http://amiworks.co.in) has limited space.

JSFoo: http://jsfoo.in/

JSFoo/HasGeek’s JavaScript HackNight Pune – Jan 14

No matter what programming language and platform you work on today, it is almost certain that at least one of the user interfaces to your software product/service is written using JavaScript. JavaScript is easily the language that is available on far, far more computing devices in the world than any other language, considering it is present by default on all desktop browsers and most mobile phone browsers. Thus, if your in the software space, is no alternative but to accept JavaScript – it is the default.

A JavaScript hack night – i.e. a night of hacking on JavaScript with 30 others from Pune and elsewhere in India has been organized on Saturday, 14th January, at AmiWorks office (SB Road, Pune), in conjunction with the [JSFoo] JavaScript in conference which will also be held in Pune a week later. (To clarify, the JavaScript Hacknight is on 14th Jan, night, and the [JSFoo] conference is on 21st January, daytime.)

The hacknight is open for any registered participant of the [JSFoo] conference, but since space is limited at the venue, you will need to register separately for it. All you need to do is get your laptop, and get ready for lots of JavaScript programming, learning, and discussions. To get an idea of what a JSFoo hacknight is like, check out these videos from JSFoo Hacknight Bangalore.

SEAP Book Club Meet: The Steve Jobs Way with Suhas Kelkar

Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) has a Book Club that meets on the first Saturday of every month, where one of the senior executives from the Software Industry in Pune gives a presentation based on a popular book.

This month, Suhas Kelkar, CTO Asia-Pacific, and Senior Director (Incubation Team) at BMC Software, will talk about “The Steve Jobs Way” by Jay Elliot.

Update: Here is the presentation Suhas used for the event:

If you cannot see a presentation above click here to be taken to the presentation page.

More details about the book:

The former Senior Vice President of Apple Computer and close colleague of Steve Jobs’s throughout his tenure, Jay Elliot takes readers on a remarkable tour through Jobs’s astonishing career. From the inception of game-changing products like the Apple II and the Macintosh, to his stunning fall from grace, and on to his rebirth at the helm of Apple, his involvement with Pixar, and the development of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and much more, The Steve Jobs Way presents real-life examples of Jobs’s leadership challenges and triumphs, showing readers how to apply these principles to their own lives and careers.

The meeting will be on Saturday 7th Jan, from 10am to 11:30am, at SunGard’s Aundh office (Westend Center One, in the same building as Reliance Mart). This event is free and open for all SEAP members and their friends. Register by sending a mail to rsvp@softexpune.org.

POCC Meet: WTF is going on with SMS – Panel Discussion & Product Pitches – 7 Jan

The next Pune Open Coffee Club meet (Sat, 7 Jan, 5pm, SICSR) will be on discussing and understanding the mess that is SMS and its impact on startups. If you’re a technologist who is working on, or plans to work on any software offering for the India market, you definitely need to understand this area. If your product has been impacted by the recent TRAI regulations, please come to share your experiences. If you are a startup that is offering SMS based services (either to your customers, or to other startups/businesses), you can actually pitch your products at this meet (see details below).

The importance of SMS for the Indian Technology Market

In the last few years, SMS was emerging as one of the most important “technologies” in the Indian tech and startup space. With 10x the number of users compared to the internet, SMS was the preferred choice for many startups and businesses to communicate with their customers. However, with the recent TRAI anti-spam regulations, things are looking very murky. Most businesses are not allowed to send SMS via gateways. But some businesses (like social networks, travel ticketing services, and financial institutions) are allowed. Others can’t send even to willing customers. But sending via international routes is allowed. And sending via individual SIM cards is allowed, but up to a maximum of 200 per day.

What is allowed? What is not allowed? What is the theory, and what are the ground realities? What is the effect on companies that had built a business with SMS as an important component, and how are they dealing with this? What to expect in the next few years?

These are the questions we hope to tackle in the next Pune Open Coffee Club Meeting, on Sat, 7 Jan, 5pm, 7th floor, SICSR, (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, near Om Market, Model Colony).

We will have a panel discussion where these issues will be discussed by people who have expertise in this area. This will be followed by short (5-minute) pitches by Pune startups that are either offering SMS based services, or are doing a business where SMS is an important part of their offering.

Please register to attend

If you are a startup who wants to pitch, please send a mail to navin@reliscore.com, or santosh@tinkeron.com

We already have a few experts lined up for the panel discussion, however, we can accomodate one or two more, so if you can suggest someone with practical experience/expertise in this area, please let us know.

TechMarathi Mahamelava: Technology in Marathi for Beginners and Professionals – 7/8 Jan

To see the information of this article in Marathi, click here

There is a large chunk of people in Pune in particular and Maharashtra in general who are being left behind in the internet revolution primarily because they are not as comfortable in English as they would like to be, and most of the information on the internet is in English. This affects young engineering students and professionals, who are now studying in English, and understand English, but lack the confidence of speaking and writing in English, and find reading English to be a bit strenuous. This also affects beginners, not on the software/IT field, who would like to pick up internet skills, understand email, Facebook, Twitter but for whom English is not the first language.

