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PuneChips Editor’s Blog – Second Edition

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First, an update on PuneChips – we now have 5465 members in the Linked In group and over 40 in the Google Groups mailing list. Some folks doing applications work have also joined us. Given that there are 300 or so semiconductor designers in the Pune area, and hundreds more developing applications, we have ways to go.

On Monday, June 29th, we had our second event; a speech by Shrinath Keskar, former M.D. of Ikanos Communications in India. A good cross section of people attended the event and the discussion was quite lively. We had several new faces in the room, a definitive indicator of progress.

We also have our first guest blog written by Chaitanya Rajguru of KPIT Cummins Infosystems, and this is really what we are looking for. I want more people to participate in group discussions and idea generation. Rather than having only just a handful of people writing content, involvement from all is needed if we want to keep growing and have a voice in the development of Pune as a Chip/Embedded design hub.

Shrinath spoke about the challenges of designing chips for the telecom sector. The topic was quite relevant since we have several companies in the area that service Telecom applications. Shrinath not only focused on design challenges which generally revolve around the cost/power/features triangle, but also on challenges offered by the market; telecom standards, time to market and deployment. This was good information for engineers as it explained the logic behind many management decisions.

Telecom standards, both wireline and wireless, drive how telecom companies go about their business. Standards not only have technical, but regulatory challenges associated with them. In addition, there are competing standards that try to solve the same problem (Fig 1) and technical slugfests go on for many years before a winner emerges.

Figure 1: Plethora of Wireless Standards, Source: Nokia
Figure 1: Plethora of Wireless Standards, Source: Nokia

Many a times, the winning standard has such a short window of opportunity that it may be pointless to keep designing to it. Sometimes, governments propose standards in order to get access to advanced technology; China proposed WAPI a few years ago for wireless security. The catch was that anyone trying to sell Telecom equipment in China would have to disclose their technology to a Chinese partner if (emphasis is mine) WAPI had been adopted.

In order to support current and possibly future standards, chips have to be intelligently designed with possibly some redundant I/O, memory and cells which can be used to fix design faults or adapt to changing standards. Figure 2 below shows what a chip designer spends doing day in and out and to Shrinath’s point, there are lots of opportunities available for innovators to improve the design process – innovation does not need to end at the transistor level.

Figure 2: Where a Designer Spends All His Time, Source: Xilinx, 2004

Telecom equipment typically stays in the market for years as telecom standards take a while to roll out due to regulatory or geographical hurdles. However, a chip vendor hardly ever has that kind of time to supply the product. A telecom line card will be generally designed in 9-12 months and the chip must be designed, tested and deployed in the production line card within that timeframe. Time to Market is very important for Telecom OEMs; hence chip vendors must be able to convert design wins into production chips that work.

Deployment is a very important phase in the life of a telecom chip. You can test the product in labs that mimic customer test environments, but you can never test for real situations such as interference from out of spec frequency bands. It is very important to have good support staff on hand to fight these battles alongside customers. Your chip must work in each and every deployment; even a 90% success rate will not cut it.

As Moore’s law comes to the end of life, there is a lot of discussion happening around a new sustainable model for chip startups. The current model, which requires upwards of $50M in VC money to be profitable, cannot live for long. Very likely, the next invention in the semi/EDA market is going to be economic, something that allows new companies to form and prosper.

Abhijit Athavale
PuneChips Editor

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How green will be my valley?

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(This is a guest blog by Chaitanya Rajguru, Associate Technical Fellow at KPIT Cummins, and a member of the PuneChips group.)

The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8...
Image via Wikipedia

The “greening” of all things commercial and industrial is all around us. Every industry from transportation to technology to power to finance is in a rush to be perceived as “green”. So should the EDA industry stay behind? I think not. And here are my thoughts on some possible scenarios on what may happen.

