The Turing100 Lecture Series come back with the 6th session. This time, there are two Technical talks, centered around the life and works of 1998 Turing Award recipient, Dr. Jim Gray.
Jim Gray made seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and implementions of real systems at Tandem, IBM, and Microsoft. Among his best known achievements are
granular database locking
two-tier transaction commit semantics
the “five-minute rule” for allocating storage
the data cube operator for data warehousing applications
describing the requirements for reliable transaction processing (memorably called the ACID test) and implemented them in software.
On Saturday, 5th January, Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, will talk about the life and work of Dr. Jim Gray, the recipient of the 1998 Turing Award. This talk is a part of the Turing Awards monthly lecture series that happens at Persistent’s Dewang Mehta Auditorium.
This will be followed by a session on “Software Faults, Failures and Their Mitigation – contributions of Dr. Jim Gray to the area of Fault Tolerant Systems” by Prof. Kishore Trivedi, Duke University, USa.
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 year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.
The lecture series 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. Full 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.
Fees and Registration
This is a free event. Anyone can attend.
The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 5th January. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here
In 1992, Butler Lampson received the Turing award in for his contributions to the development of distributed, personal computing environments and the technology for their implementation: workstations, networks, operating systems, programming systems, displays, security and document publishing.
On Saturday, 24th November, Neeran Karnik, Senior Architect at BMC Software, will give a talk about Butler Lampson’s work. This talk is a part of the Turing Awards monthly lecture series that happens at Persistent’s Dewang Mehta Auditorium.
This will be followed by a session on [“Experience Sharing – Systems design and development Projects in India”]. The speakers include Dr. Basant Rajan, CEO of Coriolis Software (previously CTO of Symantec India), and Abhay Ghaisas, Product Development Architect BMC Software.
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 year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.
The lecture series 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. Full 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.
Fees and Registration
This is a free event. Anyone can attend.
The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 24th November. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here
Pune company Helpshift (previously known as Infinitely Beta), which is focusing on helping mobile app developers do better customer service, has received $3.25 million in funding from True Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.
Last year, Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose founded Helpshift to address what they perceived to be a significantly underserved market in customer service: Mobile. After months of testing their mobile solution, the startup is getting ready to pull the curtains back on its business.
Basically the product is:
[a] mobile-focused, SaaS solution, which aims to be “the first embedded support desk for native apps,” allowing developers to capture device info from their users so that they can troubleshoot problems quicker and more effectively.
and:
To do so, Helpshift provides a native SDK that integrates with mobile apps to offer an “in app” customer experience that remains true to the look and feel of the app, rather than shoehorning its own design into each different mobile UX. Helpshift’s support screens can be customized to match the app’s visual style and is designed, the co-founder and CEO says, to be instantly searchable and available in offline mode, i.e. when a device isn’t connected to the network.
PuneTech readers would be familiar with Abinash Tripathy and Baishampayan Ghose the co-founders of Helpshift. A few years ago, Abinash started the company, then known as Infinitely Beta, whose first product was the website paisa.com. However, they shut down paisa.com to focus on “qotd.co” last year. Qotd.co has morphed into Helpshift.
After the huge success of PuneConnect 2011, we are back again with PuneConnect 2012, a mega event for Pune startups to showcase their products and services to the world at large, and specifically to larger companies in Pune. PuneConnect 2012 will be on 1st December 2012, and the idea behind the event is to allow the best startups in Pune a platform where they can find customers, mentors, business partners, affiliates amongst Pune’s established companies, and successful senior entrepreneurs.
PuneConnect is a joint initiative of Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP), TiE Pune, PuneStartups.org (POCC), PuneTech, and NASSCOM. SEAP and NASSCOM have large communities of established companies, and PuneStartups.org, TiE Pune and PuneTech represent thriving communities of Pune’s young startups. PuneConnect represents a one-of-its-kind activity that bridges the gap between the new companies and the established ones.
Any startup company from Pune or nearby areas, who has a product that they would like to demo, should submit a proposal by following the instructions at http://PuneConnect.com. A panel of selectors drawn from experts in the industry will select the most promising startups who will be allowed to set up a stall at PuneConnect on 1st December.