To bridge the gap between internet and these people [TechMarathi] was formed a few years ago by a group of enthusiastic professionals in Pune who felt that writing technical articles in Marathi, or translating the best-of-the-web articles from English to Marathi would provide a useful service. This is what the [TechMarathi] website has been doing for a while.

Now, TechMarathi has organized the first ever 2-day TechMarathi conference on 7th and 8th January, at SICSR, Model Colony.

The event will span 2 days and will have two parallel tracks – one for beginners and another for professionals. The beginners track targeting absolute beginners will feature talks like: Introduction to the Internet, How to Email/Chat, Typing in Marathi, MS Office, and Blogging. The other track, for professionals, will feature tracks like: Using Social Media like Twitter/Facebook, Differences Between Student Programmers and Professional Programmers, Mobile Software Development, Cloud Computing, Web Mashups. The second day of the conference will feature a workshop on creating websites in Marathi, and a workshop on the Marathi Wikipedia, followed by a talk and awards ceremony with Chief Guest Atul Kahate. See the detailed agenda for more. The event has a nominal entry fee of Rs. 100, which can be paid online, or in person at Rasik Sahitya, 683 Budhwar Peth, or “Akashdhara”, Near Aacharya Atre Sabhagruha, Bajiroa Road, Pune.

If you know someone who can benefit from this event, please forward this information to them. If you feel passionately about this activity in general, please make it a point to come for the event and brainstorm with other like-minded people on what more can be done. For more information in Marathi see the MahaMelava website. Register now

Details:

What: TechMarathi MahaMelava – For Professionals & Beginners
When: 7 and 8 January, (Sat & Sun), 9:30am-6pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), near Om Market, Model Colony, 7th Floor
Registration: Rs. 100, register now

Event Report: IndicThreads Java Conference 2011

(This article about the IndicThreads Java Conference 2011 was written by Abhay Bakshi for DZone. It has been re-published here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

Attending a conference (probably as renowned and as recognized as the Java conference by IndicThreads) adds to your muscle – Period. By the way, I have picked up from the same thread — same tone and similar spirit — from March 2011. IndicThreads held the Q11 conference then, which I had a chance to attend and then write a short report on for DZone. If you attended IndicThreads conferences before, your feedback is also welcome — through your blogs or through places like this report hosting page.

Now, you may ask – How Was the Environment This Time?

First and foremost, I would like to say this — you could feel the thought process from Harshad Oak (Owner – IndicThreads – Conference Organizer) all throughout the conference. When I attended the conference sessions, I could see that one presentation simply led to another one. And somehow I could also relate this fact to the earlier Q11 conference; and could see the passion that Harshad has when he arranges these events.

Just as a side note – Harshad is the first Java champion in India and he continues to serve the IT community. He is ably supported by his wife Sangeeta Oak in these endeavors. This young couple gives a lot of attention to detail for the events!

The Conference Agenda in short

The conference agenda included the following topics (Friday/Saturday — Dec 02/03):

  • The Java Report (Harshad Oak)
  • Scalability Considerations (Yogesh Deshpande)
  • PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application (Kshitiz Saxena)
  • Solr as your Search and Suggest Engine (Karan Nangru)
  • Testing Concurrent Java Programs (Sameer Arora)
  • Scala Collections: Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java (Dhananjay Nene)
  • REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers (Prasad Nirantar)
  • Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud (Kshitiz Saxena – yes again! He has awesome topic coverage.)
  • Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka (Vikas Hazrati)
  • Simplifying builds with Gradle (Saager Mhatre)
  • Using Scala for Building DSLs (Abhijit Sharma)

The presentation slides are hosted at http://j11.indicthreads.com/slides

My Thoughts on the Agenda

On the first day of the conference, I noticed that there are 7 sessions to attend on Friday and 4 more sessions on Saturday. Frankly, I thought there was some kind of mismatch in arranging these sessions. But my opinion changed as the conference went on from Friday into Saturday. The next day was intentionally kept lighter. As an attendee, I now think that your mind probably absorbs and retains more information during the initial parts of a conference. I believe that IndicThreads is getting better overall conference after conference.

What I Wanted to Get from Each Session

I planned on getting 3 things from the sessions (that was my ROI!) — first, how the knowledge earned will apply towards the business domain at my work place; second, my personal interactions with the speaker(s) from networking perspectives; and third, how I can help Harshad and his team and provide helpful feedback. Even with events like NFJS, TSSS in USA, I always received and offered my best to organizers Jay Zimmerman, Floyd Marinescu et al.

I should also mention, I still remember Rick Ross’ keynote speech at TSSS and how it was inspirational to many of us there. Point is that industry leaders like Harshad, Rick, Floyd (and of course some more) are doing everything to lead developers all across the world to be better IT professionals. Sometimes they pay from their own pockets to see results.

