Category Archives: Events

POCC Event: Exploring North American Market for Indian IT SMEs – 20 Aug

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Parag Khair, an IT consultant with experience in IT offshoring who lives in Toronto is visiting Pune and will give a talk on how small and medium IT companies from India can target the North American market, at 4pm on Saturday, 20th August, at 7th floor, SICSR, (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, near Om Market, Model Colony).

Exploring the North American Market for Indian IT SMEs

Although the focus is North America, the topics discussed will be, to an extent, applicable to other regions also.

  • Current landscape and key selling points for established players
  • Constraints of scale and how to overcome them
  • What is your target customer
  • Innovative ways of reaching out
  • Today’s hot offerings for this segment
  • Gearing up for exports – inhouse checklist
  • Addendum – Macroeconomics view – will it change the game?

About the Speaker – Parag Khair

Parag has done his Engineering and MBA from Pune and since then has around 20 years of experience in various industries spanning manufacturing, stock trading, IT, etc. For the Last 10 years he has lived in North America, worked with leading Indian IT exporter (Infosys) on various assignments all over the globe including starting and growing the business in Canada. Currently, he is also into independent IT consulting with the focus on revitalizing IT function through the combination of Agile, Offshoring, PLM, Cloud and Social Media.

Fees and Registration

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

IPMA Event: PM Journey – From Startup to Billion Dollar Co by Amit Paranjape

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IPMA Pune, the Pune Chapter of the Indian Product Manager’s Association, presents a talk by Amit Paranjape, this Friday, from 4pm to 7pm, at BMC Software, Tower A, ICC Tech Park, SB Road. Amit will talk about his Product Management Journey – from a startup to a billion dollar company

Abstract – Product Management Journey – from a startup to a billion dollar company

Amit will discuss his experiences and learnings in product management – from helping set up the first product management team in a small startup like company, to the team’s rapid evolution as the company grew to a billion dollars in revenue, in just a short span of few years. Will discuss various aspects of product management ranging from customer requirement prioritization, development support, customer support, product marketing, industry focus, strategy, sales support, etc.

About the Speaker – Amit Paranjape

Amit Paranjape is a co-founder of PuneTech. He has been involved with several startups in India and U.S. Formerly Amit worked at i2 Technologies. Amit has over 15 years of experience in Product Management, Marketing and Strategy in the Enterprise Software Industry. He has a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (IIT Bombay) and an M.S. in Manufacturing Systems (University of Wisconsin Madison). His current interests include consumer internet, healthcare and enterprise software.

Agenda

  • 4.15 pm – Registrations and Networking
  • 4.30 pm – Opening Remarks
  • 4:45 pm – Talk by Amit
  • 6:00 pm – Q&A
  • 6.15 pm – Reserved for some exciting session
  • 6.30 pm – Closing Remarks

About IPMA

India Product Management Association (IPMA) is a not-for-profit, voluntary, grassroots organization. IPMA Mission is to Foster Product Design and Innovation and Catalyze Product Management/Marketing Talent in India across software, mobile, hardware, telecommunications sectors in the IT industry. IPMA organizes knowledge sharing and networking forums such as Monthly Speaker Series, Workshops, P-Camps etc for professionals interested in product management and marketing. IPMA operate chapters in major product hubs across India and for more information about upcoming events, visit indiapma.org

Fees and Registration

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

Call for Presentations – ClubHack Security Conference – Dec 2011

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ClubHack is one of India’s foremost conferences on Security and is now in its 5th year. As usual, it will be on the first weekend of December (3rd & 4th) in Pune. Last year, [ClubHack ] had Security Guru Bruce Schneier as the keynote speaker.

The call for presentations is out, and if you’re working in the area of computer security, you should submit a presentation proposal.

Why should you submit?

Being a speaker at a conference gives you visibility and establishes you as an expert in your domain. Plus, as a part of the community, it is your duty to ensure that such events get the best quality of content. And in addition there are the material benefits:

  • 100% Travel reimbursement of economy return tickets for all Indian speakers
  • Accommodation for 2 in Pune
  • Complementary passes for event & party for 2
  • Gift hampers & freebies

Suggested topics are:

  • Cloud Application Security
  • Mobile Security (cellular technologies)
  • Mobile platform attacks (iOS, Android, BB, Win7, Symbian)
  • Cyber Intelligence
  • Cyber warfare
  • Hardware mods
  • Critical Infrastructure Attack & Protection
  • Protocol based vulnerability in networks and computers
  • Firewall Evasion techniques
  • Data Recovery and Incident Response
  • WLAN and Bluetooth Security
  • Cryptography and Cryptanalysis
  • Computer forensics
  • Open source hacking toolkit
  • Cyber Crime & law

But of course, you can submit proposals for talks in other related areas of security too.

