Category Archives: Events

Phanindra Sama, CEO & Co-Founder redBus.in to speak in Pune – 16 Sept

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redBus.in is a truly Indian internet commerce success story. Nowhere else can I imagine a website that sells bus tickets being so successful. And, to be frank, when I first heard about redBus, I did not think much of its prospects myself. Hence I think it will be very interesting for the tech as well as the entrepreneur community in Pune to listen to the co-founder and CEO of redBus.in on 16th September when he talks about his story so far, as part of TiE Pune’s excellent “My Story” series of talks.

A similar session, My Story by Carwale.com’s Mohit Dubey is one of my favorite tech events in Pune this year, and I loved the advice he gave. That is why I have high hopes from this event.

Here is TiE Pune’s description of this event:

“From a single idea to India’s largest bus ticketing company, redBus is an entrepreneurial success story with resonance around the world. It remains compelling proof that a young visionary with a strong engineering background can use technology and insight to create a competitive business and transform an industry.”

Founded in Aug. 2006, redBus today has operations across 15 states and offers services for 15,000+ routes and has built relationship with about 850+ bus operators.

redBus is amongst Forbes top 5 startups to watch in 2010. redBus is ranked no#1 – with a growth rate of 4823% between 2007-’09 – amongst the fastest growing companies in India in a survey done by All World Network. And is also awarded India’s best internet startup, 2010 by IMAI.

Phani is ranked no# 3 amongst India’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs by Business World. He was awarded Entrepreneur of the year award under IT, ITES category by ET NOW and the BITSAA 30 under 30 award. He is also selected as Endeavor Entrepreneur (www.endeavor.org) and TiE Entrepreneur (www.tie.org).

He was a State ranker in Intermediate examination, Andhra Pradesh Sr. Secondary Board, graduated with distinction from BITS-Pilani, and worked with Texas Instruments, Bangalore before he co-founded redBus.

About TiE Pune My Story Sessions!

“My Story – Inspiring Journey of an Entrepreneur”

This program is created to celebrate entrepreneurship and bring stories from successful entrepreneurs in their own words. The invited speakers will share their entrepreneurial journeys and talk about lessons learned, mistakes they wish they avoided, and key decisions that helped make their venture successful.

Fees and Registration

The event is from 6pm to 8pm on 16 September at the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Noted Cryptographer Dr. Whitfield Diffie to speak in Pune – 8 Sept

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If you have any exposure to computer security, you have heard of public key cryptography. If you’ve done a little work in the area, you are no doubt aware of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange that solves the key distribution problem, one of the fundamental problems of cryptography.

Whitfield Diffie, one of the pioneers of public key cryptography, and the co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange will be in Pune for a few days this week, and will give a talk on 8th September as part of Uniken’s Innovation Lecture Series at COEP Auditorium. This is a day-long event that will consist of student project presentations from 10am to 4:3pm, followed by sessions by Sanjay Deshpande of Uniken and Dr. Diffie. See the event page for more details.

The event is free for anyone to attend. You can register as an attendee or register to be a student presenter of your innovative idea/project at the event page.

Uniken is a Pune-based company that builds technology in the areas of Information Security and Biometrics, Embedded Systems, Control Systems, Intelligent Software Systems and applies them to problems in Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Media and Entertainment, Healthcare, etc.

Dr. Whitfield Diffie has recently joined the Scientific Advisory Board of Uniken.

Call for Speakers – IndicThreads Conference on Java – Dec 2011

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The call for speakers for the 6th Annual IndicThreads’ conference on Java is open. The conference itself is in December, but the CFP closes this week (10th September) and you should submit a proposal.

Pune’s http://IndicThreads.com has been holding Java conferences since 2006 and the feedback on their conferences has generally been good. You can check previous PuneTech coverage of IndicThreads to get an idea.

The conference itself is paid, but becoming a speaker is a good way to get into it for free.

Suggested topics are:

  • Java Language Specs & Standards
  • Enterprise Java
  • Java For Mobile Devices
  • Java for Multi-core Computing
  • Optimization, Scaling, Caching and Performance Tuning
  • Cloud Computing for Java
  • Rich Internet Applications
  • Languages for the JVM
  • Frameworks
  • Enterprise Architecture
  • Spring
  • Virtualization
  • Social Networking
  • Security
  • Agile
  • Java RIA
  • New and emerging technologies
  • Case Studies and Real World Experiences

For more details see the conference webpage

As to why you should bother to submit a proposal, see this post written for an earlier CFP which gives the reasons. And go for it now.