The Actual Sessions

I am not going to cover all the details from all the talks, well, it’s not possible. The slides are available for entire content.

The Java Report

In the keynote speech, Harshad mentioned that things moved very rapidly after Sun was purchased by Oracle. He later encouraged participants to have a look at topics such as Java EE 6 Web Profile, Java FX 2.0 (all Java), Java EE 7 and a few more. Harshad raised a point – do you as a Java expert look the same “sexy” today as you did when Java started? The answer is “less sexy”. He also said that Java ME was not offering many new things for quite a while now.

Scalability Considerations

Yogesh covered Vertical Scaling and Horizontal Scaling, and principles behind both techniques. He backed up his presentation with a helpful case study.

PaaSing a Java EE 6 Application

Kshitiz works at Sun/Oracle for last 10 years. He explained PaaS in simpler terms. It was very important to keep things simple. The speech was well accepted by the audience. Just as I was putting this article together, I saw that Javalobby had published a fresh article on PaaS 2.0 — it looks quite relevant to our discussion.

Solr as Your Search and Suggest Engine

It was very good to learn from Karan about Embedded Solr Server versus Commons Http Solr Server, and the various “search” and “suggestion” cases. Karan is quite passionate about Solr.

Testing Concurrent Java Programs

I don’t develop as much concurrent Java code at work as I do some other pieces; but learning from Sameer clicked a few ideas in my mind for a business case that we have at work. We (AEGIS) do some case executions in our workflow, and ideas from concurrency can be applied to what we do. By the way, for the intense session that we had with Sameer, fortunately, there was a coffee break after the session. Hats off to Sameer for how much he knows about this topic.

Scala Collections – Expressivity and Brevity upgrade from Java

Although Dhananjay knew a lot, he was addressing a very specific topic “Collections”. To me, the topic could have been broader (or be split in two sessions). Scala is a powerful language and initial learning curve looks longer for a beginner. I should mention that Dhananjay preferred IntelliJ for Scala-based development — rightfully so.

REST Style Web Services – Google Protocol Buffers

Prasad (speaker) has a background from Akron, Ohio (M.S.). He compared content negotiation techniques (JSON, XML, and Portable Binary Content) with focus on Google Protocol Buffers. His comparison of Google Protocol Buffers with Apache Avro was very apt.

Java EE 7 Platform: Developing for the Cloud

Kshitiz explained the terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. There are vendors other than Sun that offer PaaS support — but standards are lacking. He explained Java EE 7 focus on PaaS – Elasticity which has progressed from single node implementation to multi-node multi-instance clustering to SLA driven Elasticity. Refer the slides for more details.

Building Massively Scalable Applications with Akka

Vikas writes for InfoQ. He said that if you wanted to learn Akka, then you needed to keep in mind that Akka was designed to make developer’s life easier by addressing concurrency, scalability and fault-tolerance in applications. The founder of Akka is Jonas Boner, and I find Jonas’ article on Akka hosted by Javalobby at this page. As per Vikas, Akka is good for event-based systems, whereas Hadoop for batch-based systems.

Simplifying Builds (Build Scripts) with Gradle

An excellent slide presentation and visual illustrations by Saager. He corrected the name of the topic to “Simplifying build scripts..”. He compared Gradle with Ant and Maven, and mentioned that Gradle describes builds with only as much text as is absolutely necessary.

Using Scala for Building DSLs

This was the only session where there were no questions from the audience! From Abhijit’s (speaker) angle, it was a bit uncomfortable feeling; but I later mentioned to him that the presentation was so straight-forward (note – not an easy compilation) and neatly arranged, the questions were answered even before they were asked. I recommend – just download the presentation, and you will get to see what I mean. Good to learn about Scala in this domain.

Every session was little over an hour. And all speakers covered their sessions very well.

Past Reviews of IndicThreads Conference on Java

Some of the celebrity authors and speakers like Arun Gupta and Vikas Hazrati have reviewed their prior Java IndicThreads conference experiences by writing articles on their respective blogs (you may access the reviews: Arun, Vikas). It is rewarding to learn from such experts in the field.

Lastly, about the Food and Quizzes and Prizes!

I believe, Sangeeta made awesome choices for food at lunch and the breaks! As well as, she put up short quizzes and announced prizes in different categories. IndicThreads have maintained the “Green” theme and I won a prize in that category.

My Top Three Take-away Points

My top three take away points from J11 are – rejuvenating yourself by looking at technical topics from speakers’/attendees’ eyes and adding to your knowledge, networking with experts so that you can offer your best and receive the best from them, and just knowing where the Java industry stands today.

Conclusion

There was an “Unconference” session, where everybody who participated voiced a need for the Java groups in the city to come together. I get a feel that awareness in the industry about such conferences is increasing, and demand for such speakers and quality offered by these conferences is going to increase in few more short years.

Harshad encourages local speakers to come out and respond to the RFPs (and participate). For those who only want to attend can also win a FREE pass to the conference! All in all, it was worth attending the Java conference by IndicThreads.