Category Archives: Events

Upcoming events (Dec 20): OpenSocial conference; Entrepreneurial wisdom; Economic Crisis

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This promises to be another action packed Saturday for techies in Pune.

The day kicks off with the OpenSocial Developer Garage conference for – you guessed – developers of the OpenSocial API. With a schedule packed with two tracks of talks from morning to evening, it is the place to be if you are interested in web-2.0, and social networking (both kinds: online and offline).

In the evening, you have to choose between getting words of wisdom from a successful entrepreneur who has already sold 3 companies, or attending a panel discussion on the economic crisis: myth vs. reality. The first is a Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting, at SICSR at 5:30pm and is a talk by Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO of Vuclip.com, a Silicon Valley based mobile video startup, and COEP alumnus. He will talk about the DOs and DONTs of startups, with anecdotes from his experiences to support each. For details, see our full post about this event.

The panel discussion has been arranged by the Project Management Institute of Pune, and the idea is this: “Considering the current economic situation and various news spread all across, we sincerely feel presenting correct information and right perspective for all the industry leaders, project managers is very important.” This is at Cummins Auditorium, Navi Peth, from 4pm to 7pm. For details, see the PuneTech calendar entry for this event.

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OpenSocial Developers Conference in Pune – 20th Dec

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What: A conference for all OpenSocial Developers
When: 20th December 9:30am to 6:30pm
Where: Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada Pune – 411006      View Map
Registration and Fees: This is a free conference, but attendance is by invitation only. If you register now, you might still get an invitation.

Details:

A group of OpenSocial enthusiasts from Pune have come together to create this conference. The event is aimed to unite all the OpenSocial Application Developers from all over the country and just share/code/have fun and maybe inspire others to take up OpenSocial Development.

This event will also help towards awareness of OpenSocial and building a strong OpenSocial developers community.

Who should attend?

Anyone who developed any application based on OpenSocial platform or anyone who want to learn how to create OpenSocial Applications.

What’s the menu?

There are two tracks of speakers going on at two different halls. See the detailed schedule for more information. Another section is dedicated to codelab. A few developers will develop an application for the “India I Care” NGO. If you want to participate, just the organizers know on the Developer Garage Mailing list. At the end there will be an “Application show case” where OpenSocial application owners can demo their application.

Blogging and Twittering

Follow @devgarage on twitter for official Developer Garage updates. In general, people blogging or tweeting about this event are expected to use the odgpune tag, which means that searching for this term will give you everything you wanted to know about this event. (And please use that term in your own blogs or tweets.)

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DOs and DONTs for startups from a 4-time entrepreneur – 20 Dec

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Pune’s Universities have given the world some of its best minds, and we are fortunate that they take time out of their busy schedules to visit Pune. And when that happens, we must grab that opportunity to learn from their experiences. One such distinguished alumnus of Pune is Nickhil Jakatdar, successful serial entrepreneur. Nickhil has successfully sold 3 startups, and is now on to his 4th one. The Pune OpenCoffee Club has arranged for a talk by Nickhil at 5:30pm on Saturday, 20th December, at SICSR, Model Colony. He will talk about the DOs and DONTs for startups, with anecdotes supporting each one of them based on his vast experience.

Chetan Pungaliya, co-founder of Kaboodle, (and himself a successful entrepreneur), says this about Nickhil:

Nickhil is a great guy to listen to. He is an advisor and friend to startups in the US and India. I personally find Nickhil’s experiences insightful and it is always a pleasure talking to him. He has done talks like these in Berkeley, Stanford, Symbiosis and COEP in the past and people love it. Even though this is last minute, you should definitely try to attend the talk.