Note, there is also a call for speakers open for the ClubHack conference. So that gives you two avenues to showcase your work.

CloudCamp: Cloud-computing (un-)Conference – 3 Sept

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CloudCamp http://cloudcamp.org/pune is coming to Pune this Saturday (September 3rd)! Sponsors include not only big companies and organizations like IBM, Microsoft, but also Pune-startup PubMatic.

CloudCamp will have a mix of invited speakers and barcamp style last-minute speaker. Talks include:

  • “Integrating Public/Private Cloud” by Vijay Sukthankar, Cloud Computing Leader at IBM
  • BigData use in Advertising by Anand Das of PubMatic
  • “Platform-as-a-Service” by TBD of Microsoft
  • “CloudWorkshop – Does your app belong in the Cloud?” by Larry Carvalho of RobustCloud

For a detailed schedule and other information see the CloudCamp website. The event is at VITS hotel, near Balewadi Stadium, from 9:30am to 4pm.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Call for Speakers / Demos – NASSCOM Game Developer Conference, Pune

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The NASSCOM Game Developer Conference started as an experiment in 2009 to address the game developer community in India which grew into an independent 2 day conference in its 2nd year attended by more than 350 + delegates and fabulous talks, post mortems and panel discussions.

Now the 3rd edition is here; Scheduled on 11th – 12th November, 2011 in Pune due to high demand.

The call for speakers / presenters is open. You can give a talk, or you can pitch your game. Proposals are invited for the following tracks:

  • Game Programming
  • Art
  • Game Design
  • Production
  • Gaming Business
  • General

Games on all platforms are welcom: mobile, handheld, consoles, PC, web.

Apply to be a speaker by sending this form to Shruti Verma.

More details about the event are here

“Collaboration Retreat” for CIOs/CFOs/others in Pune – Sept 24

Events,

(Re-published from Mithi.com’s website)

2nd Collaboration Retreat 2011

Mithi is organising the 2nd Collaboration Retreat at Pune, an invitation-only event for select CIOs, CFOs and delegates on Saturday, 24th September 2011. The Collaboration Retreat 2011 would offer a first-of-its-kind interactive platform for sharing CIO and CFO perspectives on Collaboration Infrastructure Strategies for Cutting Costs and Managing Risks.

The 1st Collaboration Retreat 2010 organised by Mithi last year was a success. 12 CIOs and over 50 delegates from diverse organisations took time out to be with us and participated whole-heartedly in the Golf Clinic, CIO Speak session, panel discussion and Dr. D.B. Phatak’s concluding address. A majority of the CIOs and delegates found the event very interactive and informative, and the right forum to address issues & concerns related to collaboration strategies. Click here for highlights of CR 2010.

Bigger And Better

This year the event will be much bigger and wider in scope with over 30 CIOs & CFOs and 200 delegates expected to attend the full-day conference. We are happy to extend a special invite to you as a delegate for the Collaboration Retreat on Saturday 24th September 2010. You’ll have a wonderful opportunity to hear and interact with over 30 CIOs from leading companies in India.

Themes

  • Open Source options
  • Co-existence and other cost cutting strategies
  • Managing Risk
  • Cloud and New Devices
  • Social Networking

Who Should Attend

You can benefit from attending the Collaboration Retreat 2011, if you are a:

  • Chief Information Officer (CIO)
  • Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
  • Senior IT and Finance decision maker
  • IT Manager
  • Finance Manager
  • System Integration Partner
  • Enterprise/ System Administrator
  • Collaboration Technology Professional

Why you should attend

The Collaboration Retreat 2011 would offer a first-of-its-kind interactive platform for sharing CIO and CFO perspectives on Collaboration Infrastructure Strategies for Cutting Costs and Managing Risks.

The participants will have a wonderful opportunity to interact and network with over 30 CIOs & CFOs and over 200 delegates from leading organizations in India.

Registration details

The event is in MCCIA Trade Towers, ICC, SB Road, Pune, on 24th September 2011.