So where does one begin? One good starting point may be with a popular indicator used to gauge the “goodness” of EDA tool’s output: “Quality of Results”, or QoR. QoR is used as a higher-level indicator of process quality, much like a Customer Satisfaction Index that up-levels feedback on specific aspects such as timely delivery and responsiveness. IC design EDA tools have used to showcase what they can do. So is it possible to expand its scope to include “greenness” as well? Or is it just an attempt to paint a turkey blue and pass it off as a peacock?

QoR is one of the long-lived and often-used keywords in Silicon Valley – surely on par with “information superhighway” in sheer citation count. Yet the latter phrase isn’t heard much anymore. It just reminds us of the 90’s internet boom, and doesn’t convey anything that is new today. After all, this superhighway is now as much part of our lives as electric power distribution is, and it has been a while since either created much excitement. And so is “QoR” similarly frozen in time as well, not staying up-to-date with today’s design challenges?

Let us take a quick look at how QoR has evolved over time. In the early days of IC design, the biggest challenge was to pack as many transistors onto a single die as possible. The self-fulfilling prophecy of Moore’s Law had setup expectations that somehow had to be met! And while the accompanying frequency spiral required lots of efforts to maintain, it was achievable. Thus the QoR directly reflected “transistor count” and “frequency” as the most important indicators of EDA tool capability. Other variations appeared, such as the packing density of logic and analog circuitry.

“Power” then appeared on the QoR scene, as limits of battery power and even socket power were approached by systems. Now EDA vendors could speak the language of the system architects with their “power-performance-area” optimization triangle. Higher-level performance metrics such as MIPS and FLOPS entered. Then came combinations such as “MIPS per megahertz per watt.” Thus the QoR definition expanded from the “micro” qualities to encompass the “macro”: from frequency and packing density to power and performance.

Looking at current trends in the economy, “Going Green” has taken on big importance everywhere. It is the socio-politically correct thing to do, regardless of your product or service. Companies with physical products joined the bandwagon early: building architects, automobile manufacturers, consumer electronics OEMs, and IC manufacturers. One software company that has made a start is Google, with its goal to “minimize its carbon footprint.” Other companies have been slower to adapt – maybe due to having “soft products,” or maybe because they find it hard to make the right connection into this trend. But the semiconductor industry and the EDA industry are inevitably subject to the same greening trend, and can not convincingly “opt out.”

But “Being Green” is as high-level a quality metric for an EDA product as any – so much so, that whether it even applies to EDA tools is sure to be hotly debated. Yet suppose, for a moment, that it were to be made a part of QoR, how do you think it can be done?

Initial thoughts that come to my mind suggest getting a “Green Process” certification for the EDA tool development cycle, analogous to the ISO9001 or CMMI certifications. In the future, such certifications could surely be applicable to any business or organization (maybe even an individual!), and the EDA industry would be no exception. Another possibility is to publish a “carbon footprint” or “carbon neutrality indicator.”

But the above “green indicators” apply only to the development of the EDA tools, and give no satisfactory indication of whether their use will lead to “green products”. My best suggestion so far to gauge that quality is to measure the tool performance (the fewer compute cycles it burns, the better) and its reuse (the more, the better). Reuse can be in terms of reusing the building blocks (within a project), the output (across projects) and even the hardware utilization (e.g. exploiting multicore architectures). I believe these quality measures will anyway be applied to the evaluation of EDA tools, because they also affect development cost and schedule. So one might as well explicitly go after these indicators and kill two birds in one stone!

On the downside of a green QoR, we could be chasing a red herring. Isn’t it be better to focus on the core job of the EDA tool, which is to make the design task easier? To what extent do we go in order to conform to this latest fad? And how about degrees of greenness, and who measures those? If two tool vendors claim to be green, how do I verify their claims and compare them against each-other?

So, what do you think about the “Greening of QoR?” Is it meaningful? If not, why not? And if yes, how can we go about it? It’s always fun to make predictions, so please do share yours …

About the Author – Chaitanya Rajguru

Chaitanya is an Associate Technical Fellow at KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd. He has extensive experience in end-to-end development of semiconductor products, from definition to production, with specialization in PC chipset, graphics and Flash memory IC products. He has played various roles such as product development lead, technical expert, people manager and organizational development facilitator.

