Category Archives: Featured

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Job Mela 2014 for final year Engineering Students by @PuneStartups/@CSIPune

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It’s back! The Pune Open Coffee Club and The Computer Society of India, Pune are organizing a job mela for final year engineering students on Saturday, 14th June, at Cummins College Pune, from 9:30am to 4:30pm.

This event is free for students, as well as for startups. Startups who wish to be part of this, please signup here, and read the For Companies section below. Students who wish to be part of this please read the For Students section below.

For Companies

We already have 850+ students signed up, and we expect the number to go up even more by the time of the event. These are engineering students who are interested in jobs with Pune startups.

On 14th June, you will get a chance to give a short pitch about your company to the students, interact with selected students, shortlist the ones you like and interview them right away (or schedule an interview for later). And this is free for you.

So sign up here.

If you’ve been to a previous job or internship mela organized in Pune, you know that handling 1000+ students is a complete mess. Hence this time is a bit different. We are making all students go through an online programming test by ReliScore, and only students who do well in the test will be allowed to attend the event.

In other words, you get only good students, and you will not be inundated with resumes of unemployable students.

What are startups expected to do there?

Get marketing material – lots of it. Visiting cards, leaflets and what not. Get banners – you will have one table of size 3ftx4ft for you. Get a laptop with a running PPT. Your main aim is to attract the best students to your company.

This must be costing a bomb?!

NO! This event is totally FREE of cost. However, prior registration is mandatory.

For Students

Students: You don’t find so many startups in one place, at one time, all accessible to interact with you!

Why work with startups?

Startups are cool. Startups are where the action is. The experience that you would get in a startup in a few months, would be better than what you would get from large corporations in a few years. In startups, you get an exposure to the various moving parts of a company – coding, testing, admin, HR, marketing… you name it! More than all of this, you get to work directly with founders of the company, who will one day make it very big (like Google, Twitter?).

What do startups want from me?

Life at startups can be very exciting – but you need to be prepared to give more than 100%. Many startups work on cutting edge technologies, and there is going to be a huge learning curve for you, to be able for you to meaningfully contribute to the company. So, it requires dedication, patience and a positive attitude.

Ok, as a student, what should I do?

Get in touch with the T&P officer of your college. An online programming test has been arranged for 10th June with participating colleges, and you need to find out the procedure for being part of this event.

If you are a student of a Pune college, and your college is not participating in this event, please ask them to contact CSI Pune (or send mail to punetech@punetech.om and we can forward it to the appropriate people), before 9th June.

If you’re a student from a college that is not participating, or if you’re a student from outside Pune but are willing to work in Pune, and willing to travel to Pune on 14th, then please visit ReliScore.com on 11th June for instructions on how you might be able to get into the event on a wild card entry.

Call for Proposals: Deccan Ruby Conference July 2014

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The Deccan Ruby Conference, the first of its name, will be held in Pune on 19 July 2014, at the Hyatt Regency in Pune.

The call for talk proposals is now open, and will remain open until 5th June.

Submitting a talk proposal is the first step towards making this conference a big success, and in general making Pune’s active tech scene even more awesome.

If you have any question, write to the organizers at team@deccanrubyconf.org

About the Conference

Ruby is fun and this is our idea of having fun while organising a conference. A one-day, single-track conference that starts early and ends late! The conference boasts of workshops and talks for both beginners and experts, a lavish party at a local brewery and a potential Futsal tournament among conference attendees! (After all the World Cup finals would have been just a week earlier). For people staying on till Sunday, we plan to organise a trip to Sinhagad (a fort near Pune that has some pristine scenery and a rich history that will leave you speechless). A good easy 1 hour trek for those who want more than just some football.

“Hou De Karcha” (Let there be expense)

Ticket sales for those interested in just attending the conference are now open, and at the time this article is written, you can still get early bird prices:

  • Early bird tickets will go at Rs. 1,150
  • Standard tickets will be at Rs. 1,850.

“Hou De Shikshan” (Let there be education)

Pune being a student city (yes – there are about 150 colleges just inside the City!), in a very unique way, we are allowing Companies to sponsor students while getting access to hiring budding Rubyists. Read more about this in the Sponsorship Prospectus!