Benefits to selected startups include:
Exposure to Pune’s top companies, potential customers and potential mentors
Exposure to Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors who are being
invited to the event
Press and media coverage before and after the event
Winners of the event get automatic entries to other country-level events (e.g. those organized by NASSCOM)
PuneConnect 2011 showcased 12 Pune startups. All the companies got a lot of exposure to potential customers, angel investors, VCs and media.
Media Coverage: The Financial Express, the Financial Chronicle, Business Standard, and the top Marathi newspapers Sakal and Maharashtra Times all carried detailed articles about PuneConnect and the companies. All 12 companies got mentions in various articles. One company, World Without Me, got a half-page article in Pune Mirror as a direct result of being featured in PuneConnect 2011.
Entries to other prestigious events: 4 of the selected companies (InnovizeTech, ReliScore, DroidCloud, and AdMogul) were selected to be featured on an episode ETNow TV Channel’s Starting Up show. 4 of the companies (kPoint, Vaultize, InnovizeTech and DroidCloud) were selected for participation in a national-level conference organized by Zinnov, where they got to demo their products to companies from all over India. Two of the companies (BizPorto, and InTouchId) went on to be a part of the TiE Pune Nurture Initiative where they got in-depth mentoring in becoming ready for funding.
Funding: DroidCloud (now known as AppSurfer) got an invitation to the SuperAngels show on the ETNow Channel as a direct result of being in PuneConnect 2011, and a chance to win Rs. 1 crore in funding on the show. AppSurfer actually went on to win the show and secure the funding.
Delhi Safari, a 3D Animation movie made by Pune startup Krayon Pictures, is seeing a worldwide release tomorrow (19th October). Attached to the move, are some big names from Bollywood (Director Nikhil Advani, voices by Govinda, Sunil Shetty, Boman Irani, Akshaye Khanna, Urmila Matondkar, music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy) and Hollywood (Vanessa Williams, Christopher Lloyd, Jason Alexander, Cary Elwes), and one look at its preview will convince anyone that it is a quality product. Considering that it was conceived and fully executed by a company in Pune, PuneTech decided to have a chat with Anand Bhanushali, the Technical Director of Krayon Pictures, to talk about the technology that went into making Delhi Safari. The following article is based on our conversation with Anand.
About Krayon Pictures
Krayon Pictures was founded in 2007 by Kishor Patil, co-founder and CEO of KPIT Cummins, Nishith Takia, a Masters in CS from University of Maryland, USA, and Namrata Sharma, who had 14 years of experience in Animation and Software in Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Mumbai. Unlike other animation studios in India who were simply outsourcing animation work from studios abroad, Krayon Pictures was started with the intention of producing their own movies – i.e. creating their own IP. They got an idea for a movie, roped in Nikhil Advani, and Delhi Safari was born.
Anand is the Technical Director at Krayon. He has been with Krayon since day 1 of Delhi Safari. Before joining Krayon, he had worked national and international animation projects, including character effects in feature films like Hoodwinked, Fight Club Gaming Cinematic and Tinker Bell.
He was also responsible for implementing Krayon’s proprietary pipeline and asset management tool for workflow automation and enhanced artist efficiency.
About the Infrastructure Used by Krayon
Krayon has a data-center at their office in the center of Pune, behind Le Meridien Hotel. The movies are rendered using their render farm which is a densely packed cluster of 100 nodes, each of which has two Intel Xeon quad-core processors with 8GB or RAM, running the Red Hat Linux operating system.
The Storage is based on SOFS – scale out file system – a high availability file system with a total capacity of 48 TB, operating at Raid Level 5 and having a HDD Interface that’s a combination of SAS and SATA with a bandwidth throughput of 500 MBPS.
The network is two-tier architecture made up of Cisco 6509E switch with Dual Sup720 3C 10G as a Core Switch with 8 10G ports, 96 Fabric enabled 1GigE Copper ports and 48 1Gige normal ports and Cisco 3750-E 48 port switch connected to Core Switch by 4 GigE copper uplink.