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Venture Center – Pune’s incubator for startups in biotech, chemical, materials sciences

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Kaushik Gala, Business Development Manager at Venture Center is looking for all innovators in the areas of biology, chemical, and material sciences.
Kaushik Gala, Business Development Manager at Venture Center is looking for all innovators in the areas of biology, chemical, and material sciences.

Venture Center is an incubator housed in NCL Pune, created with this purpose:

To nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises for India by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the region.

Envisioned Future: To be the organisation that will be credited with creating, shaping and sustaining a “Pune cluster” of innovative technology businesses with a significant economic impact regionally, nationally and globally within the next 20 years.

To find out more about Venture Center, we interviewed Kaushik Gala, the Business Development Manager of Venture Center. Here are excerpts from the interview:

1. What is Venture Center?

Entrepreneurship Development Center (‘Venture Center’) is a technology business incubator approved by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. Venture Center is incorporated as a Section 25 not-for-profit Company established under the Companies Act 1956.

Venture Center was setup with support from the Department of Science & Technology – National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (DST-NSTEDB) and National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) (constituent lab of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research).

2. What are the services that Venture Center will provide incubatee companies?

Venture Center provides:

· Infrastructure – Dedicated labs, shared work-benches, analytical facilities, offices, hot-desks, etc.

· Advisory – Intellectual property, business planning, startup nuts-and-bolts issues, etc.

· Fund-raising – Seed stage fund raising from various sources including government agencies (eg. MoMSME), professional investors, etc.

· Technology commercialization program (‘Lab2Mkt’)

· Information and learning center – Library, databases, workshops, seminars, etc.

3. At what stage do you expect innovators and/or startup companies to approach you?

We offer resources and services at all stages of an early-stage technology startup – ranging from idea/conception, to prototype to Series A/B financing.

4. Obviously you are not interested in incubating any and all startups? Can you describe, with some examples, what sectors you are limiting yourself to?

Our focus is on the areas of material, chemical and biological sciences and related engineering / software ventures. However, some of our services are open to all individual entrepreneurs and startups.

Specific examples include startups that have commercialization technologies related to surgical implants, membranes for water purification, CFD and modeling solutions, etc.

5. Are the innovators expected to move to Pune, into your facility, to avail of any of your services?

For startups that need our infrastructure facilities, being located in Pune is obviously preferable. However, for services such as advisory and fund-raising, they can be located outside Pune as well.

6. How is Venture Center funded? What are your long-term funding plans?

Venture Center is funded via:

· A grant from DST-NSTEDB for start-up costs and operational expenses for the first 5-years

· In-kind support from NCL

· Donations from well wishers

After the fifth year of operation, Venture Center is expected to become self-sufficient. Besides generating revenue from a variety of services, our long-term funding plans include:

· Raising capital from governmental agencies and professional investors to set up an early-stage (‘seed’) fund for investment in technology ventures

· Raising grant funds from governmental and corporate agencies to expand our services portfolio

· Partnering with other R&D labs, domestic/foreign incubators, etc.

You can find out more about Venture Center at its website which is packed with a huge amount of detail. Information about the executive team behind Venture Center is here.
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The PuneTech SMS Reminder Service – Get event reminders on your mobile

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PuneTech logoHave you ever forgotten about an interesting tech event in Pune, and then regretted 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 can also subscribe via a web browser by going to the PuneTech SMS Channel page, sign in with 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.

Can Orkut/Facebook kill Flickr?

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Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

(Vibhushan Waghmare co-founder of Pune-based marketing analytics startup, MQuotient, wrote this post, titled “Orkut – Facebook as Photo Sharing Sites” on his blog, and is reproduced here with permission.)

