Category Archives: Events

SeedFund.in wants to meet Pune entrepreneurs

External Visitors, ,

Anand Lunia, Executive Director & CFO, Seedfund is visiting Pune this week, and is interested in meeting Pune entrepreneurs in one-on-one meetings. If you fit that description, you can send him an email at anand AT NOSPAM seedfund dot in.

Seedfund believes in investing small amounts (1 crore to 5 crore) in early stage startups and they are mainly interested in the following sectors: internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays, and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.

This message brought to you by the Pune OpenCoffee Club, which you should join if you are a Pune entrepreneur, or you are interested in the Pune startup ecosystem.

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Do you want a Goolge Gadget an OpenSocial tutorial in Pune

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Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Rohit Ghatol of the Pune GTUG (Google Technologies User Group) recently conducted a well received tutorial on Google Web Toolkit. Based on user interest, he is trying to gauge whether there is enough interest to conduct another tutorial, this time on Google Gadget and Google OpenSocial development platforms. If you are interested, please let him know by filling out this survey.

For more information, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PUNE GTUG or join the Pune GTUG mailing list.

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Overview of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Live Blogging, , , ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of difficult problems to be solved.

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

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

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

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

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Microsoft technologies conference in Pune this weekend

Events, , , , ,
PUG DevCon 2008
PUG DevCon 2008

What: Pune User Group (PUG)‘s DevCon conference on Microsoft technologies

When: Weekend, 30 and 31 August, 9am to 6pm

Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, S.B. Road (Map)

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone. Register here.

Details:

DevCon is a Developer Conference from the developers, by the developers and for the developers. Developers may be professionals or students who will represent next generation developers. Agenda has been determined through voting. For information about the expected presenters look here. DevCon 2007 attracted 1200 people.

Featured Products/Topics: Windows Embedded, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight, Expression Studio, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Security, Expression Studio

Recommended Audiences: IT Professionals, Microsoft Partners, Solution Architects, Software Developers, Students, Technical Decision Makers, Developers, Architects

For more information about the organizers, see the PuneTech profile of Pune User Group.

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Liveblogging the POCC meeting on Usability

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

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

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

But it is common sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on Usability/UI – Aug 23

Events, , , , ,

What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together. Informal meeting to discuss UI, usability etc.

When: Saturday, 23 August, 5pm

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

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone, but you must register by sending an e-mail to manasgarg at NOSPAM gmail dot com

Details:

The general agenda is to have a free-wheeling discussion on various aspects of UI development including (of course not limited to) tools/methodologies for quick prototyping, usability aspects etc. Jhumkee Iyengar, Shashank Deshpande, and Harrshada Deshpande (with a combined experience of 40+ years in design and usability) have graciously agreed to be present to guide the discussion.

Jhumkee Iyengar has been doing design and usability since 1988, in IT, manufacturing and other industries, most recently in Persistent Systems, where she created and grew the usability group. She also launched usability in e-Governance and is responsible for improvements in PMC’s websites. She is also a presenter for the Nielsen Norman Group, and conducts usability workshops all over the world.

For more details about Jhumkee, see her linked-in profile.

Shashank Deshpande Shashank has been in the field of IT usability for 15+ years (yes, he has been doing usability since before it became a known/popular field in India). He was the head of usability at Symantec India (formerly Veritas) for 9 years. Just this week, he is returning from conducting a 4-day workshop on usability at Yahoo! India. For more information about Shashank, see his linked-in profile.

Harrshada Desphande (not related to Shashank!) has also agreed to be present to guide the discussion. Harrshada has 9 years of experience in managing user experience design in the IT industry – most recently in SAS R&D. She also organized the hugely successful IdeaCamp Pune.

For more information about Harrshada, see her linked-in profile

We are hoping to get another couple of experts in this field. I’ll post that info as soon as we have confirmations. Stay tuned.

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Pune-GTUG seminar on Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – 23 Aug

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What: Pune Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents a seminar on GWT (the Google Web Toolkit).

When: Saturday, 23rd August. 1:30pm to 5pm

Where: Synerzip. Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189, Near Mirch Masala Restaurant , Opp Vandevi Temple, Karve Nagar (Map).
Registration and Fees: The event is free for all, but you must register here.

Details
“GWT in Depth” Seminar will brush up on GWT basics and then jump on to practical use of GWT.
Attendees are required to know the concept of GWT. The seminar would include following

  • GWT basics
  • Building J2EE components for GWT
  • Using MVC in GWT and other Design Patterns
  • Wrapping existing JavaScript Libraries with GWT. Using gwt-google-apis framework to write gadgets with GWT.
  • J2EE Backend support for GWT frameworks

Invitation is by registration only, because the conference room has a limited sitting capacity.

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CSI Pune Lecture: Overview of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing – 27 Aug 2008

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Computer Society of India – Pune Chapter presents a lecture series on Data warehousing. This is the first lecture in that series:

What: Overview of Business Intelligence & Data warehousing by Vibhas Joshi, head of R&D at SAS R&D India.

When: Wednesday, August 27th, 2008, 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, Senapati Bapat Road
Entry: Free for CSI Members, Rs. 100 for others. Register here.

Details – Overview of BI & Data warehousing

Concepts of data warehouse, data marts, OLAP and data mining, understand relationship between transactional systems and data warehouse.

About the Speaker – Vibhas Joshi

Vibhas is with SAS R&D india as Head R&D , Program Manager – Industry Intelligence solutions, Member of Management Team.
Vibhas holds a Masters degree in Physics from the University of Pune, a Diploma in Computer Management from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute as well as a Masters in Management Studies from University of Pune. He is certified PMP.