Here are some highlights of Nickhil’s background:

  • Nickhil is currently the CEO and Co-founder of mobile video search and delivery startup Vuclip. For details, see TechCrunch Mobile’s interview with Nickhil.
  • Earlier, Nickhil was the President and COO of Praesagus, a MIT incubated start-up that he helped grow to becoming the most widely used design-to-manufacturing modeling software in its class, before its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems. Post-acquisition, Nickhil became Engineering Group Director at Cadence where he ran the entire Manufacturing Modeling Group.
  • Nickhil helped found and served on the board of directors of CommandCAD, an electrical CAD company that was acquired two years after its founding.
  • Nickhil co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Nickhil served as CTO and VP of Marketing and Products as the company grew to become the industry standard in the field of scatterometry, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. Nickhil remained at TEL for 3 years as Sr. Director of Technology and Marketing.
  • Nickhil has an M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been the recipient of many awards from various organizations, including the IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions in Semiconductor Manufacturing for 2001, the Berkeley Distinguished Pioneer Award, the NSF and MICRO fellowships.
  • Nickhil is a student of COEP, and had won the Most Outstanding Student award when he graduated.
  • Nickhil has been featured in several articles published in the United States and in India.
  • Nickhil has to his credit more than 30 patents and 20 conference papers.
  • Vuclip was earlier known as blueapple.mobi – and that was a bad business decision, and they ended up having to change their name to vuclip.com. Can you guess why?
  • Vuclip went from a few thousand users to over a million users in just a few months, without any advertising. How?

Details:
What: Presentation by Nickhil Jakatdar, “DOs and DONTs for Startups”
When: 5:30pm, Saturday 20th December
Where: 7th follor, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Chambers, Model Colony, Pune. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

Please forward this to anybody who might be interested in one day starting their own startup.

Be informed of such distinguished visitors and other tech events in Pune by subscribing for our PuneTech updates via RSS, Email, twitter, or SMS.

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POCC Meeting Report – SEO, Web Scalability and Olio

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Dhananjay Nene wrote this detailed report on the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting last Saturday, which covered Search Engine Optimization by Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, and Web Scalability by Hashamkha Pathan of SUN. We have reproduced it here with his permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

Went to the Pune OpenCoffee Club meet yesterday. It was supposed to focus on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Scalability and Sun Startup Essentials Program.

Search Engine Optimisation – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

I really liked this session. It is always refreshing to see a very down to earth speaker explain things broken down in a very simple way (tinge of jealousy at my end ?). While I feel like a ??? ????? (half doctor or amatuer) on this topic since I know only parts of it, I came back with some more insights into the space and some comfort in knowledge that the little I knew wasn’t way off the mark.

Anyways, here’s what Dimakh had to say on the topic :

Make sure you know what keywords you are conducting the SEO. Don’t forget the site name itself in the process. For good SEO, focus on the following issues (listed in a descending priority as per Dimakh, he said Google hasn’t ever published the priorities)

  • Content : It is important to make sure your content is in tune with the desired topics and keywords. Make sure the keywords (and sometimes even the phrases) you want to optimise for are covered in the content. Google does look at the keyword density in the content and that can influence your site rankings.
  • Domain : It is preferable to have the important word or two about your site in the domain itself. eg. You may consider having a site domain as sushrut-icecream-parlour.com instead of sushrut.com (I am not sure if he would’ve preferred the hyphens there – just applying my own thoughts here).
  • Filename : Make sure your filenames (ie. those in the URL) actually reflect the content.
  • Tags : Ensure that the tags (meta?) reflect the content appropriately
  • Alt Tags : Use the alt tags to enrich the information available to the search engine to better understand the images or hyperlinks. Keep them short but give enough info to the search engine eg. in a link to a file called enquiry.html, have the alt tag mention “Enquiry for Motors”.
  • Internal Links : Make sure it is easy for the spider to traverse through your site using the various links. Sometimes you may want to provide an alternative navigation mechanism if the default mechanism is not easily understood by a search engine (I assume he was referring to things like a Flash based navigation)
  • External Links : I really couldn’t understand what he implied here (probably because I got a little lost into thinking when I should’ve been listening), but some could help fill out the stuff in the comments below.

Finally Dimakh mentioned Seo Root and Google Rankings as sites to visit for further learnings. On the whole a very helpful session. One more karma point Pune Open Coffee Club earned in my books.