Orkut and Facebook are the most popular social networking sites in India. Photo sharing has been a prime feature for both these socio-nets. Often we find friends uploading albums with photos from their recent trip/vacation to some place or some events in their life. These updates are actively tracked among the friends’ network and commenting and tagging of photos is quite common.

Image representing Orkut as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Given this, I am surprised that neither of these two socio-nets has a feature of image search among the friends’ network and public photos on these sites.

Often when we are planning a trip or vacation to some place, we try to search online about the destination. I would always love to know if any of my connection on either Orkut or Facebook has been there and has put up any photos of the place. A friend’s word would always carry more credibility than the most authentic commercial profile page/wiki for the place. In fact, a few days back Orkut themselves had run an online ad campaign wherein they showed one animated user talking about the great trip/vacation he had and other asking him to upload photos from this trip/vacation on Orkut. So I am quite sure that photo sharing (especially of specific locations) is a big traffic booster for Orkut and Facebook.

Image representing Flickr as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

However right now there are no means to find out if there are any photos of interest available on these socio-nets to which I have access. I have to turn to proper photo-sharing networks like Flickr.com and try my luck with photos from some stranger with whom I might never be able to connect (Yahoo! sucks in all its social network efforts :) ). This one application can overnight convert Orkut and Facebook into a serious competitor for all photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

This image search facility should allow me to search for photos to which I have access on these socio-nets, i.e. photos from my friends or photos which have been made public purposefully by their owners. This search can be based on tags/album name or whichever image search technology is best suited. I am sure Google with its best search technologies will not have much of an issue in developing an image search for Orkut. Besides, Google maps/Google world should be integrated with Orkut and geo-tagging of photos should be allowed. It will only make image search more accurate when searching for photos of a specific location.

While privacy has always been a key concern for these socio-nets, and more so with photos, this search facility needs to be very particular in searching only among those photos to which the searcher’s account have access to. Facebook has the famous privacy bug still unresolved wherein if any of your friend comments on a photo from a Facebook user who is not your friend, you still get to see the entire album of photos of that person. Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor’s private photos from Facebook had leaked out once because of this bug, however still it remains unresolved. Wonder if it is now an intentional bug that Facebook wants to be alive to drive more page-views.

As a plain user of these socio-nets, I sense a need here for an application which can provide this image search facility. I hope some Product Manager from either Google of Facebook listens to this and evaluates the opportunity. But before that, what do you guys think of it? Is there an opportunity for building such an application for Orkut or Facebook?

About the author – Vibhushan Waghmare

Vibhushan is a co-founder of MQuotient, a Pune-based startup that uses cutting-edge quantitative analytics and mathematical modeling to build software products for marketing analytics, and in general deliver solutions for enterprise marketing challenges. Before co-founding MQuotient, Vibhushan was managing the Search product at Yahoo! India. He is an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and an Electrical Engineer from REC, Nagpur. He has also held positions with Amdocs & Cognizant Technology Solutions. Check out his blog, his linked-in page, or his twitter page for more about him.

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Why you should attend BlogCampPune – 2

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Passion

That is the one word that a BlogCamp can be captured in – passion. Bloggers, the serious ones, are very passionate about their blogging. And usually, the more successful blogs tend to be about a few specific topics that the blogger is very interested in, and puts a lot of time and effort into. And there is nothing like learning about a topic from somebody who has put years of effort into learning about and writing about that topic.

And you get about 20 such people in a blogcamp.

First, though, I need to clarify what a blog is, according to my definition. Far too many people thing of a blog as a “Dear Diary” where someone writes about every little episode of his or her life, and what they had for lunch, and how much they hate their boss, and how Pune’s traffic sucks. Those are not the blogs I am talking about. Those are pretty boring, and other than a few close friends and family of the blogger, nobody really reads those blogs.

I am talking about those who use blogging either to write about interesting insights they have related to their field of work, or who use it to explore an interesting hobby, or a topic that they are very interested in. In general, these are blogs by people who put some serious thought into what they write, and write things that their readers are interested in.