See the CFP for more details, and specifics on how to submit a proposal.

Mini DebConf – Conference for Linux Enthusiasts – 13 Aug

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Mini DebConf is a developer conference for those interested in Debian Linux (which is also the Linux Distribution on which Ubuntu is based). The purpose of the conference is:

  • Introduce the Debian Project to new users and potential contributors.
  • Introduce some of the technologies that Debian uses which could benefit new contributors.
  • Hands on sessions to learn debian tools and processes.
  • Start working on projects with the help of experienced developers.
  • Sharing Skills and discussing how the overall FOSS movement be taken forward.

Mini DebConf conferences are being held across cities in India. This weekend it is coming to Pune. MiniDebConf Pune is scheduled to start on 13th August 2011 at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Bibwewadi, Pune.

On 13th there will be a series of talks and discussions introducing Debian. Second day will have hands on workshop sessions to teach creating debian packages. Third day will be a practical session of things they have learned on previous days. There will be cricket sessions in the evening. There is also a gpg key signing party on third day.

Sessions start at 10 am and last till 5pm every day. Complete schedule is available from event website

Chamba Mukt Cinema Project and Diaspora Decentralized Social Networking Project will have their booths at the conference venue. Debian, Chamba and Diaspora T Shirts will be available for purchase at the venue.

Organizers

  • VALU (VIT Active Linux Users)
  • COFSUG (COEP Free Software Users Group)

Please check http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2011/FAQ if you you have any questions, or send a mail to minidebconf.india@gmail.com.

About Debian

The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

Fees and Registration

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

ReliScore Tech Talk: Introduction to HTML5 & CSS3 – 6 Aug

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MCUG and ReliScore.com present “Introduction to and HTML5/CSS3” by Vikrant Labde, CTO of CueLogic Technologies, to be held at MIT, Pune, at 3:45pm, on Saturday, August 6th. This talk the first in a series of technical talks targeted towards 3rd and 4th year students of engineering and other computer science degrees that will be organized throughout the year by MCUG and ReliScore. To motivate students to attend, our partner, Pune’s GS Lab is sponsoring a few prizes – including passes for PyCon the Python Conference that is happening in Pune this year, and Crossword gift coupons. In addition, GS Lab is also sponsoring the video recording of this talk using their kPoint software so that it can be put online for the benefit of a wider audience. This talk is free for anybody to attend. Register here

Click here to read more

Why you should register to attend Python Conference Pune (Sept 2011) right now

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Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers of PyCon India 2011. I’m doing this as a volunteer to further the cause of Python and software development activities in India and Pune. Neither I nor PuneTech gain anything financially from promoting this activity.

PyCon India, the International Python Conference that happens in India every year, will be in Pune this year on September 16-18, 2011. Early Bird Registration – Rs. 300 (includes lunch, 3 days) is open until the end of the week August 15. Register now!

If you need convincing as to why you should attend Pycon, here are some reasons:

  • Raymond Hettinger, one of the top pythonistas in the world is the keynote speaker. Raymond (@raymondh on twitter) is a Python core developer. He is the author of the itertools and set modules and most of the collections modules in the standard library, the peephole optimizer for Python, and dozens of ASPN cookbook recipes. It will literally be many years before you get a chance to hear a technologist of this calibre.
  • Learn Python: This is your chance to learn Python. Start learning Python right now, and by September, you’ll be ready to get maximum value out of the tutorials in the conference (including Twitter/Facebook/Linked-in/Google Data hacking, web scraping, image processing, and functional programming using Python). If you need arguments on why everybody must learn python check here, here and here.
  • Excellent Talks: There are 24 high quality talks, on all kinds of interesting topics including Data Analysis and Business Intelligence, Python-to-Javascript cross-compliation, Telephony apps, Robotics, Web Apps, Python in Biology and Life-Sciences, Cloud Computing, Android, testing, GIS, and much more. There is also one talk on using Python to do your homework.
  • Meet Smart People: Even if you don’t agree that people who choose to work with Python are smarter than most others, you will have to agree that this will be one pretty darn interesting bunch of 500+ developers from all over India and outside. Rs. 300 to get a chance for that kind of networking is nothing.
  • Hire Smart People: If you are having trouble hiring top quality technology talent for your company, you definitely need to be at PyCon, handing out your card, and telling everybody what a cool company you work for. Far better use of your time than going through resumes sent to you by your recruiter.
  • Just Rs. 300: Early Bird Registration closes on 1st15th August, so act now. That’s only Rs. 300 for a high quality conference and it includes lunch and snacks for the 3 days of the conference. That’s right, you’ll be paying less than the cost of the food! And, unlike the other, regular tech events that happen in Pune, this is not a cheapo event – there will be swag – T-shirts and other stuff being given away. Did you realize that PyCon sponsors are paying for the privilege of giving you free stuff?
  • Make PyCon Pune the biggest PyCon: Pune now has a reputation to keep up – whenever any tech event that happens in different cities, invariably, the biggest turn-out is for the Pune instance. PHPCamp with 1000+ registrations and 700+ actual attendance is probably the biggest ever tech unconference/barcamp style event in the country. DocType HTML5 in Pune had far more registrations than other places and the organizers had to close registrations. Recently GizmoMeet had their biggest turnout in Pune. The Python community in Pune is far younger than the Python community in Bangalore, so it will be tough for Pune PyCon to beat the Bangalore PyCon, but we definitely need to give them a at least a tough fight.