Web Scalability by Sun Microsystems :

(I missed the first couple of mins, hence didn’t catch the presenter names). (The presenter was Hashamkha Pathan from Sun. -Navin) The presentation focused on a toolkit designed for prototyping various technical and architectural issues around web 2.0 applications called Olio. Its a very nice and capable tool which in the words of the web site can be used for the following activities :

  • Understand how to use various web2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. in the creation of your own application. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
  • Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
  • Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
  • Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
  • Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

An excellent piece of content that was poorly targeted imho. Sun has an extended amount of experience dealing with enterprise architects, and this was a really wonderful presentation which most enterprise architects would’ve understood easily. This particular community of people often need to do their homework very well, and usually are allowed a fair amount of time and money to do their homework, and in many cases also have access to a body of people who are also equally capable in working out various issues related to architecture.

I really think this is a useful tool which can be used by startups but that they shall need to spend the time to understand the tool and what it could do for them. However it is not a point and shoot kind of a tool. Based on the questions I could very easily understand that most persons very quickly ended up assuming that the tool could do much more than what the tool authors ever intended, and then felt disappointed. This was really a situation of positioning gone awry and I think Sun will need some more effort in positioning the presentation in its early stages to prevent disappointment later.

Finally as in a question I did ask quite explicitly, the reason why it makes sense for Sun to invest in and open source such a tool, is that this tool really forces you to do your homework well in the first place. If you were to do your homework well in the first place and focus on performance and scalability early on, the tool usage would tell you to either focus on Java or more infrastructure to handle high load or low read percentage scenarios. These are very reasonable and sensible outputs of the tool. What olio does not tell you is the set of tradeoffs which are outside its scope, impact of the various choices of languages and toolkits on spead of release, agility, robustness and maintainability – that is something that the startup architect will need to come to some decision independently.

Finally sun talked about its Startup Essentials Program which offered various promotional incentives to startups. Very useful incentives, though I would advise people to evaluate if usage of such incentives introduces a small degree of lockin onto open solaris (I like opensolaris – just would ensure that I would use it in a manner that doesn’t introduce too much lock in), and also the post production cost implications including support. There were a fair degree of questions through the session, and I think as an audience it makes sense to pause and take the matter offline if the proceedings continue to be stuck at a stage after two or three questions.

Update: A presentation similar to the one presented can be found on Olio site at Olio Presentation

In parting

All in all a very useful session, and a left me with the desire to attend more sessions subsequently. Thanks POCC and all the organisers.

About the Author – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile. He blogs about software engineering and programming languages at /var/log/mind, and other more general topics at /home/dhananjay.

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PUG Community Day: Sharepoint 3.0; Windows Mobile. 13 Dec

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What: Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group Community Day featuring presentations on SharePoint Services 3.0 and Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator
When: Saturday 13 December, 4pm onwards
Where: SEED Infotech Ltd., Nalanda, S No – 39, Hissa No – 2/2, CTS 943, Opp Gandhi Lawns, Erandwana, Pune 411 004,
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. No registration required.

(For a full list of tech activities in Pune this weekend, see yesterday’s post on PuneTech)

Session 1 – Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

This session is First introductory session for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This session is a must for the Developers/Users who are new to this technology and want to start off with Windows SharePoint Development.

Built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment. With a familiar, Web-based interface and close integration with everyday tools including the Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Services is easy to use and can be deployed rapidly.
WSS 3.0 enables the user to create web site with following capabilities

  • Collaborate
  • Manage Document and Integrity of Content
  • Content Management Capabilities
  • Integration with Office Application

Speakers:

Sudhir Kesharwani is from Accenture and having over 6 yrs of experience in Microsoft Technology, 16 Months experience in SharePoint Application Development. He holds many certifications like MCTS – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, MCTS – Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, MCPD – EA & MCSD

and

Akhilesh Nirapure is from Accenture and having over 2.5 yrs of experience in Microsoft Technology, 16 months experience in SharePoint Application Development. He holds many certifications like – MCTS in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MCTS – MOSS) and MCPD – EA

Session 2 – Windows Mobile – Line of Business Solution Accelerator 2008

The Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator is a sample line of business application that showcases the latest design principles and technologies in the mobile space.