In the first category – those writing about topics from their work – are people like Dhananjay Nene, who writes long and insightful posts on software programming, design and architecture, some of which take is weeks if not months to think about and write. And for anybody interested in being great at software, it is a must read; and like Suvrat Kher, a geologist who writes on geology, evolution, and the changing earth. In the second category are people like SandyGautam who is really a software engineer, but  writes the Mouse Trap, a blog about psychology and neuroscience, that is considered amongst one of the best science blogs in the world (those technically minded should note that his blog has a Google PageRank of 6). Or meetu, who in spite of being a CA and an MBA in finance, gave up the corporate life for writing about movies at wogma.com. Arun Prabhudesai is interested in the Indian Business scene, and his blog trak.in has over 5000 subscribers (and god knows how many more daily readers). And Tarun Chandel, who in addition to “regular blogging“, also posts his experiments in photography to his photoblog.

You’ll meet Rohit Khirapate who writes at Aamhi Marathi, Nitin Brahme and Vishal Gangawane who are reporters with Pune Mirror, Sahil Khan, who started The Tossed Salad, a life style magazine, while still a student, Debashish Chakrabarty, who amongst other things, is also very active in Hindi blogging circles, Nikhil Kaushal of Rang De, which is a micro-finance organization, trying to make a difference in the lives of poorest people for whom a loan of a few thousand rupees can make a difference, and people from OLPC Pune, who are trying to put laptops in the hands of poorest kids – the stated goal of the project being achieving one laptop per child.

Register, and attend. This will be your chance to find some of the most interesting people you’ve ever met. This will be your chance to possibly find people who share the same weird interests as you. This will be your chance to inspire a bunch of college kids, who will all be there because of their individual and varied interests. This will be your chance to be inspired to do something interesting and different with your life.

BlogCampPune2 – come to inspire and be inspired.

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Rise of the Virtual Machines – Some thoughts on the impact of virtual machines

In Depth, Technology,
Virtual Machine Monitor Type I
Schematic diagram of a Virtual Machine setup. The physical hardware is at the bottom, the virtual machine monitor (VMM) sits in the middle, and multiple actual virtual machines sit on top of the VMM. Image via Wikipedia

(This post by Dilip Ranade on his blog, takes a look at how Virtual Machines are going to change the way we do computing, and also how we will start using virtual machines in new and interesting ways as they mature. It is republished from there here with permission.)

Synopsis: some thoughts on the impact of virtual machines

Virtual Machines were invented in IBM in the early seventies , but it appears that it was only VMWare started much later in 1998 that figured out how to make money purely out of virtualization. However, with Xen and Microsoft Virtual Server also entering the fray, things are getting interesting.  The green pastures of Virtual Machines, often misnamed virtualization (which is actually
a broader term) now appear poised to support a large herd of bulls.

Although it is hard to predict all the ways in which a new technology will change the world– think of telephones and sex hotlines for example — here are some thoughts on how VM’s can have an unforeseen impact, arranged roughly in order of increasing ambitiousness:

  • VM’s can break the HW/SW Red Queen Effect
  • VM’s can break vendor “lock-in”
  • Processors can become commoditized
  • Operating systems can become commoditized
  • Rise of virtual appliances
  • Rise of virtual machine swarms

VM’s can Break the HW/SW Red Queen Effect.

Software vendors and hardware vendors are in a mutually beneficial race, leading to an exponential spiral: customers are forced to buy ever more powerful computers to run ever more resource-hogging versions of software. But with a Virtual Machine this collusion can be broken. First of all, customers will balk at buying bloated software, as happened with Microsoft Vista. Secondly, marginally bloated software can be tolerated without having to replace the virtual servers with more powerful machines. For example, a VM can
be virtually upgraded to larger memory or more CPUs without making new purchases.
Thus, the existence of virtualized servers brings genuine economic pressure for software developers to be more frugal with CPU and memory consumption in their products. This works in conjunction with the next point.