“Hou De Tota” (Let there be loss)

Welcome sponsors! More details in the Sponsorship Prospectus but here are the sponsor slabs:

  • Lai Bhari: Rs. 1,00,001
  • Bhari: Rs. 40,001
  • Abhari: Rs. 12,501

Note: Do not miss the 1 Re. “shagun” (good luck).

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on the Life and work of Edsger Dijkstra

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Persistent System presents a talk on the life and work of Turing Award Winner Edsger Dijkstra, on 22 March, 2pm to 5pm, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, SB Road.

In 1972, Edsger Dijkstra was given the Turing Award for fundamental contributions to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; for eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; for illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design. Dijkstra is famous for his graph algorithms (shortest path, minimum spanning tree), for writing the first Algol-60 compiler, which was the first high level language with explicit recursion (which was implemented using stacks), structured programming, and a whole lot of important contributions to practical and theoretical computer science.

He is also the guy who killed the goto.

In this event, Ravindra Naik, Principal Scientist at TRDDC Pune, will touch upon some of the contributions of Dijkstra like – Design of Algorithms, Program Design, Programming Languages, Formal Specification & Verification and OS & Distributed Processing.

This will be followed by a talk on “Art and Science of Programming” by Shailaja Shirwaikar HOD, CS Nowrosjee Wadia College. The talk will present Dijkstra’s programming methodology. From writing short, readable and efficient programs to illustrating his point through the choice of apt examples, Dijkstra was an artist programmer. Structured programming, developing loop invariants to separation of Concerns, and Dijkstra’s emphasis on formalism in development of programs has eventually lead to the Science of programming. The formal approach of program development gives the programmer the confidence in the program developed by him and debugging would be unnecessary. Dijkstra believed in disciplined method of programming which is very relevant to the students of programming.

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 22 March.

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

DrupalCamp Pune on 5/6 April; Call for Speakers is open

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The Drupal Community in Pune presents DrupalCamp Pune on 5/6 April 2014, a conference for Drupal developers and users. This is a free conference, and open for anybody with an interest in Drupal in particular, or web development / PHP in particular.

Call for papers

DrupalCamp would love to get your proposals for sessions to be delivered in Drupal Camp Pune. You may select any topic from development, design or anything interesting that you would like to share. Last date for submitting your proposal is 27th March, 2014.

Call for papers: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/session/add

DrupalCamp Background

Drupal in Pune started back in February 2009 as Pune Drupal User Group (PDRUG), with an objective to strengthen the local Drupal community in Pune. The first meetup saw 3 Drupalers, in last year we have been able to engage Drupalers in monthly code sprints where focus is on on D8 core contributions. In addition to code sprints, Pune community has also organised global training days and specialized workshops for Pune colleges.

The first Drupal Camp Pune was organized back in 2009. In this first camp there were 300+ attendees. One of the fun highlights of the Drupal Camp Pune 2009 was the Drupal Song which featured in Dries’s blog :), we soon followed up Drupal Day/Hackathon in presence of Addison Berry (former documentation lead, Drupal). Between 2010 and 2014, Drupal community has been focusing on a lot of Drupal meet ups and now its time to have a bigger event: “Drupal Camp Pune 2014.”

What to expect?

In Drupal Camp Pune 2014 you will meet some of the earliest contributors to Drupal in India from around the country. For developers and students, the event presents opportunities for learning, getting involved in community contributions via code/ review/ QA for Drupal 8. One of the main objective of this camp is to engage students more personally in a ladder like workshop. For the business community there will be an opportunity for learning from sessions based on case studies of Drupal websites, meeting representatives of the leading Drupal companies in India, and some of the brightest individuals working on Drupal.

What should I bring to Pune Drupal Camp?

Just come with Open mind and laptop with Drupal 7 installation. You can follow instruction over here.

Keynote – Jacob Singh

Jacob is the country head for Acquia India where he manages all alliances, business development and services in the region. He is an experienced trainer, project manager, developer and scrum-master with 14 years of experience building great web experiences, seven with Drupal.