Delivering new innovations and development best practices to the Windows Mobile platform with Visual Studio 2008, the .NET Compact Framework 3.5, SQL Server Compact 3.5, a working Supply Chain application, over 5,000 lines of commented code.

In this presentation, we’ll see how we can use provided sample code in our applications and how we can build Line of Business apps more rapidly.

Speakers:

Mayur Tendulkar is a Microsoft Windows Mobile professional who loves talking about mobile and embedded technologies. He has been a Microsoft Student Partner Lead since 2006 and representing Student and Professional Community. He has delivered sessions in Microsoft Virtual TechDays and PUG DevCon 2008. Apart from that, he conducts regular community activities in Pune. You can read his blog at http://blog.mayurtendulkar.com OR reach him at mayur.tendulkar{at}gmail.com

Upcoming tech events this weekend, and PuneTech Event Reminder SMS service

Events,

Do you forget about an interesting tech event in Pune, and then regret the fact that you did not attend it? PuneTech is pleased to announce the Free PuneTech Event Reminder SMS service that will send you reminders about tech events in Pune one day before. Basically, this is a Google SMS channel, where we post the basic information about events: title, date, venue. In most cases, this will be posted twice – once when the event is announced (or when we find out about it) and once one day before the event. In case of events with submission/registration/nomination deadlines, we’ll also post a reminder a day before the deadline. Every reminder will be contained in a single SMS. For details, you’ll be expected to use a web browser to check out the PuneTech calendar (or ideally, you’ll already know all the details of the event because you are already subscribed to the PuneTech daily email updates (which is also free)).

This service is totally free. To subscribe, SMS “REGISTER” to +91 9870807070 to register with Google SMS channels, and when you receive confirmation, reply to that message with “ON PUNETECH”. Remember the second part – your PuneTech reminders will not start until you’ve sent the “ON PUNETECH” message. You cna also subscribe via a web browser by going to the PuneTech SMS Channel page, sign in to your google account (i.e. if you use GMail, enter your GMail username and password, if you don’t have a google account, create one), and then follow the instructions there. For more details about the Google SMS service, see their homepage and FAQs.

And to launch this service we have arranged a number of exciting tech events in Pune this weekend. (Actually no, we did not arrange them (except for part of the POCC meeting), but everything is fair in love, war and the internet, right?)

2 day conference on Technical Writing

Full day on Friday and Saturday at Le Meridien.

The Society for Technical Communication, India, conference is the largest gathering of technical communicators in the country. On December 12 and 13, 2008, the thriving city of Pune (Maharashtra) will play host to the technical communication fraternity from across the country, and even the world.

During the two-day conference and the one-day preconference workshops, distinguished speakers from a cross-section of the high-technology industry’s blue-chip companies will address the audience on a variety of topics. Sessions at this year’s conference range from effective documentation project management to an unconference-like, well, unconference!

Full details including venue and agenda are here.

PMI Pune Seminar: “Business Analysis and IT Strategy” and “Portfolio Management in SMBs during recession”

10am to 12:30 am at Cummins Auditorium, on Saturday.

There will be two talks. One on Business Analysis and IT Strategy by Prof. Pradeep Pendse, and the other on the Role of PMO in Portfolio Management within SMB enterprises in a Recession Driven Economy by P. Seenivasan, PMP, CSQA.

See here for details of the venue, abstracts of the talk, speaker profiles and other details. Free for anyone to attend.

POCC Meeting: SEO; web scalability; Sun Startup Essentials Programme

Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe will have an overview of Search Engine Optimization. Then representatives from Sun will talk about how to build scalable websites, and finally they will give information about the Sun Startup Essentials program intended to help jumpstart startups. For further details, see the PuneTech post yesterday about this event.

Update 1: The next event was announced a few hours after this post was written. Hence it was not included in the original version of the post

PUG Community Day: Sharepoint 3.0 and Windows Mobile

Pune (Microsoft Technologies) User Group Community Day featuring presentations on SharePoint Services 3.0 and Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator. On 13th December, 4pm onwards, at SEED InfoTech, Erandwana. For details of venue, speakers, and abstracts of the presentations, see the full PuneTech post.

