Category Archives: News

Pune Municipal Corporation gets CIO, new website, wiki

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PMC has gone hi-tech. Yesterday, they unveiled a new, improved website that is expected to be more userfriendly. They can now apply for birth and death certificates online and pay municipal taxes online. PMC is the first corporation to have a payment gateway (through ICICI bank and HDFC bank) according to CIO Anupam Saraph.

Yes, Pune has a CIO – Chief Information Officer. The PMC collaborated with SEAP, the Software Exporters Association of Pune, to appoint Anupam, who will guide the direction of all hi-tech goodness that is to happen in PMC soon. Pune is also the first municipal corporation to have a CIO.

“The website has been a voluntary effort by the software companies in Pune such as Persistent software, Eclipse software who provided manpower purely on a voluntary basis,” said Saraph.

The other important feature in the website is the inclusion of Wiki software that allows creation of an employee zone for internal management of the corporation.

Through Wiki, employees would now be able to create, edit, link, and organize the content of the projects they are involved in.

To ensure better navigation, the PMC website will change every month. “In the next version Wiki software will allow the citizens to talk about development plans of the city. Later versions intend to include the software for citizens to help the corporation with their strategic infrastructure expertise, so as to develop a standard in the city,” said Saraph.

“Till now we have trained 180-odd employees and expect to train 50 employees a month to ensure more usage of the software,” he said.

The website in it present form has been visited by more than half a million people.

Source: ZDNet India

News in Brief: Harbinger makes insect games, Zensar gets new business, Aryabhatta award for Dr. Kale

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Harbinger to design and develop games to teach children about insects

Pune-based Harbinger Knowledge Products has partnered with a US non-profit organization, the Entomological Foundation, to design an develop games based online learning software products targeted towards 3rd and 4th grade children in the US. The games will teach the children about “the exciting world of insects and their role in our environment.”

Harbinger are also the creators of Flockpod, a web-service that allows web publishers to create a space on their webpage where users can interact with each other right on-the-spot, without leaving the page, and of Raptivity an library of pre-built flash interactive videos that can be used for e-Learning.

Source: press release

Zensar wins $5 million in new contracts

Zensar Technologies, software services and BPO provider, has won over $5 million new deals in West Asia and South Africa in the first three months of 2008 and is now targeting over ten per cent of its total revenues from this market segment.

Sify business

Aryabhatta Award for Pune’s Dr. Kale

The Astronautical Society of India (ASI), Bangalore, has on Wednesday announced its annual awards for the year 2006 in which Dr. Pramod Kale, Director, Integrated Circuit and Information Technology Pvt. Ltd., Pune, has been chosen for the prestigious Aryabhata Award.

The Aryabhatta award was instituted to recognise talented Indian individuals who have made significant contributions to astronautics. The press release doesn’t actually list Dr. Kale’s contributions which won him this award.

Source: Newstrack India

Pubmatic and Komli to power all eBay.in ads

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eBay India), today announced an exclusive advertising relationship with Indian ad network Komli Media. Komli is now the exclusive seller of all of eBay India’s banner advertising inventory up to end March 2009.

In addition, eBay India will also use Komli’s Pubmatic ad optimization service to improve ad revenues. Pubmatic can estimate the revenues that a website can earn from any particular ad, and thus improve revenues by comparing ads from different ad networks (e.g. Google Adsense, Yaho! Publisher Network, or even Komli itself) and then only showing those ads that are likely to generate the most revenue. This service (which is available free of cost to any web publisher) will now get used on eBay India’s pages.

The Pubmatic service is developed in Komli’s engineering center in Pune.

News in Brief: VMWare, QLogic to invest; Symantec interviews own employees; Aar-em lights up villages

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VMWare to invest $100 Million in India

VMware Inc. announced today that it plans to invest more than $100 million in India by 2010, partly to double its research and development workforce in that country to more than 1,000 employees. VMWare currently has R&D centers in Bangalore and Pune. While a lion’s share of the new investment will go to Bangalore, some of it will also be used to expand VMWare’s Pune facility.

Source: VMWare Press Release

QLogic announces Development Lab in Pune

QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), a leader in networking for storage and high performance computing (HPC), today announced the opening of the QLogic International Development Lab (QIDL) in the heart of Pune, India. QLogic is hiring engineers now for the QIDL, located in the ICC Trade Towers off Senapati Bapat Road. According to their press release the QIDL development team is expected to help “design the future” of networking for storage and HPC. For details, contact hr-india@qlogic.com.

Source: TechNewsRelease.

Symantec Pune conducts interviews of own employees

It is common practice to conduct exit interviews of employees leaving a company to find out why they are leaving and thus identifying weaknesses of an organization. Symantec, Pune is turning the concept on its head by conducting interviews of employees who have been with the company for a long time, and focusing on the strengths of the organization that made them stay back.

After selecting leaders from this group of Symantec loyalists, their example and achievements were put before the others on the company intranet. “This benefited us. Now these leaders have not only got recognition for their extra-efficiency, it has also encouraged others to see whether they can be incorporated in this list of leaders,” says Abhay Valsangkar, Symantec India’s head of HR.

Source: Sify Business.

Aar-em Electronics Pvt. Ltd. a Pune based firm known for its Champion brand of Uninterruptible Power Supplies now has entered the field of providing Uninterruptible light source for villages after sunset by providing them lights and other utilities powered by solar energy.