VM’s can Break Vendor “lock-in”

When a software product is on a virtual machine, it is easy and non disruptive to try
out a competing product on another virtual machine, even if it
requires different type of hardware. However, this effect is not as powerful
as it can potentially be, because todays virtualization is too focused to x86
architecture.

Processors can Become Commoditized

The time is ripe for the evolution of a standard virtual processor,
just like TCP/IP is for network protocols. Consider the advantages: Considerably reduced development and testing costs (write once run anywhere); potentially longer software product life (delinked from hardware obsolescence); clean room environment for “dusty decks” (very old software can continue to run in a virtual environment). I am thinking of a more abstract kind of virtual processor that is also extensible or mutable in ways that hardware processors cannot be. It may not need to make hard choices between various hardware tradeoffs.
The Java virtual machine is an example.

Operating Systems can Become Commoditized

As the virtual processor evolves towards higher levels of
abstraction, so should virtual devices that it connects to. This should reduce the complexity of the virtual operating system; then it should not need a team consisting of thousands of progammers to maintain a virtual operating system.
For example, a virtual OS does not need bootstrapping code – it can boot of a virtual network boot service. Similarly, there is no need for every virtual Operating system to implement its own file system and to interact only with (virtual) hard disks. All it needs is a simple file system client to discover and connect to the correct virtual Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices.

Rise of Virtual Appliances

General-purpose operating systems can be replaced with lean-and-mean
tailor-made variants designed for specific applications. For example
an OS built specifically for a web server, or different one for a
database.

Rise of Virtual Machine Swarms

The trend towards multi-core, multi-thread programming can be fitted
better to a virtual machine designed to work in swarms. The Transputer of late 1980’s comes to
mind: multiprocessor meshes could be built from multiple Transputers just by physically connecting built-in serial links between pairs of Transputers. The
standard virtual processor’s simple network interconnect could support
easy interfacing within a swarm. I think PVM and grid computing concepts can be considered precursors of VM swarms.

About the Author – Dilip Ranade

For more information, see his linked-in profile.

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“wh[0x01] WildHack Contest” for articles/video/code related to cyber security by null.co.in

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null-logoNull.co.in, Pune’s network security community for hackers, security professionals, security enthusiasts, and in fact anyone related to IT for whom security matters (ahem: if you are in IT, and security does not matter to you, you should really not be in IT, should you?) is holding a month long contest for the best security related content. Content means anything that you can produce: article, blog post, whitepaper, advisory, disclosure, tutorial, video/audio, source code, tool, proof-of-concept. Pretty much anything that you created on your own, and relates to cyber security, and would be educational for other people to see/read/consume.

The contest runs from 15th June to 15th July, and winners get cool “????” T-shirts (there will be at least 10 winners). It’s OK to submit content that you’ve previously published elsewhere (e.g. bugtraq, or your blog), but it must be your original content. So get cracking (or is it “hacking”) and email your submission to submit _at_ null.co.in

Contest Details

1. The contest starts on 15th June 2009 and ends on 15th July 2009. Winners will be announced on the null mailing list on 20th July 2009.
2. The submissions can be anything related to security/hacking.

3. Submission Categories expected(but not limited to):

  • – L2-L4 security/hacking.
  • – Web 2.0 vulnerabilites and countermeasures.
  • – .NET Malware/security.
  • – Code injection (Binary/XSS/SQL/Command etc).
  • – Spam mitigation and antispam evasion techniques.
  • – Malware detection and antimalware evasion techniques.
  • – Protocol vulnerabilities.
  • – Voip.
  • – Mobile networks GSM/CDMA/3G.
  • – Wireless.
  • – Cryptography.
  • – OS/Kernel and Virtualization security/hacking.
  • – Bluetooth.
  • – Hardware based security/hacking.
  • – Cyber Forensics.
  • – Cyber Warfare.
  • – Social Engineering.