One of the early Acquians (2008), Jacob holds the distinction of working in the most departments. He has been an integral part of the Acquia Search and Drupal Gardens products, a recognized Drupal trainer and consultant and a solution architect.

Important dates:

  • Call for Papers starts on 12th March, 2014 and ends on 27th March, 2014
  • List of Accepted sessions to be announced on 29th March, 2014
  • Actual event is on 5th and 6th April

Call for Sponsors

Not only does a platform like Drupal Camp make the community stronger, but it also contributes to grow economic ecosystem. By Sponsoring Drupal camp you show your commitment to Drupal and the community at large.

Become a sponsor: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/sponsor-camp

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/user/register

Event website: http://camp2014.punedrupalgroup.com/

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

Pune has more tech and startup events each month than there are days in the month. Because of the large volume, information about most of our events is not posted to the PuneTech blog – they directly go to the PuneTech Calendar. Please sign up to get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free), or follow @punetech on twitter.

Startup Conference TiECON Pune 2014 – 12 April; with keynote by Rajiv Bajaj

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TiECON Pune 2014, the second TiE Pune conference aims to bring together entrepreneurs, investors and industry, foster generation and discussion of entrepreneuri
al ideas, and develop a sustainable entrepreneurial infrastructure within Pune.

TiECON Pune will be held in Westin Pune, from 9am to 6pm on 12th April. Click here to register – before tomorrow 15th March to avail of the early bird discount. (Use the coupon code TiE-PuneTech to get a discount.)

Check out the agenda for the event. Highlights: 40+ Speakers, including a Keynote by Rajiv Bajaj.

Why Attend?

At TiECon Pune 2014 chances are you’ll come face to face with business’ leaders, entrepreneurs & industry luminaries. It will be a great opportunity to hear & interact with industry experts and explore:

  • New frontiers for the entrepreneurial journey
  • New enablers and support systems
  • New markets for seeking success

Stay connected and we’ll update you as soon as registrations open.

Who Should Attend

Entrepreneurs are passion-people. This event is for these passionate individuals. You could be passionate about technology, services, mobile, consumers, internet or engineering. But if you’re passionate about the future – you should be here.

Fees and Registration

The charges for the event range from Rs. 1599 for early bird TiE Pune members, to 3000+ for non-member late birds. If you’re not a TiE Pune member, you can use the code “TiE-PuneTech” to get a discount as a “Member of Supporting Organization”. The early bird discount ends on 15 March (tomorrow).

Register here

Call for Proposals: Pune Scala Symposium 12 April

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On April 12th, Thoughtworks Pune will play host to a day-long conference on Scala in Pune, and the call for proposals is now up. Here are some examples of topics that you can submit talks on:

  • experience reports from commercial projects (what worked, what did not and insights from implementing Scala on the project)
  • experience reports contributing to open source projects or consulting projects
  • demo/introduction to a library/tool/framework/technique

Propose a session now!

If your talk gets accepted, ThoughtWorks will sponsor your travel (domestic) and stay.

Who should attend:

If you are an existing user of Scala or other functional programming languages or if you are curious to know more about Scala and want to find out how other companies are using Scala, come join the Pune Scala Symposium. You will get to meet Scala enthusiasts from across India, discuss and learn from each other.

Venue:

ThoughtWorks India Pvt Ltd, 6th Floor, Binarius Building, Deepak Complex, National Games Road, Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerwada, Pune.

Follow @punescala on twitter, and join in the conversation using #punescala.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: http://info.thoughtworks.com/pune-scala-symposium-april-12-registration.html.

Food and refreshment drinks will be provided. Attendance is free of charge. Seats are limited, so sign up now!

If you have any questions write to punescala@thoughtworks.com or you can reach out to Mushtaq Ahmed on +919850099687.

Interview with @NexusVP, the most active tech Venture Capitalists in Pune

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Venture Capital firm Nexus VP, with 8 investments in Pune, is not only the VC firm with the largest presence in Pune, but conversely, they also seem to love Pune, with more investments here than any other city, including everyone else’s darling Bangalore.