What are you waiting for? Register now

(We’d like to mention here that amongst the various sponsors of PyCon (including Google and GitHub), are these cool Pune companies/institutions: Venue sponsor: Symbiosis, Gold: Vayana, Silver: Druva and GSLab)

PuneChips Event: PCI Express Architecture and Applications for FPGAs – July 30

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PuneChips invites everybody to a talk on PCI Express Architecture and Applications for FPGAs by Kiran Puranik, a Principal Architect at Xilinx. This talk will be on 30 July, 10:30am, at the Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road.

Abstract

Modern FPGA devices offer great advantages for designers of industrial imaging, networking, automation and control, data acquisition systems for test, industrial and medical applications. Apart from offering high performance programmable fabric, FPGAs offer a wide variety of IO standards to interface with networks, motors, sensors, transducers, offer built in high density data storage and the ability to interface to high speed external memory devices. But, most importantly FPGAs offer Gigabit serial connectivity via standards based protocols such as PCI ExpressTM. The ubiquitous nature of PCI Express technology enables development of FPGA based plug and play board and card products that interface with standard off-the-shelf embedded compute and communications platforms, running WindowsTM, Linux or other operating systems and custom device drivers. PCI Express 3.0 Architecture offers many reliability, availability and scalability features to address application needs, as well as advanced features such as relaxed transaction ordering, transaction processing hints, optimized buffer flush-fill, active power management to achieve the highest throughput performance possible within the platform’s power and thermal budgets.

About the speaker: Kiran Puranik

Kiran is a Principal Architect at Xilinx, Inc., responsible for serial connectivity protocol products such as PCI Express. He has spent the last 10 years at Xilinx engaged in architecture definition, design, development and verification of Intellectual Property blocks for several generations of FPGAs. Before Xilinx, Kiran held various engineering positions in the field of ASIC, ASSP design and ICCAD software development.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. It was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start & grow their businesses.

Please forward this information to anybody in Pune who is interested in renewable energy, solar technologies, semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

Fees and Registration

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

GizmoMeet: An event for all gadget fans in Pune

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Annkur writes:

Organized across India by OnlyGizmos.com, GizmoMeet is one of its kind meetup for gadget lovers. Over 250 technology enthusiasts have attended our meetups in Delhi and Mumbai. Coming saturday We look forward to meet you over some coffee at Cafe 1730, Koregaon Park (5.30OM-8:30PM).

So here we give you a sneak peek in to some of the stuff you can expect to see at the GizmoMeet, Pune:

  • Mobile and web apps by various developers
  • Android 3.1 running on the first ever Honeycomb Tablet, Motorola Xoom
  • Mobile OS: Windows Phone 7 Mango Update
  • Super motion gaming device, Kinect for Xbox 3 (Make sure you get your kids coz they’ll love it)
  • The Apple series which includes iPhone 4, iPad and an iPad 2 as well (So look forward to experiencing some great gaming as well as utility apps on iOS)

Well this certainly isn’t an exhaustive list of all the gadgets that are going to be there at the GizmoMeet . We would like to keep some surprises as well.

So folks, mark the 16th of July on your calendars. We hope to see you all there and be part of the experience that was intended only for you and feel free to get along your other tech enthusiast friends as well.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please RSVP on one of these:

FB: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=229957280358469

Twtvite: http://twtvite.com/gizmomeet5

Or, comment on this post: http://onlygizmos.com/gizmomeet-5-pune-we-are-coming/2011/06/

Event Report: Java 7 Launch Event in Pune

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(This article by guest writer Amit Naik, an architect at BMC Software, Pune, is a report of the Java 7 Launch event that happened in Pune last weekend.)

Harshad Oak started things off by pointing out that Java has a bit of ups & downs in the past couple of years. Hopefully Java 7 will reverse the trend. He also encouraged people to join the Pune Java User Group to stay connected with other Java users in Pune.