He has over 25  years of experience in the IT. He has special skills in General Management, Program Management, Project Management, Software Product Development, Requirement Engineering, Database Management, Software Development Methodologies, and Infrastructure set-up.

Vibhas has conducted numerous training programs covering Project Management, Requirement Management and Software Engineering.

Vibhas in the course of his assignments has worked in the following business domains: Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing, Telecom.

For more information about other lectures in this series, and in general other tech events in Pune, see the tech events calendar at upcoming.

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Business plan competition for students – funding up to Rs. 1 crore

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Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune, is running Endeavor 2008, a business plan competition (open only to students). So if you are a student with an interesting idea looking to get visibility, guidance, and possibly lots of money, hurry, because the last date to submit entries is 24th August.

Details:

“SIBM Endeavour 2008” provides a platform for budding entrepreneurs with
viable Business Plans to meet seed funds and venture capitalists through the
“SIBM Endeavour Business Plan” contest. This contest is a 3 month long
business plan contest with 4 rounds. Every participating team can expect to
gain from the contest. Individual mentorship, Elevator Pitch for top 40
b-plans, cash prizes, and above all, funding of upto Rs. 10 Million (from Seed
Fund Advisors Pvt. Ltd.).

Our panelists for this contest are:

  • IndiaCo Ventures Capital Ltd.
  • NEA-IndoUS Venture Capitals
  • SEED FUND Pvt. Ltd.
  • NEN Online

Last date for Executive Summary: 24th August – 2008

Cash Prizes:
1st Prize: Rs. 2,00,000
2nd Prize: Rs. 85,000

For registration: http://www.sibm.edu/endeavour08

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Inviting articles on Entrepreneurship for CSI Pune’s September Seminar

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.

CSI Pune is planning a half-day seminar on Entrepreneurship in September, and with it they will also publish their Desktalk newsletter, on the same topic. Anjali Gupta of Bookeazy, one of the driving forces behind the Pune OpenCoffee Club, is the guest editor of this issue of Desktalk.

You are invited to submit articles of interest to entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in general. The following is a list of suggested topics, but feel free to write on any other subject that goes with the theme. The article needs to be submitted by end of August, to deodhar [dot] swati [at] gmail [dot] com.

The right advisor at the right time made all the difference.

The article must highlight the importance of getting the right advisors for the company early in its lifecycle, recognizing which advisors are necessary and when to listen to them. Or it could highlight a negative experience with bad advice. Also, the necessity to change or add advisors at different phases of the company’s evolution.

An entrepreneur must be very flexible and very stubborn.

Entrepreneurial judgment is the ability to tell the difference between a situation that’s not working but persistence will ultimately prove it out, versus a situation that’s not working and additional effort is a destructive waste of time. An article highlighting either situation or both at different times in the company’s life would be useful to compare and contrast.

Venture capital – the good, the bad, the ugly.

Understanding the mechanics of the VC industry. A profitable business need not always be venture fundable. Only certain businesses need and are suited for venture money. What else besides the money should be evaluated in a good VC?

Five Reasons not to start a company.

Article must highlight and recognize how much pain and effort it involves to start a company and then deliver shareholder value. Being good at something, working on my hobby, having a good idea, wanting flexible timing, or being good at managing people, are not reasons to build companies. What you build must have a path for sustained growth and profitability.

Avoiding the Founders’ bias.

Will your pre-starting work years really count or harm? Every company’s DNA is strongly colored by founders background and prejudices especially in the initial years. Those from a tech background will hire developers first and write code. That need not be the best way to approach the market. Experiences from tech entrepreneurs who’ve had to change themselves to be businessman and not technologists.

Product companies must embrace failure first and cash much later.

Building a successful tech product company i.e. build once, sell many times, is different from building a services company. Very rarely will your first product be successful, most of the times it will just tell you what not to do the second time around. Experiences and learnings from those who have switched from one to the other or built one type of company or both forms in the same company

It’s the stuff that’s not on your business plan that will trouble you the most.

It’s not the assumptions on the business plan but the unknowns that are not even on your sheet that entrepreneurs need to worry about. An experience highlighting how the unknowns unfolded and how to start looking for them early by talking to potential customers, partners or suppliers, competitors, etc.

How will Technology Entrepreneurship benefit India?

What technologies and/or companies will comprise of the next wave of social change in India? Will they still be service-oriented? Or, will they look a lot more like Products from the West with a distinct Indian flavor? The purpose of this is to suggest answers to the conundrum – is India really a potential large market for Technology Entrepreneurs?

India’s Export to the Rest of the World through Entrepreneurship

What is India’s contribution to rest of the World in this day and age? India’s unique problems, social structure, youth, education and culture have resulted in a very different impact on the rest of the world. The aim of this topic is to highlight and analyze startups/companies that have the potential of making a global impact by solving hard problems within an Indian context.

Is there indeed a fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid?

… that requires Entrepreneurs to make a paradigm shift in what is conventional thought? Are we doing enough to encourage failure, experimentation and retrial – all very necessary to encourage entrepreneurship at this level?

The art of the Start for to-be-Entrepreneurs

(and the state of that art in India): Starting a Company is hard, what with an extremely competitive environment and an unforgiving social attitude towards failure. The intention of this broad topic is to highlight the key elements of the startup ecosystem in India – How do I fund my dream (Angel Investors, Friends, Family, Bootstrapping, Venture Capital)? Getting a Business Plan together, what are the key elements of a good business plan? etc.

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