Recently, Sandeep Singhal wrote this in a tweet:

Pune has the most product oriented culture. With 8 investments plan to spend more time there.

and soon after that, Nexus held an event in Pune showcasing 3 of their portfolio companies. With this much invested in Pune, and more activities planned, we decided to talk to Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus to find out more about their Pune love affair.

How many companies have you invested in Pune? Can you name them?

Currently 8 of our companies have offices in Pune : Pubmatic, Druva, Sedemac, Helpshift, Uniken, and 3 others that will be announced in time

What attracts you to Pune? What would you say about the Pune start-up ecosystem, in comparison with other cities?

We consider Pune as a key technology hub in India. We find very high quality start-ups in Pune. They are either starting up in Pune or are setting up engineering offices here very early on in their life cycle to tap onto the superlative engineering talent in the city.

What are you plans for 2014-15?

We plan to continue / increase our focus in Pune, hope to interact and partner with many more exceptional entrepreneurs in Pune in coming years.

What technologies do you see as most exciting for the next few years?

We expect that exciting startup opportunities will be unearthed at the intersection of different technology trends like mobility, cloud and big data, applied to all facets of life spanning but not limited to health and wellness, education, enterprise IT, retail, home automation, industrial automation, agriculture, etc. That said, rather than being thesis driven, we are fundementally bottoms up investors looking to partner with passionate entrepreneurs who create category defining companies.

What would your top-3 recommendations (advice) be for an entrepreneur?

  • Instill the sales DNA in yourself. No matter what your background might be, as an entrepreneur you would always need to sell : to your customers, to your prospective hires and employees, to your investors.
  • Always look to hire better than yourselves.
  • Less is more. It’s much more important to figure out what features your product should Not have than what features it should have. Start-up that thrives does One thing right and better than anyone else, that addresses one key pain-point felt by a big enough target set of users / customers.

According to you, what is the #1 mistake that most first-time tech startup founders make?

Point #3 above. Tech start up founders have the propensity to start building out the technology / product, without really understanding that key One thing that is needed in their target market, that they have a competitive advantage one. Achieving product – market fit is quite different than developing the technology. Key is focus and saying ‘no’ to features much more than saying ‘yes’.

NASSCOM Product Conclave Pune 5th March (Early Bird Discount up to 21 Feb)

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NASSCOM Product Conclave is a day long conference focusing on Indian Software Product companies happening on 5th March. However, those interested should keep in mind that the early bird discount on registration ends on 21st Feb (tomorrow).

Here’s a description of the event from NASSCOM’s website:

It’s a great time to be a Product Entrepreneur in India with the buzz in domestic markets, increased interest in Indian start-ups by overseas investors and withmany fold improvement in infrastructure, India has become an attractive ground to breed start-ups. NASSCOM 10k Project is aimed at helping 10,000 start-ups to germinate & grow in India

NASSCOM Product Conclave 2013 at Bangalore, in October last year was a great success and a true show of strength by the Indian software products industry. The event spread over three days saw high voltage, adrenalin pumping, action filled activities involving more than 1400 software development practitioners interacting, learning and sharing. NPC2013 had 180+ speakers, many of them stars/super achievers in their own field including Nandan Nilekani, Rahul Sood, Rajan Anandanwho shared their experiences with an eager audience. It was a carnival of fresh thinking, innovation and match-making. After the huge success of NPC2013 and on the demand of the industry, NASSCOM is pleased to announce NPC West at Pune, a full day of excitement, knowledge share, networking and setting up agenda for the future of Indian product industry. NPC Pune is planned on March 05, 2014 and will be attended by star speakers from the Product Industry, VCs,Practicing Entrepreneurs, Consultants.

The focus of NPC Pune is to set a stage for Indian start-ups and emerging companies to access knowledge & support available in the ecosystem on building their markets, create performing teams and secure funding. People’ s Choice Awards showcasing Top 10 Products in the NASSCOM Emerge category will also be announced during NPC Pune. You can take advantage of workshops on Digital Marketing, B2B Sales planning and Product Design. NPC Pune will see a turnout of around 400 delegates and aline up of software Product industry, VC industry& Entrepreneur Speakers. We will also bring you the softer touch with an interesting speaker from outside the industry.This NASSCOM Product Conclave is being held in Pune, a strategic hub of Indian Product Start-ups. We wish to encourage all companies located in the region to participate and take advantage of interacting with some of the super achievers in the Indian Products arena.