Challenges Faced while settings up the Infrastructure
Krayon was initially based in Kothrud (in KPIT offices), but soon moved to Hinjewadi once they realized the scale of the infrastructure that would have to be set up. Unfortunately, Hinjewadi did not work out as a location for them. The basic infrastructure (e.g. electricity) was not entirely ready when they moved in, and in spite of having mammoth UPS backups, they kept running into huge problems with electricity fluctuations that the UPS was unable to handle. This led to blowouts, server shutdowns, and artists having to sit idle while the electricity problems were fixed. Finally, they moved to their current location near Pune Station.
Softwares and hardware are definitely important and form the core of the studio pipeline. You have to be extremely careful and have all the statistics, data , research ready before you choose any software and hardware as its going to be with you for quite sometime. If you do a mistake, then its a very expensive mistake, and can take the studio and the project down. Stability, flexibility and support form the basis of choosing softwares and hardware for a studio. We knew with the kind of quality, we are aiming with Delhi Safari, we would need robust hardware, definitely a huge Renderfarm of our own. Mr Parag Patil – our technology director , all the credit goes to him as he is the brains behind all the hardware in Krayon. Parag and me along with the IT and R&D team worked non stop for 4 months, sketching, workflow diagrams, network diagrams, configuration of workstations, to servers.. Everything.. We partnered with IBM and took their expertise and they did the set up of the entire backend infrastructure of our studio.
About the team at Krayon Pictures
They have a team of about 120 people, most of whom are artists. The artists are divided up into various departments, including about 40 people working on the animation, another 30 on asset creation (i.e. creating the building blocks and characters that will be used by the other departments), 10 on lighting, and 10 on compositing.
Most of the work is done using Autodesk’s Maya Software, and the scripting is done using Maya’s MEL, or Python.
We started Delhi Safari with 8 artist including me and a small management team. So we had to build the entire studio, lay down the pipeline and parallely start pre-production, recruit a team, and train them. It was the most challenging task i had ever done, my approach was simple, i was very clear right from the start that the way pre production, characters, backgrounds were being designed with lot of detail and vast extensive sets, there had to be a pipeline which artist could very quickly adapt to and not worry about file management.
So we formed a small research and development team , basically MEL and Python programmers and we started brain storming, bouncing ideas, discussion about what was the most disliked part in our jobs earlier, and since we all came from various departments like fur, animation, lighting etc., atlas most of us knew what we didn’t want in the workflow. We spent almost a year making a simple workflow for every department. Basically ‘clean in and clean out’ , it means whatever comes in the department needs to be a clean file and whatever goes out needs to be a clean file, so every department needs to optimize file and remove unwanted data.
Challenges Faced with Building a World-Class Animation Team in Pune
India is not known for producing high quality animation movies, but from the beginning the Krayon Pictures team was sure that they wanted to build something that was not just “good enough for Indian audiences”, but was truly world class. In doing this, they faced an uphill battle, because it was not easy to get people who have experience of working on that kind of projects.
In addition, things were difficult because Pune did not have too many experienced animation artists. Except for BIG Animation, there are no other big animation production houses in Pune, which meant that hiring was a challenge. Thus, they had to go all over the country, including Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, to find good animators.
One thing they never compromised on, was the quality of the people they hired. Thus, their hiring took longer than expected, but they decided that delays were preferable, but having the right kind of team was more important. They focused on trying to find people who were truly passionate about animation – because the other things can be taught via in-house training programs, but passion cannot.
Advice for Pune based entrepreneurs
Delhi Safari has proved that truly world-class intellectual property can be built out of Pune. However, the whole process was not easy. In addition to all the problems they had to solve in getting the movie made, there were a further set of issues to be faced after the movie was complete. Initially the movie was made in 2D, and then ran into some issues with the international distributors. At this late stage it was decided that the movie needed to be in stereoscopic 3D, so a lot of work had to be done to re-do the movie in 3D.
