Category Archives: punetech

PuneTech T-shirt giveaway to celebrate 3000 LinkedIn members

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The PuneTech Group on LinkedIn has 2950 members right now, and will hit the nice round figure of 3000 sometime soon. It is already one of the largest Pune-related groups on LinkedIn (we think it is the 2nd largest).

Joining this group is a good way to let the world know that you’re a technology professional in Pune (or you have some strong connection to Pune). It is also a place where you can look for connections, or people can find you.

Also, the group there has forums, discussions, job postings – different from what you find in the PuneTech website and email subscription. So it would be a good idea to join.

To generally celebrate this milestone, and to encourage more people to join, we are giving away an “I am a Pune Technologist” T-shirt to a couple of randomly selected people out of the people who join the PuneTech LinkedIn group between now, and the time that it hits 3050 members. And to ensure that existing members don’t feel cheated, we’ll also pick a couple of existing members randomly.

So please join. And invite your friends too. The faster we reach 3050, the faster you get your T-shirts.

We are Number #1! (For “Pune Technology” search on Google)

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From almost the day we started PuneTech, one of our desires has been to build a site that is the top search result on Google for the search Pune Technology. Today, we are proud to report that, as far as we can tell, PuneTech has the top 2 results for this search.

For the last 10 years, the top ranked search result for “Pune Technology” has been a terrible, out-dated, incomplete, and pointless list of ‘IT Companies in Pune’ from PuneDiary.com. We’ve always hated the fact that the world saw that obsolete page instead of something more current, and a couple of months back, when we (reported that PuneTech now has a pagerank of 5](http://punetech.com/minor-celebration-time-punetech-com-now-has-a-google-page-rank-of-5/), we shamelessly let it be known that we wanted to dislodge PuneDiary from the number 1 slot.

We’re very happy that it has finally happened.

Drop in pagerank and PuneTech Wiki discontinued

Sadly, we have to report that our pagerank has once again dropped from 5 to 4. After some investigation, we believe that this drop is because of spam and vandalism happening on the PuneTech Wiki. Also, the PuneTech Wiki has not really lived up to our expectations, and hence, starting today, we have disabled the PuneTech wiki. Some of the pages in the Wiki have been migrated, but the rest is just gone. It wasn’t worth keeping around.

More details: The PuneTech Wiki was a section of the PuneTech website that was modeled after the wikipedia (and in fact used the same software (Mediawiki)). The idea was the the community would collaborate to create interesting and useful content. However after trying that for 3 years, we have given it up as a failed experiment. Most of the content on the wikipedia was added by us, and very little content came from others. The amount of work needed to keep the wiki free from spammers and vandals outweighed the benefits of having the wiki. That is the reason why we have turned off the wiki.

The PuneTech Directory

In its place we hope to create a PuneTech Directory. It already has a listing of the most important tech user groups, organizations and mailing lists in Pune, a way to find the most interesting techies in Pune, and a list of the top-ranked websites in Pune.

Other content, specially lists of companies (organized by industry/speciality) will be added soon. We will do it ourselves, manually, as and when we find time.

How to do SEO the hard way

It has taken us too long to reach number #1. The reason is that there are a lot of things that we should have done, but did not do.

We did not do SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We did not do link-building. We did not spend too much time thinking about crafting headlines and first paragraphs with search traffic in mind. We did not add lots of content on a regular basis to ensure a high flow of traffic. We did not keep an eye on what is ‘hot’ on any given week/month and then try to write stories around those concepts (keywords). (On a separate note: we also are aware that the design of the site is terrible and both the looks as well as the usability need lots of work.)

We do realize that all the above things are important – and that anybody building a website for commercial reasons must focus on the above issues, and much more. Specifically, we are NOT implying that these activities are somehow distasteful and that good people should not do them. In fact, we hope more good people focus on these things, and less of the bad people.