Update 2: The next event was announced on Thursday, and hence included late.

Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Monthly Meeting

The PLUG monthly meeting, where Linux enthusiasts get together to discuss Linux enthusiastically. Normally happens on first Saturday of every month, but postponed to the second Saturday (13th December) this month because of the CMDA IT Expo in Pune last week. Time is always 4pm to 6pm, and place is always SICSR, 7th floor. (Yes, it is in the same place as the POCC meeting, but they are in different rooms.)

POCC Meeting: SEO; web scalability; SUN startup essentials, 13 Dec

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together with a 3-point agenda. 1. Search Engine Optimization, 2. Web scalability, 3. SUN startup essentials program

When: Saturday, 13th December, 4pm – 7pm

Where: SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone – no registration required

Details:

4pm – 5pm: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

In the last POCC meeting (Pain Points of Pune Startups), people wanted to know how to do SEO for their websites, and the consensus that emerged was that you should either do SEO yourself, or at least have a good understanding of SEO before you outsource it to a consultant. As to who would be a good consultant for SEO, someone suggested that we should simply do a google search on “SEO Pune” – whoever claims to be good in this area should be the first hit. We tried that and the first Pune company that showed up was Dimakh Consultants. We’ve invited CEO Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe to give members an overview of SEO.

Dimakh Consultants is a Pune-based web consulting company with a decade long specialization in web designing, application development, hosting, networking, SEO & SEM. To date, Dimakh has managed the set-up and delivery of 5 Internet Service providers all over India. He manages more than 20 servers placed all over the world and hosts more than 1600 websites in India, US, Europe and far east. He regularly conducts workshops on SEO and SEM around the country.

5pm – 6pm: Overview of Web scalability by Sun Microsystems; and overview of Sun’s Startup Essentials Program

Representatives from Sun Microsystems will give a presentation on scalability of websites – something they are in a unique position to understand since Sun’s servers and Sun’s MySQL database form the key elements of the stack for some of the biggest websites in the world. Specifically, they’ll talk about: Web Application & Performance Considerations, Web2.0 toolkit – An overview, Sun Systems for Web Applications, Getting Best out of MySQL on Solaris.

After that, Sun will give an overview of their Startup Essentials program. This is a program designed by Sun for startups. Get industry-leading servers starting under $750. Storage up to 70% off, installed and configured under 5 minutes. Access to their network of investors. Your choice of OS (Solaris, Linux or Windows). Open Source and discounted enterprise-class software. Free technical advice and training, discounted partner hosting, and discounted storage. Anyone can apply, and you get access to all the above if you are selected.

6pm – 7pm: General Networking

Mingle. Ask follow up questions to Dimakh, or the Sun folks. Try to recruit trespassers. Brag about your startup’s achievements. Ask people if they know any angel investors. Show people how to open a beer bottle in 10 different ways. Live-twitter all the exciting developments as the meeting progresses. Play housie. (Actually that is not part of the plan, but if SocialWebFactory shows up, who knows what will happen.) Maybe even watch a movie.

Message to Pune Startups

Nominate yourself for proto.in. See Santosh’s blog post to know why you should do this, and how it will help you.

Message to Everyone

This weekend is going to be a rather active weekend (again) for tech activities. Check the PuneTech calendar for details.

Problems faced by Pune startups, and suggested solutions

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Together, we can solve our problems faster than alone
Together, we can solve our problems faster than alone

The Pune OpenCoffee Club (POCC) had a meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the various pain points faced by Pune Startups, and to see what solutions or workarounds people had come up with. POCC member Mandar Vaze has captured the main points of the discussion for the benefit of those who were unable to attend. In places where my notes had additional info that’s missing from Mandar’s notes, I have taken the liberty of interspersing my points – those are in italics.

I joined the meeting slighly late. When I arrived there were about 50+ people seating in a circle, and few more people occupying seats on the sofa behind. Topic planned for the meeting was “Startups – pain points”.