“MOHRI” a village situated at 100 kms from Pune City Maharashtra, India having 27 houses and a population of 160 of which 75 are children today boasts of having electricity which has been provided by Aar-em Electronics Pvt. Ltd. Where once life practically came to a standstill at sundown are now abuzz with activities. The solar-based devices have illuminated the villagers’ houses like never before- kerosene lamps are a thing of the past now. Even, infotainment is beamed to them through solar-powered television sets.

Aar-em is offering a system which typically contains a roof-installed solar PV module, storage battery, charge controller, interior wiring, and switches and fixtures with the capacity to power two- low-wattage high power LED modules.

Source: Business Wire India

Yahoo and CRL (EKA) to collaborate on cloud computing research

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(Link courtesy Amit Paranjape via e-mail)

Yahoo and CRL have just announced that they will collaborate on research into cloud computing. I believe this announcement is essentially about Yahoo’s use of Hadoop on CRL’s EKA supercomputer.

This Yahoo!/CRL announcement comes on the eve of the first ever Hadoop Summit. Apache Hadoop is a Free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers. It enables applications to easily scale out to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. In Feb 2008, Yahoo announced that its Search Webmap application has been converted to a Hadoop application that runs on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and produces data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query.

CRL’s EKA supercomputer is a Hewlett-Packard based system with 14,400 processors, 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops), and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops for the LINPACK benchmark. Of the top ten supercomputers in the world, EKA is the only supercomputer funded by the private sector that is available for use on commercial terms.

This announcement should also increase the interest in attending the presentation on EKA to be held here (i.e. in Pune) in a few days (Thursday, 27th March). The talk promises to be very interesting, especially given the background of speakers Dr. Lagu and Dr. Sherlekar (who used to be profs in IIT-B amongst other things). Details.

Badmash.tv: Pune-based animation studio

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Badmash.tv is a Pune-based animation studio that has just launched with the intention of developing animated content (think flash-based movies like The Singhsons, a parody of The Simpsons), that will be distributed through websites they create, and also mobiles, iPhones etc.

Their first project is Dishoom 2008, about Amitabh Bachchan’s historic bid to become the first Prime Minister of the United States. (Yes, “Prime Minister”. Less competition that way.) This candidate stands for change, as seen from his blog post:

Like today, during my visit to the holy city of Toledo, I met a woman named Bertha.

She used to be a steel worker. Just a few hours ago, she stood in front of me with sorrow in her eyes and begged for change. I said, “Lady, that’s exactly why I am here. Change!”

She extended her Dunkin’ Donuts cup. I tried to refuse, but she kept shaking it. Finally, I reached into the cup and accepted her $2.10 contribution.

Badmash used to be a comic strip with an Amitabh fixation out of Berkeley a few years ago that was quite successful with over 200,000 visitors per week. Turns out that the same guys, Sandeep Sood and Nimesh Patel, are behind Badmash.tv. VC Keyur Patel who likes giving birth to new companies got the idea of converting some of their strip ideas into animated TV shows and shorts aimed for mobile phones. Thus was born Badmash.tv. And another 5 such animation properties are on the way, including some joint ventures with US studios.

Related news: Design and animation institute planned in Pune – JV with CCIV France.

NIT & MIT beat VIT and IIT in Robocon India

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Sorry, couldn’t resist that headline.

Robocon, India was conducted in MIT, Pune this weekend and Nirma Institute of Technology, Ahmedabad won the event with a team consisting of a “combination of students from mechanical, computers, electrical and other engineering streams”. MIT, Pune were the runners up. IIT Delhi and Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, Pune were the semi-finalists. It is pretty impressive that Pune had two teams in the top 4, considering that 38 teams from all over the country, including 5 IITs (K,B,M,D,G) had participated. The two finalists (NIT & MIT) will represent India in the International Robocon which is also being hosted by MIT, Pune this year from 29th August to 2nd September.

Since we are the hosts, the theme is also ours. The robots have to participate in a Dahi-Handi competition. Specifically:

Two (2) opposing teams a Red team and a Blue team will operate Manual machines and Autonomous machines and attempt to get at the pots of butter placed at a height and remove the large cube of Butter (Makhkhan) from the bowls.

A few of the machines would also attempt to “Steal” the Earthen Pots (Matkas) containing balls of Cheese (Paneer) being carried by the Young Girls (Gopis).

Points are earned when the Butter is removed from the Bowls placed at a height.

Points could also be earned when a Pot and/or Cheese is transferred to a Basket.

The team which picks up all the three butter cubes directly from the bowls and holds them in the air will be declared “GOVINDA” (the winner) and the game will be over.

If no team becomes “GOVINDA”, the team which accumulates more number of points within the specified time of three (3) minutes will be declared as the winner.

Samples of the Paneer, Makhkhan, and the Matkas have been sent to the participants in various countries. As far as I know, samples of Gopis have not been sent.

India has never won the International Robocon (actually International really means Asia and Oceania, and typically gets about 20 entries (which are in turn selected using local competitions in each country similar to Robocon India)). China won last year, and Vietnam has won it thrice in the 6 years that the competition has existed. Looks like winning will be tough this year too. For example, we selected our entries out of 38 teams, whereas Thailand selects out of 200 teams and Vietnam selects out of 300.

I first found the news here, and in ToI. Then did a bunch of digging on my own.