4. Research work in Progress will also be accepted.
5. The submissions can be in the form of:

  • – White papers.
  • – Advisories/Disclosures.
  • – Best Practices.
  • – Video/Audio Demos.
  • – Tutorials.
  • – Hacks, tricks & tweaks.
  • – PoCs.
  • – Source code/Tools.

6. The submission should be original work of the author/submitter.
7. Your submissions* should be emailed to (submit _at_ null.co.in).
8. It is ok to submit your work already published on the net like advisories already posted on FD/Bugtraq, paper presented at a conference etc.
9. Submissions will be judged by core group members of null. Criteria for judgement:

  • – More technical the submission, more chances it has for winning.
  • – Innovation/Some thing new and never heard of before.
  • – Age of the work. Newer work will get more preference.

10. NULL will be giving away atleast 10 T-shirts.
11. For any further queries/details please write to (dhiraj _at_ null.co.in).

*Disclaimer: By submitting your work to null you are giving null the right to publish and redistrubute it in any form.

See the contest website for more details.

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Ignite Pune: Speak for 5 minutes on anything you’re passionate about – 19 Jun

Events, Featured, , ,

ignitepuneThoughtWorks hosts the first edition of Ignite Pune! Imagine you’re on stage. You have 5 minutes, 20 slides advancing every 15 seconds. What is the passionate topic that you would talk about?

On June 19, 2009, 6:00 PM at ThoughtWorks Pune, YOU can have that stage. Any topic that you think is interesting is welcome (no sales pitches or a product demos please!). If you are interested in speaking, email your presentation to ignitepune@thoughtworks.com

The event is free, so if you’re interested in meeting people, learning something new and sharing their passions, RSVP via email.Let’s Ignite Pune! If this will be your first Ignite night, check out others around the world at
http://ignite.oreilly.com/

Venue: ThoughtWorks
GF-01 and MZ-01, Tower C
Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada, Pune – 411006
Email: ignitepune@thoughtworks.com

For more details see the Ignite Pune page. If you want to attend, register here.

India’s largest tweet-up: Will Pune break its own record? (#ptu2)

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

The Pune Tweetup is back.

Back in February, when we had the first one, organizers Bhavya, Purva and others had organized it on CCD on FC Road, assuming that “a few” people will turn up. A staggering 62 showed up , and managed to squeeze into CCD (that number is confirmed – I was personally present when the bodies were counted). Rohan talked about how he got business through twitter, Anupam Saraph talked about how to help Pune using twitter, Dhananjay talked about using different twitter accounts for different purposes, and I gave my twitter best practices spiel. It was covered by Pune Mirror, DNA, and Indian Express. As far as we know, that was the largest tweetup in India, and will be known by that name (“Largest Tweet-up in India”) until someone gives us details of something bigger that happened elsewhere.

Or, unless Pune Tweetup 2 (#ptu2) is bigger.

This one is on Saturday, 6th June, 6:30pm at the Mint Cafe. And I am not giving directions, because a SadakMap url is a more efficient way of doing that. To give the organizers a chance to panic (at the number of registrations), you should register at http://ptu2.eventbrite.com.

And for those feeling a bit lost, I guess I should explain what a tweet-up is. A tweet-up is a meet-up of twitterers. A Pune Tweetup is a chance for Pune’s twitterati to meet in person all those people they’ve met and interacted with only over twitter. It’s a place where you make friends and influence people. It’s a place where you run into people with interests similar to you. It’s the best place for professional networking. There’s also place for some unprofessional networking. It’s a place where you’ll sell your Ferrari and become a monk. It’s a place where you meet some of the smartest people in Pune (by definition, since, if you are not on twitter, you are not that smart, right?) And those who have been living in a cave for the last two years and have just emerged are probably wondering what is twitter and why is everybody going ga-ga over it, should educate themselves about twitter and take the plunge.

So what are you waiting for – register now. As they say, offer valid until stocks last.

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