Initial round of introductions


Internet connectivity :

  • BSNL seems to be the best in terms of stability
  • BSNL’s Business plans for internet not cost effective
  • Several startups use multiple Home connection plans – Is it legal to do this?
  • Someone mentioned that for the team of 15, 40GB/month plan is sufficient
  • (Another suggestion was to take a limited bandwidth BSNL connection in the office, and then do heavy downloads at home using your personal unlimited bandwidth connection.
  • If you are using multiple connections (possibly from different ISPs) to ensure stability, then free, open source software is available that can seamlessly allow you to multiplex between these two connections. -navin)

Dealing with Power cuts :

  • Laptops work best to avoid worrying about power cuts.
  • If you need to use Desktop, LCD better than CRT (low power usage -less load on UPS/inverter)
  • With laptops, team can work from home, in case extended power cuts

    • Assuming team mates stay in different area than office
    • When team grows, this may not scale – possible security issues
  • Suggest using 9-cell battery
  • Have common pool of spare charged batteries around to extend the battery life even further
  • Spare batteries cost around Rs. 3000 as against UPS for Rs. 5000
  • UPS/Inverter :
    • Anjali (I think) mentioned that 4.8 KVA inverter costs about Rs 48000
    • She also suggested that multiple smaller UPS better than single bigger one of higher capacity – avoid single point of failure.
    • Someone asked to post reliable vendor for UPS/Inverter

Incubation Space :

  • IT Park / Incubation centers were suggested as a solution where you don’t need to deal with any of these hassles. They take care of power, internet, and other facilities issues that you don’t want to worry about. Pune IT Park and Connaught Place were the two possibilities suggested. This entire section written by Navin with inputs from Amit since after actually visiting Pune IT Park and Connaught Place and clarifying many of the misconceptions people at the POCC meeting had about these places
  • At Pune IT Park the cost in the region of approximately 5500 per month, per person – and this includes the internet connection. (Someone at the meeting had indicated a cost of 8000 – which is incorrect.)
  • Facilities include shared reception, printer and fax machines, gym, swimming pool, 24×7 security, shared parking, internet connection for smaller (e.g. 4-person setup), free coffee/tea, (paid) cafeteria.
  • Someone mentioned that you can stay there for only 2 years after which you have to leave. This is not true.
  • Capacity of up to 20 seats is available currently (Someone mentioned that there is a long waiting list – that appears to be no longer true.)
  • Connaught place near Bund Garden has offices for rent – but their rates suggest that they are not targeting startups, but are probably geared towards senior executives of MNCs. Our rough calculations indicated that the cost would be in excess of 30,000 per month for two people.
  • Another possibility suggested by a few people was to convince some friend of yours who owns a company to give you a couple of seats to work on your startup. We’ve heard of a number of people going this route.

How to share experiences?

  • Several people seem to get stuck at same issues – How can we address this?
  • Wiki doesn’t work
  • (For many startup issues, especially those related to partnership / proprietorship / private limited, registrations, and other legal issues, Vikas Kumar, CTO of BrainVisa pointed out that he knows many of the answers, based on his own experiences, but doesn’t have the time to put the information on a wiki, or even to respond to questions on a mailing list. However, if someone were to call him up on the phone, he would be happy to help them out. -navin)
  • “Ask Pune Tech” was started as one possible solution for this problem.

Student internships

  • People wanted to know whether it is possible to successfully use students from local colleges to do useful work for the startup, either as part of a paid internship or as part of their final year project.
  • Many people have had bad experiences. Some had good experiences too. People had good experiences with the following colleges: COEP, PICT, MIT, SICSR.
  • Sahil, who is a student at SICSR, suggested that we should use the SICSR R&D cell, which has enthusiastic students who would be happy to work on such stuff. Just drop into SICSR and visit the R&D cell.