As a result of this experience, Anand has this important piece of advice for entrepreneurs: Do not start work on developing your IP, before you have sold the product. What he means is that you should validate the market, figure out your distribution channels, and only then develop your product. This is advice for any product entrepreneur, not just movies and animation. It’s interesting to note that this is exactly the same advice that serial entrepreneur Anand Soman gave Pune’s technology entrepreneurs 3 years ago. See “Don’t develop any software until you have a customer” for more details.
Specifically for those interested in building their own animation IP, Anand suggests that they should not start with a movie – that is difficult. Start with smaller things and slowly work you way up to a movie.
Delhi Safari is releasing in movie theatres tomorrow and we wish them the best.
Robin Milner received the Turing award in 1991 for three major contributions to computer science:
In the area of automated theorem proving – He developed LCF, the first theoretically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction
In the area of programming language design – He developed ML, the first language to use polymorphic type inference along with a type-safe execution handling mechanism, something that underlies some of the most interesting new programming languages that are being developed today, and
In the area of concurrency – He developed CCS, a general theory of concurrency.
On 6th October, Navin Kabra (yes, that’s me), will give a talk about Robin Milner’s work. This talk is a part of the Turing Awards lecture series that happens at Persistent’s Dewang Mehta Auditorium at 2pm on the first Saturday of every month this year.
This will be followed by a panel discussion on “Should every programmer learn functional programming”. The panelists include Dhananjay Nene, Chief Architect at Vayana Software, Prof. Raju Pandey, of University of California-Davis, Rustom Modi, who has been teaching functional programming at the University of Pune for over 15 years, and who is a founder if i-Magus which delivers training in functional programming and other related technologies, and Kedar Swadi, CTO at AlgoAnalytics, and others. For more details of the panel discussion see this article
The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here
Abstract of the Talk
In this talk, I will give a brief overview of Robin Milner’s career, following by a technical dive into his work. I will briefly cover his work on automated theorem proving and LCF, which served as the motivation for the development of ML, the programming language intended to be used for automated theorem proving. ML ended up having a huge impact on the design of modern programming languages and its influence can be seen in important modern languages like Microsoft’s F#, Haskell, and the JVM based Scala. The bulk of my talk will cover the design of ML, with a specific focus on the polymorphic type inference system used in ML. Type inference is an important aspect of a lot of modern programming languages, and can be found, for example, in Google’s Go Language, Perl6, Visual Basic 9.0 onwards, C# version 3.0 onwards.
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 year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.
The lecture series 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. Full 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.
Fees and Registration
This is a free event. Anyone can attend.
The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 6th October. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here
(NASSCOM’s EmergeOut Conclave is one of the top conferences in the country for software companies, and for the first time this year it is coming to Pune. Although PuneTech normally does not promote paid events, we make exceptions for exceptional events, and this is one of them, and also because there is a 35% discount for PuneTech readers. See below for details.)
What to expect at the EmergeOut Conference
Keynote address by Industry stalwarts and new age successful entrepreneurs – including the IT Secretary of Maharashtra, Ganesh Natarajan CEO of Zensar, Hitesh Oberoi, CEO of Naukri.com, Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva.com, and Mahesh Murthy, co-founder of SeedFund
Series of workshops and high powered panel discussions – including how to cross 50cr in revenues (Anand Deshpande), Whitespaces in Cloud Technologies, Mobile Technologies, How can a small company make it big (Mukul Kumar, Pubmatic, Harbinger), Big Data and Analytics, Marketing, Sales, Social Media,
Showcase – Your Story: a showcase of the top IT startups in India
The Indian IT Industry has been the poster boy success story of the new age India in the last two decades and continues to do so. The Emerge Community is one of the important pillars and back bone of any industry and more so in case of the IT Industry. These companies are more agile, hungry for success and ever ready to face challenges, of course all this comes with a handicap of size, financial constraint and competition, which makes the space more exciting for an entrepreneur.
The power of small is in being together. This one day conference will facilitate one on one interaction, share best practices, help you explore new opportunities and learn from others failures and success. The sessions and topics of the day are custom made for you to learn, benefit and contribute. More and more Indian companies are aspiring to join the Billion dollar club and are well on track on getting there. “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” and exploring beyond, forms the core theme of Emerge Out Pune.