This is a free, invitation-only event with limited seats. If you are keen to participate, please hurry up and submit your details in this form. The organizers will confirm your participation through email.

MCUG Event: Understanding all the technology underlying a hyperlink click

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The MIT Computer Users Group presents a talk by Anirudh Tomer and Toshish Jawale on what happens under the covers when you do something simple like clicking a hyperlink. The talk is at 1:30pm on Saturday, 20th August, in room A203, E&TC Dept. MIT, Kothrud.

About the Seminar:

To see this post you must have clicked a hyperlink, and it would have hardly took seconds to open that. So easy man!!!, but what you didn’t saw was how did the computer made this possible for you.

It all started at your Brain, here is the simple flow of all events that took place in LAYMAN’s TERMS

  1. Brain sends signals to your muscles to move the mouse on link and click on Mouse, your eyes help in that movement and tell brain to click at right place.
  2. Mouse sends interrupt via USB or PS2 to Host Controller.
  3. Host controller forwarded the interrupt to Processor.
  4. Processors sent interrupt to device driver.
  5. Device driver gave control to X server (i.e display server for Linux)
  6. X server gave control to browser
  7. browsers parses that link.
  8. browser contact network card via system calls and sent the request to FB server
  9. Routers take the packet from your network card and gave it to FB server.
  10. FB server processes the request and sends the reply back
  11. Browser gets the reply back and processes the HTML code to display the new contents.
  12. X server updates the video memory buffer with new contents
  13. Monitor reads the new content from that buffer and shows new content at screen, at 60HZ (say)
  14. Eyes get the same signal at 16HZ and send it to brain
  15. Brain processes the information and validates the information, if its the right one.

and all this happened in 1 second parallely, so A MOUSE CLICK IS SO COMPLEX. In this session we are going to cover all this in detail. Since this all started at brain and ends up at brain, we call it Brain to Brain

Who Can Attend

Anyone from this universe and its a free event. Goodies waiting for you as well. So if you are one of those who keeps the passion for understanding HOW STUFF WORKS, then this is a must attend session for you. Suggestions are most welcome

About MCUG – MIT Computer Users Group

MCUG (The MIT Computer Users Group) is a student group started by students and alumni of MIT College Pune, but has now grown to include 500+ members (students as well as industry professionals) from all over India. MCUG conducts various tech activities targeting students of computer science engineering.

IPMA Pune Event Report: Experiences in Product Management by Amit Paranjape

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Product management means many different things to many different people, and is in fact quite different depending upon whether the product is new or mature, whether the company is small, medium or large, whether it is an enterprise product or consumer product, and a host of other things. A lot of issues that product managers need to keep in mind, and skills that they need to develop was covered in Vivek Tuljapurkar’s IPMA Pune Talk covered by PuneTech earlier.

Here are Amit’s Experiences in Product Management:

  • Early days of a company
    • Product Management is not a well-defined role or a group or even a person in a small company. Focus is only on sales and development, and product roadmap is decided in an ad hoc fashion.
    • As number of customers, and breadth of solution increases, the ad hoc processes start to break down.
    • Must create a Product Management as a layer between developers and customers. And everybody views this as bureaucracy and added overhead. This can only be done if there is strong backing from someone for the PM role. For example, the development team might get hassled by all the ad hoc requests that come from the sales organization, and will insist that a PM group be created and that all requests are channeled through PM. This is internal change management and it takes time to settle down.
  • Roles of PM in early days
    • Create a process for written specs, well defined test cases and support for QA
    • Be a friend of the development/delivery organization and the sales organization
    • In general, build relationships will all the stakeholders
    • Take over program management of all custom development projects
    • Recruiting product managers – biggest challenge.
  • As the company gets bigger
    • As the company gets bigger, the challenges change
    • Need to start worrying about requirements of individual products vs. the product suite, and solutions
    • Worry about difference between product and solution and module
    • Most of the time, you don’t really know what you’re doing – you’re just trying to do a good job in the face of uncertainties and ambiguity.
  • Products vs. Solutions – the perennial debate in Enterprise product companies
    • A solution is something that solves a business problem of a customer. This is what sales sells to the customer. Solutions can be based on customer industries (e.g. consumer goods, automotive, finance), or it could be based on business processes (e.g. Procurement, Demand Management)
    • A product is a specific piece of technology that engineering can build and which solves some particular problem. A combination of products that work together seamlessly is a solution
    • The reason for separating out products and solutions is to ensure that a small set of products can be used to build many different solutions for various customers
  • Overall Learnings
    • A PM must be paranoid. You need to worry about everybody and everything, because whenever anything goes wrong because of anybody, it ultimately comes back to you. So keep track of what various development teams are doing, what potential problems are. You need to keep track of sales teams, and what they’re promising customers, and how they’re positioning the product.
    • You need to work by influence. The people who can make your life miserable (sales, dev, etc.) don’t report to you, but still you need to make sure that they listen to you.
    • All PMs need to be entrepreneurial in their thinking – jugaad is needed at all times. Because things are always broken or breaking as far as a PM is concerned, problems to be solved, fires to be put out.
    • Blaming others is not the answer. Ultimately the buck stops with PM, so PM needs to solve the problem, irrespective of who or what caused the problem.
    • Relationship management is the key. If you maintain good relationships with various stakeholders, your life will be easy.
    • You are constantly in “sell” mode. You need to convince sales people to do some things, and consultants to do some things, and development to do some things.
    • In a fast growing company, where there isn’t lots of structure, be ready to temporarily take on the roles of development manager, or customer project manager as and when required
    • Make sure you do competitive research
    • Make sure you keep track of customer satisfaction levels
      -Recruiting
    • Recruiting product management people is a challenge
    • Skills required for PM in small companies are different from those required for larger companies. Small companies are ad hoc, with tactical goals, with a narrow focus, and a consultant/developer mindset. Large company PMs are process driven, worry more about long-term strategic goals, have a broader focus, and think more like sales people than developers.
    • Do not make the mistake of hiring “experienced” PMs from large companies for doing a small company PM job. This usually does not work well.

Event Report: IndicThreads Conference on Mobile Application Development

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(This is a live-blog of the IndicThreads conference on mobile application development that is currently happening in Pune. Since this is a live blog, so please excuse the greater-than-normal number of errors and lack of coherence sometimes.)

NFC in mobile devices – Ashutosh Tripathy, Talentica

Ashutosh Tripathy talked about NFC in mobile devices and why it is important. NFC is “Near Field Communication”, which is a very short range wireless communication between devices. The range is very low – just a few centimeters, and the bandwidth is also low – just 424kbps max. But the important thing is the ease of use it gives in a large number of use cases – e.g. event tickets, sharing business cards, ID cards, easy printing, file sharing, mobile payments etc.

The important thing about NFC is that it does not work at a distance (and it can be configured so that it does not work when the screen is off). This means that NFC communication can only happen with the knowledge of the user of the device. Thus, for many applications you can get rid of complex security procedures and passcodes that are needed to prevent malicious users from getting access to your device without your knowledge.

For example:

  • Bluetooth + NFC gives instant Bluetooth pairing – without requiring passcodes and other complex mechanisms. So if you want to transfer a file between two devices, you bring them close together and NFC is used to set up the Bluetooth pairing. After this, the actual file transfer happens over Bluetooth, so that it will continue to work even when distance between the devices is increased.
  • Wi-Fi + NFC can similarly give very easy to use wi-fi configurations

NFC Enabled Phones in the market already:

  • Google Nexus S (Android)
  • Samsung Galaxy SII (Android)
  • Nokia C7
  • Blackberry Bold 9900 and 9930
  • Nokia 6131

Upcoming and rumored:

  • iPhone 5
  • Nokia N9, N5
  • Lots of Android 2.3.3 phones
  • LG Optimuz NET
  • Various Samsung BADA OS based phones

It is expected that most new smartphones will be NFC enabled soon.

Ashutosh followed it up with a demo of how to build an NFC app on Android.

Developing mobile enterprise applications – Yateen Shaha, SAS

More and more enterprise apps are now mobile enabled. The primary business drivers behind this trend is increased productivity, faster/better decisions, and thus competitive advantage.