Other topics discussed

  • Anthony talked about Startup Hive – How resources can be shared. (Basic idea is for a bunch of startups to take space near each other, possibly in the same complex, and this would lead to a lot of synergies, energies and other goodness. -navin.)
  • There was a discussion about SEO/SEM – several people were of the opinion, that it is better to learn yourself than out source. (With this in mind, we are trying to organize a lecture on SEO from an expert for this month’s POCC meeting. An announcement will be made in a few days. -navin)
  • Shushrut mentioned about IBM SMB website. Similarly there is ICICI SME website. (These sites have lots of resources for startups. Check them out for answers to common questions. Another suggestion was ammas.com -navin)

Presentations :

Bandhan.com – Search engine for searching bride/groom

  • Main problem they are trying to address is how to market their product
  • They (bandhan.com) wish to “play nice” with established players like Bharat Matrimony and shaadi.com by not offering syndicated search to other sites

The Tossed Salad – Lifestyle magazine

  • Problem they are trying to solve – How to market
  • Several suggestions about finding niche, rather than being generic
  • Amit suggested looking at seekingalpha.com and punekar.in

After these presentations, there was Startup Cinema – “The office space”

About the Author – Mandar Vaze

Mandar Vaze is Linux Enthusiast since 1997, using linux at home on and off. He was associated with Twin Cities LUG in US, and PLUG after returning back to India. After working in corporate environment for 13 years, he has recently quit his job at Avaya. He plans to have his own business some day, but currently looking to be associated with some Pune based start-up as a consultant. He thinks Pune Tech is cool 🙂

CSI Pune Workshop: Introduction to Agile/SCRUM – Saturday 6th December

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What: CSI Pune’s introductory workshop on Agile/SCRUM
When: Saturday, December 6th, 2008, 3:00pm to 6:-0pm
Where: BMC Software, S.B. Road, 5th Floor Tower A, ICC Tech Park, Senapati Bapat Road, Pune, Maharashtra 411016
Entry: Free for CSI Members, Rs. 100 for others, Rs. 50 for BMC employees. Register here.

Details – What is SCRUM?

What exactly is Agile – and which Agile? What is Scrum? The growing evidence base that Agile project methods deliver value faster and with higher quality is all well and good. However, if you and/or your organisation have little or no Agile experience – deciding where to start can be quite daunting.

Scrum is the fastest growing Agile methods which is increasingly being used by IT and non-IT organizations worldwide. Introduced to the world in 1996, Scrum has become the foremost Agile methodology for IT giants like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Verizon etc.

Benefits of the workshop provides participants with a top-level overview of Scrum and a balanced appreciation of the different Agile methodologies.

Delegates will take away with them a clear understanding of whether Scrum is ‘right’ for their organization, its pros and cons and those of the different methodologies.

Participants will have ample opportunity to ask questions and interact with the presenters in order to relate Scrum to their own organizations. They will also be provided with onward knowledge and learning resource sources.

Who Should Attend

  • Business managers
  • Program Managers
  • Project Managers
  • Software Development Managers
  • Software managers
  • Software Quality Managers
  • Developers and Testers

Programme

15 minutes: Registration

30 minutes: Introduction : How did Agile arise? What is Agile? Where is Agile Now? The Emergence of Scrum

45 minutes: SCRUM Breeze-through

15 minutes: Tea Break

30 minutes: Comparison and Summary of Leading methods with Scrum

  • SCRUM Comparative Strengths
  • XP Comparative Strengths
  • DSDM Comparative Strengths
  • The common aspects

30 minutes: Panel Discussion / Q & A

  • Selection of context?
  • Do different contexts favour different methods?

There are a lot of other tech activities going on in Pune in the next few weeks. Check out the PuneTech calendar for details.

Recession, Linked-In, OpenSocial, Grails and more at IndicThreads Java Conference

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Note: Most of the presentations are online at the conference homepage.

The IndicThreads conference on Java technologies, which is an annual occurrence in Pune happened over the course of 3 days last week, and IndicThreads were gracious enough to invite me to attend the conference (sort of a press pass, so to speak), and although I wasn’t able to attend the whole conference, I did manage to squeeze in a couple of hours each day, and was very glad that I did, because I ended up with some really enriching sessions.