Emerge Out Pune is all about participation of companies from the product, mobility, services space and beyond and offers a unique opportunity for organisations to collaborate and partner with the key stake holders. We have tried our best to package the day in a way that there is something and more for everyone to take away, as we know for an Emerge company, it is always “Yeh Dil Mange More”
(BMC Software Pune has created a by-the-techies, for-the-techies group, called The Ninja Club, to give the technical individual contributors in the company a place to learn, hang out, and get recognition for their work. This article about the Ninja Club is by guest author Neeran Karnik, an Architect at BMC.)
The problem is well known in the IT industry in India – why are smart techies tempted to switch to the management ladder, a few years into their careers? The industry loses technical talent, and quite possibly, gets saddled with mediocre management talent in the bargain! Techies who stay on the technical track complain about a lack of control, a lack of visibility, and a lack of rewards. Society also seems to treat “managers” as an exalted breed, and someone who remains an individual contributor is seen as having stagnated in his or her career.
The Ninja Club at BMC is a techies-only club, created to provide cross-team visibility for techies, encouraging collaboration, peer reviews of design and code, and in general, letting the smartest techies interact with each other more easily.
Organizations are taking different approaches to tackle this problem – including creating explicit technical ladders, giving more high-profile recognition for technical accomplishments, even awarding junkets for creating IP. At BMC Software, we have taken a somewhat different approach – a grassroots effort in the technical community that is backed by, but not actively promoted by management. It’s loosely patterned after the martial arts, and is called the Ninja Club.
The Ninja Club is a forum created by techies, for techies. Its membership is self-selected (by invitation), purely on the basis of demonstrated accomplishments on the technical front. As such, membership itself is a badge of honour. In addition however, like in a martial arts discipline, members qualify for different coloured belts – starting with white, and earning their way to black. These belts are completely independent of the usual grades or bands in the HR system, and unrelated to promotions and performance evaluations. A points system has been put in place – a Ninja earns points for activities such as technical talks, participating in coding contests and ideation sessions, filing invention disclosures, publishing conference papers / whitepapers, etc. Points make you eligible for ‘promotion’ to the next coloured belt: white –> yellow –> green –> red –> black. But promotion is not necessarily automatic – in addition to points, the Ninja may have to get past, for example, an online programming test or an interview by other Ninjas at the higher belt level.
Like martial artists, the idea is that Ninjas get together regularly to practice their skills – coding, design, etc. – and to learn from each other. To that end, the Ninja Club organizes various activities such as coding contests, design review sessions, etc. for club members. We are also starting Special Interest Groups (SIGs) focused around technology areas like Big Data, Cloud Computing, SaaS, etc. Discussions can also be around the business domain (IT management and data centers, in BMC’s case) and customer use-cases, not necessarily on technology. Smaller groups of Ninjas can get together in SIGs to discuss, brainstorm, and do small side projects on such topics of their interest.
Such activities enable techies to network across their product teams, find role models and/or mentors, benefit from peer review of their ideas, and expand their sphere of influence. However, the club also organizes wider events that are open to everyone at BMC, not just its members. Over the past year, Ninja Club has organized the following different types of events:
Ninjutsu: Quizzes focused on technology and programming – with questions ranging from tech trivia to ‘spot the bug in a snippet of code’
Kaigi: Technical talks on hot topics like Hadoop, Android development…
Tougi: Debates, where teams argue for or against a given proposition, such as the effects of Consumerization of IT, “BYOD”, or Desktop Virtualization
Online contests like treasure hunts, crosswords, etc.
A screenshot of one of the pages in the Ninja Club, powered by eMee.
One key element of Ninja Club is its online presence, in the form of a gamified social network called eMee. This was developed at Persistent Systems, and heavily customized by them for BMC. Ninjas get their own profiles and avatars on eMee, using which they can showcase their technical skills, certifications and accomplishments. Points earned for various activities can be exchanged for ‘gifts’ that are used for decorating your house. Promotion to a higher belt results in your moving to a fancier house! Like in the martial arts, a Ninja can have ‘followers’. You can follow your role models or mentors, to keep track of their activities and status updates. Common news items are published to the “Ninja Times”, and visible to all. Non-Ninjas also get their own limited profiles, and the ability to follow Ninjas. A search mechanism allows anyone to find people with specific skills. This melding of the real and virtual worlds in eMee levels the playing field for smart programmers who may not be very social in the real world!