Important Things to worry about when building enterprise mobile apps:

  • Delivering the right functionality – not all functionality can be supported in the mobile device. So choosing what is in and what is not included is important
  • Access Everywhere – User should be able to access the app from inside the company intranet, but also from outside over public networks.
  • Offline Access – Should be allowed
  • Protecting data – Security is very important to enterprise customers, so you need to take great pains to keep them happy.
    • Authentication could be device based, or user based, or ideally both.
    • Data Encryption:
      • Over the Air: The data being sent over the public internet should be encrypted
      • At Rest: The data stored on the device should also be encrypted, so that if the device gets lost, the data is still protected
  • Storage/Bandwidth limitations – Since storage and network bandwidth on the mobile device is going to be limited, you need to carefully design the architecture of the app (and the backend services supporting the app) in such a way that it does not require lots of data to be downloaded and stored locally.
    • Some of the decisions could be based on what kind of network connection the device is currently using. Thus, use network liberally when on wi-fi but be more careful when using 2G or 3G.
  • Code Reuse – having to maintain two different code bases, one for desktop apps, and another for mobile apps is a pain. Design the overall app (e.g. by using model-view-presenter patterns) so that maximum code is reused.

Tips and tricks:

  • Cache whenever you can, to improve performance
  • A good user experience is very critical – much more so than for desktop apps
  • Must take advantage of device features
  • Performance and Response time is critical for user acceptance

Other Talks

There was a panel discussion on “Mobile is the next Desktop.” I was one of the panelists, so unfortunately, I could not live-blog this. Topics discussed were why mobiles are going to take over the world, how developing for mobiles is different from developing for PCs, how the fragmentation in mobile (devices and platforms) is a huge pain (with no solution in sight), how html5 might or might not replace native apps, and other topics.

Mayur Tendulkar gave a presentation on Windows Phone 7. Most of what he said was similar to the talk he gave a few months back at TechWeekend 7, so I’m not repeating it here.

Abhay Aggarwal, from Xebia India talked about building an app that needs to target multiple screens. These are the various sizes available: 240×320, 240×400, 320×480, 360×640, 480×800, 540×960, this doesn’t even count the tablets. He talked about a process & architecture that would minimize the pain of doing this.

(At this point I had to leave even though there where two more talks later in the day, and a full day of talks the next day that I could not attend. However, the presentations are online at http://m11.indicthreads.com if you’re interested.)

TechWeekend – Web Security – August 20

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TechWeekend Pune and Microsoft present a technical session web security on Saturday 20th August, 10am, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA Trade Tower, ICC. This session will feature Rohit Srivastwa (of ClubHack) talking about some of the top web vulnerabilities, how they work, and how to prevent them, and Aditee Rele (of Microsoft) talking about the new security features in IE9.

Top Web Vulnerabilities – Rohit Srivastwa

This talk will cover 6 of the top 10 most exploited vulnerabilities on the web as reported by OWASP. Specifically:

  • Cross-Site Scripting
  • Information Leakage
  • SQL Injection
  • Local/Remote File Inclusion
  • Unrestricted uploads
  • Shell Injections

and best coding practices whereever possible.

The speaker Rohit Srivastwa is one of Pune’s most well know security evangelists. He has an expertise in cyber crime investigation and IT infrastructure management. Rohit is actively involved advising several military agencies, law enforcement personnel, media, corporate and Government bodies in these fields.

Rohit Srivastwa is also the founder of ClubHack, a member driven community to spread the security awareness. ClubHack organizes an international hacker convention in Pune every December.

For more see Rohit’s website

Security Features in IE9 – Aditee Rele

The latest version of Microsoft’s browser contains a lot of technologies focused on making the browser very safe from malware and phising attacks on the internet. It uses a new mechanism called layered protection against malware and a bunch of memory and exception handler protections to ensure that the most common ways of exploiting security holes are automatically plugged. To prevent phishing, it uses a SmartScreen filter to block bad URLs, and an application reputation mechanism to detect untrustworthy executables, providing what they claim is 100% social engineering blocking.

The speaker Aditee Rele works in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) Group at Microsoft Corporation, India. She focuses on addressing architectural challenges in the enterprise and web space and has first-hand exposure to large implementations on various platforms across Microsoft Technology Suite.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required

The event starts at 10am, in the Sumant Moolgaonkar Auditorium, Ground Floor, Wing A, ICC Trade Center, SB Road. Please come 10 minutes early since security at the venue takes a little time, and we are planning on starting the event on time.