On the first day of the conference, the two big names of the tech industry in Pune, Ganesh Natarajan and Anand Deshpande gave keynote addresses. Ganesh, who is CEO of Zensar, and President of NASSCOM gave the NASSCOM view of the coming recession. His main thrust was that the Indian software / BPO industry will not be as badly affected by the recession as the rest of the world. He had a large number of graphs and figures to make the following points:

  • We had already been tightening the belt for almost an year now, so we are in much better shape to handle the recession than those who weren’t being so prudent
  • We are creating new products, tackling new verticals, and focusing on end-to-end service (and these claims were all backed by facts and figures), and this diversification and added value makes us resilient

And he spent a lot of time pointing out that to do even better, or primary focus needs to be the tier 2 / tier 3 cities, 43 of which have been identified by NASSCOM and whose developement will get some attention. Also, our tier 2 / tier 3 colleges are sub-par and a lot of work is needed to improve the quality of students graduating from there. NASSCOM has started a number of initiatives to tackle this problem.

Since this was a conference for Java techies, Anand Desphande, CEO of Persistent, presented his view of the broader context in which the Java programmers exist, and what are the things they need to think about (other than their code) to have a better long term view. Basically:

  1. Multicore chips, and why programmers need to worry about them
  2. Mobile Telephony: the desktop/laptop is no longer the primary target device for programmers. Think about the mobile users, and how what they want is different from the traditional PC users
  3. Cloud and SaaS: is coming in a big way, and will change the way people use software. Also, it makes life easier for users, but much more difficult for programmers. So need to improve skills in these areas
  4. Web 2.0 and Social Networking: these are exciting new fields with a lot of growth. They require a different kind of programming mindset.
  5. Rich Internet Applications: Similar to above
  6. Large Volumes of Diverse Data (including BI and analytics)
  7. Open source is on the rise. As programmers, you must have a good understanding of various open source licenses
  8. Gaming and Entertainment boom: Too many programmers think of only corporate world & green monitors etc. Think different. E.g. Gaming and entertainment are large markets and require a different mindset to come up with new ideas in these fields.
  9. Green IT: Instead of worrying about speed and efficiency, for the first time, worrying about power consumption has started affecting programmers
  10. Be a part of the community. Give back. Do open source. Join CSI ACM. IEEE. (and I would like to add contribute to PuneTech)

Anand also predicted that in the next 6 months, the Industry will see serious job cuts and salary cuts, and he things it is unavoidable. But pointed out that those who take trouble to keep themselves updated in their area of expertise, and go deep (instead of just doing “enough”) will not have a problem, and in fact will be best positioned to take advantage of the situation when the financial situation starts recovering after 6 to 9 months.

I missed the rest of day 1, but it has been covered in great detail by Dhananjay Nene. on his blog, as well as Varun Arora on the IndicThreads blog (part 1, part 2).

The highlight of day 2, and in fact the highlight of the whole week for me, was the presentation by DJ Patil, Chief Scientist of Linked-in. DJ Patil is in charge of all the data analysis that happens at Linked-in – basically the advanced guess they make like: “people who viewed this profile also viewed these other profiles”, and “people whom you might know” etc. He was not listed on the conference schedule – and was just passing through, and got invited to talk. He gave a great talk on an overview of how linked in works, their strategy for linked-in apps (the third-party apps that are integrated into the linked-in website). Again Dhananjay has already captured most of DJ’s important points on his blog, so I will not repeat those here. But I did have a very detailed conversation with DJ afterwards, and one of the things that came through was that they are looking seriously at India and wondering what they can / should do to get more Indians on linked-in. India already has about 4.8% of linked-in’s users. He was very open about trying to find out what are the things about linked-in that we don’t like, what are the things in linked-in that we would like to change, and what are the features we would like to see. If you have suggestions, send them over to him – he is dpatil on twitter.

The third day had a session on Grails by Harshad Oak, and if you are not familiar with Rails, or any of the other “programming by convention” schools of software, it is definitely something you should check out. It can reduce development times by orders of magnitude on things like building web applications and other things that are done over and over by programmers all over the world.

For other talks that happened, but which I missed, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any reports or blog posts giving details, but you can see the conference schedule to get an idea of what went on.