The hope is that this Ninja Club initiative will improve the technical vitality of the organization, and make technical careers more desirable and rewarding. By providing cross-team visibility, encouraging collaboration, and peer reviews of design and code, product functionality and quality should also improve over time. Success will eventually be measured in terms of the quality and growth of the technical populace at BMC Software, and being seen as the techies’ employer of choice in the region!
About the Author – Neeran Karnik
Neeran Karnik is an architect at BMC for their Bladelogic Server Automation product. Before that Neeran has worked at IBM India on the datacenter automation and cloud computing products in the Tivoli group, and as a Technical Director and Research at Symantec, and a Research Staff Member at IBM India Research Lab. Neeran has a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from University of Minnesota, USA.
Neeran is also one of the co-founders of Cricinfo.
Do you have a cool app that is making life of a customer easier, helping them save time and be more productive? Do you have an app which is enabling people to connect them to their family and friends – easily, and in a fun way to help them come closer? Is it desirable, usable and consumable? If yes, then here is the place for you.
NASSCOM would like to provide visibility to your application at the NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Forum. The conference will showcase the Top 8 mobile applications that are part of the ecosystem as game changers and provide recognition to them.
Last date for submission is 25th September, 2012. The finalists will be announced by 5th October 2012, after which the shortlisted contestants will have to showcase the same on the 12th of October during the Emergeout Conclave, Pune. For any queries, write to Darryl@nasscom.in.
Criterion for selection:
The eligible entries which match up to the criteria will be judged by our jury members, constituting of industry experts. An overview of the criteria is appended below:
Accessibility and Availability: What mobile platforms the
application can successfully run?
Usability/Creativity: The application demonstrates superior user
experience (UI, graphics, etc.) e.g. by leveraging the latest technologies.
Uniqueness/Novelty Value: Display creativity in applications, use
established technology in a unique and innovative way, leverage the latest
technologies, etc.
Market Potential: Size of target market for which the app is
relevant and accessible. Potential to monetize.
Traction: Current downloads, revenue generated, partnerships for
distribution etc.
Submission Requirement & Eligibility:
This Contest is open only to start-ups & EMERGE companies headquartered in India only. Register here
The call for speakers for the IndicThreads’ software technology conference is open. The conference is in December, but the CFP closes this week (22 September), and you should submit a proposal
IndicThreads have been holding tech conferences in Pune for the last 7 years, and their conferences are the top pure technology conferences in Pune. An IndicThreads conference is one of the best places to hear about the latest trends in the software industry, and to meet techies from large and small companies of not only Pune, but the rest of the country too.
The conference itself is paid, but becoming a speaker is a good way to get into the conference for free.
This time around, the conference will cover a wide range of technologies from Java, Cloud Computing, Mobile App Development to emerging technologies like Big Data, Gamification, HTML5. (Traditionally, IndicThreads used to have a Java conference – but this year, they are broadening the theme.)
The CFP calls for submissions in these areas:
Software Architecture
Cloud Computing: IaaS, SaaS, PaaS
Design methodology
Mobile Software Platforms
Mobile Software Development
Software Testing
Optimization, Scaling, Caching and Performance Tuning
Java Language Specs & Standards
Enterprise Java (JavaEE)
JVM Languages
Software Security
Development Frameworks
Big Data
NoSQL Software Development
Agile
HTML5
New and emerging technologies
Case Studies and Real World Experiences
But feel free to submit other topics in software technology too. The audience consists mostly of software architects and project leads from various product and services companies across India. If you have done any interesting work in one of the areas above, you should submit a proposal. For now, all you need to do is submit a one paragraph abstract of what you’d like to talk about.
Why?
Because you get a free pass to the conference
Get recognized amongst the community as an expert in an area
It strengthens the tech community in Pune, which benefits all of us.