Then, we moved on to the main speaker: Chuk-Munn Lee (chuk-munn.lee@oracle.com). Fun fact – Chuk-Munn is a fan of Futurama and called out the fact that he is wearing a “Bender the Robot” T-Shirt.

These are the highlights of Chuk-Munn’s presentation:

The last Major release of Java – Java 6 was in 2006-7 and no major releases since then. JavaSE7 has a lot of gestation period. The big release of 7 is now broken down into 2 incremental releases Java 7 and Java 8 to get something out of the door faster and make it more manageable.

Reading is more important than writing for Programming Languages. Programs should be a Joy to read. Counter example PERL a Write-Only Language, or Looks Same Before and After AES Encryption. A Camel is a horse designed by committee. Very difficult to read and maintain. So very difficult to collaborate in large teams or large codebases where readability is important. This is where Java shines but it has sometimes got too much boilerplate code needed.

Applications in the commercial world compete on the basis of features – same should not apply to programming languages. In languages you want fewer features but they should work consistently. So it is difficult to add new features to Java consistently.

The main features new in Java 7 can be grouped into these categories:

Small Language Changes (Project Coin)

  • Binary Literals with underscores for clarity
  • Strings in Switch statements
  • Inferring types with <>
  • Varargs Warnings @SafeVarargs fixes problem of Heap Pollutions JLSv3 4.12.2.1
  • Multi-Catch – very useful in reducing boilerplate code if used properly!
  • Copying Streams – try-with-resources

NIO2

  • NIO2 (JSR -203) java.io.File does not work consistently across platforms, missing basic operations like copy, move, etc.
  • Path Class (Async I/O)
  • Features – Filesystem and Filestore support
  • Symlink support
  • Basic File operations
  • File attributes and Permissions support enhanced
  • Other interesting features
    • Watch files directories

Invokedynamic

Java may or may not be the first choice of everybody but JVM is massively popular and many, many languages are adopting it. The VM spec is from 1997 – fairly generic and not specifically wired to Java except for the 4 key bytecode instructions – invokespecial (constructor invocation), invokestatic (statics), invokeinterface (interface), invokevirtual (methods)

Java 7 is introducing a new instruction for Java 7 invokedynamic that will allow for late binding in languages such as JavaScript to be natively supported on the JVM.

Other Features

  • New Fork-Join framework
    • ForkJoinPool and ForkJoinTask along with fork keyword to natively support fork-join semantics
      natively on the VM
  • New decorators for Swing – Jlayer and LayerUI
  • Infiniband support – using a sockets direct protocol (SDP) over the wire
  • Utility methods for java.util.Objects

That was end of the main presentation.

Time for Audience Q/A

(All Questions/Answers paraphrased to best of my recollection)

  • Java 7 seems like an underwhelming release. Why?
    • There was a very long gap between Java 6 and Java 7 because of the inability to move things thru to conclusions fast enough in the JCP. All the big features were not done yet so it would have taken a lot longer to get everything finished. Oracle polled the community and the result was two releases – one with all the finished features and one with all the big features -Java 8- to follow shortly thereafter.
  • Will Oracle make Java more “restrictive” in terms of licensing etc.?, What is Oracle’s commitment to Java?
    • A very large part of Oracle’s internal codebase is on Java so Oracle has excellent commitment to Java and will move it forward Will it make it more restrictive license wise – this question has been comin up over the years and the answer is always NO. Most of Java is under a GPL-like license anyway so cannot be really made more restrictive.
  • With the departure of Apache Software Foundation from the JCP and the Lawsuit over Android against Goolge what is the future of JCP and the Java community?
    • Cannot comment on the lawsuit. If the situation with the ASF worries you personally then you should consult a lawyer. I (Chuk-Munn) ask myself this question – does it personally affect me in any manner? If not then I do not worry about it.
  • Is the support for dynamic languages increasing or decreasing with Java 7?
    • Increasing with the introduction of invokedynamic etc.

The PPT that was used by Chuk-Munn Lee is available from here (see attachment at the end of that page)

About the Author – Amit Naik

Amit Naik works as an Architect with BMC Software. He builds performant cloud solutions with a focus on heterogeneity and monitoring across different virtualization and provisioning vendors in the cloud computing space. His main focus is the Architecture and Design of BMC solutions with emphasis on building highly-scalable systems with REST and other SOA interfaces.

Amit has a Bachelor’s degree from College of Engineering Pune and a Master’s degree from Purdue Univ., West Lafayette. He has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, much of it in the USA, across a variety of Technical and Techno-Managerial roles.