Check out the NPC 2014 website for details on the speakers, agenda, venue.

Fees and Registration

This is a paid event, and the early bird fees are Rs 1500 for members, 2000 for non-members, and the full fees are Rs. 2000 and 2500 respectively. A special startup fee of Rs. 1000 only applies to companies with annual revenues of less than 1 crore, and which have existed for less than 3 years pay only Rs. 1000.

Please register here: http://www.nasscom.in/npc-pune/registration

@PersistentSys acquires @CloudSquads – Pune/California based enterprise social media startup

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Pune’s Persistent Systems has just acquired CloudSquads, a Pune and San Francisco based startup that builds social apps for the enterprise market.

After cloud-computing and mobile, the new hottest trend in the industry is SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), and CloudSquads is smack in the middle of this trend. CloudSquads builds products that help companies like E*Trade, GE, Autodesk to use social media for customer support, sales, marketing. In addition they build apps that can be used for providing private social networking features within the enterprise.

From the press release:

CloudSquads helps companies develop a strategy for engaging with the modern social customer across all customer facing functions including brand, marketing, sales and support. The company implements platforms which provide rich capabilities that transform these interactions into healthy communities and then integrates those platforms with companies’ internal systems allowing them to better know and serve their customers.

and also:

“Social communities are the natural next step in the evolution and enhancement of external systems of engagement with customers, following the 1-800 number and corporate web presence,” said Ashish Seth, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “CloudSquads helps global brands unlock the power of social to realize dramatic increases in employee productivity, double digit improvements in marketing and sales effectiveness and dramatically lower support costs, said Henry Bruckstein, Co-Founder of CloudSquads, Inc. “Combining the global reach and broad technology capabilities of Persistent Systems will allow us to multiply the transformative impact in the market.”

Why is Persistent buying CloudSquads? According to Ranga Puranik, President of Persistent:

“CloudSquads complements our software product development and SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) technology expertise with consulting, IP connectors and implementation services around social community platforms and is perfectly aligned to better serve our ISV and enterprise customer base.”

Persistent had recently reported that it had created “Persistent Venture Fund”, a venture fund to invest in early stage startups, mainly in the SMAC domain. Persistent Venture Fund’s first investment was in US-based ustyme, a free video call app for the iPad.

According to Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent, the fund will only invest in startups that are strategically interesting to Persistent’s business.

“We consider two aspects for selection. First is the technology area of the start-up and its similarity to our interests, and second the customers that it needs to align with our customer eco-system,” he added.

Panel Discussion: Intelligence at the Edge with @DruvaInc @Helpshift @Uniken_Inc and @nexusvp

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Nexus Venture Partners is one of India’s top technology venture capital firms, and has invested in 4 of Pune’s top technology startups: Druva, Helpshift, Pubmatic and Uniken.

On 13th February, Nexus is hosting a panel discussion on the topic “Intelligence at the edge”. With the CTOs of Druva and Helpshift, and the CEO of Uniken as panelists, it promises to be a great event that every techie in Pune who’s interested in the future of technology must attend.

Detailed Program:
– 6 – 6:30pm: Introductions
– 6:30 – 7:30pm: Panel Discussion.
– Panel Moderator:
– Jishnu Bhattacharjee, MD, Nexus Venture Partners
– Panelists:
– Milind Borate, Co-founder & CTO, Druva
– Baishampayan Ghose, Co-founder & CTO, Helpshift
– Sanjay Deshpande, Chief Innovation Officer & CEO, Uniken
– 7:30 – 8pm: Q & A
– 8 – 9pm: Networking over dinner

Fees and Registration

The event is on 13th February, from 6pm to 9pm, at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA, ICC Trade Towers, SB Road. The event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16L17gU5zTGPFtfIxQWymz5tJWqcfzG3IsWvdeIag5DA/viewform

Please double-check the date/time/venue of the event at the above link. We try to ensure that PuneTech calendar listings are accurate, but occasional errors creep in.

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