But, PuneTech is different. PuneTech is a non-commercial activity that we do in our free time because we like doing it. Because we are having fun doing it. And the SEO/design related activities are not our idea of fun. That is the only reason we have not spent too much time on them.

So how did we reach #1? The slow, painful, old-fashioned way. Content. Unique content. Good quality content. Articles that are interesting for people. Information that we think people should be reading. We are glad to report that “Content is King” is still true.

Thank You

There have been lots of people, too numerous to list, who have helped PuneTech in various ways, and had a big hand in making it what it is today. Special mention must go to the Pune Open Coffee Club, which started around the same time as PuneTech and the two forums have been very complementary to each other.

Together, we have made the Pune community one of the most active and vibrant communities in the country.

Minor Celebration time: PuneTech.com now has a Google Page Rank of 5

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We’re very happy to report that http://punetech.com/ now has a google rank of 5.

To a large extent, we have never really worried too much about the SEO of PuneTech, or the design, or a whole bunch of other stuff that webmasters typically do (and should) worry about. Since PuneTech is a non-commercial, hobby project that we do in our free time, and since that free time is limited, we have always chosen to focus our efforts on producing good quality content, rather than other aspects.

However, it would be very naive, and unrealistically idealistic of us to say that SEO is not important. If we don’t rank highly in Google results, people can’t find us, and that sort-of defeats the purpose of a site like PuneTech. Of course, we do value regular subscribers much more than the casual users who land up on our pages via search engines, but still, the further growth of PuneTech does depend upon getting such users, and then converting them to subscribers.

Hence, we’re very happy that Google’s algorithm has promoted us to a Page Rank of 5. It was very easy for us to reach Page Rank 4, which we managed to do just a few months after PuneTech was started. But there we stayed for a while, and last year, as we went through some downtime, some server headaches, and a 2-month long break, the Page Rank had dropped to 3 for a while. But now it is at 5, which is a significant milestone.

For those who don’t understand what Page Rank means: Page Rank is a number assigned to websites by the Google Search Engine and indicates the relative importance of these websites. It goes from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible. This is an ‘exponential’ scale, which means that, very roughly, a site with PR of 5 is ten times more important than a site with PR of 4; and also it is ten times more difficult to attain a PR 5 compared to getting a PR of 4. It took us 4 months to reach PR 4, and 40 months to reach PR 5 – which sounds about right. (Of course, many websites never make it past 3 or 4, so it’s not just a question of time.)

To put things in perspective, see the PuneTech list of Top-Ranked Pune Websites. You’ll note that only 3 Pune sites have a PR of 7 or more (C-DAC at 8, and IISER and IUCAA at 7). That’s it. There’s a handful of sites at PR 6. It is very unlikely that there are any Pune websites at PR 6 or above that are not already listed at that page. The list of sites with PR 5 is also fairly small, and comprises a Who’s Who of Internet in Pune, although this list is incomplete – and there would be a bunch of other sites that we’ve missed. (If you find any, please edit that page, or let us know.) In short, PR 5 is pretty good.

Still, one of our primary goals remains unachieved so far.

For many search related to technology in Pune, PuneTech pages have started showing up somewhere on the first page. If you search for “Pune Technology” on Google, PuneTech shows up as the second link. Which is great. But the first link is a terribly outdated, and totally pointless page from PuneDiary.com. We’ll never be really happy until PuneTech ranks above that page in a search for ‘Pune Technology’. If you have a website, please help us in this noble goal by linking to http://punetech.com from your site.

Why has the PuneTech website been changing so frequently?

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Regular visitors to PuneTech.com would have noticed that the website has been undergoing major upheavals in recent times. This article gives you an idea of what is going on behind the scenes. This article is not directly related to tech in Pune, so busier readers should feel free to skip this article.

But before I get into the details of what’s going on, I should point out: If you have noticed that the website has been changing frequently, you are doing it wrong. You should not be visiting the PuneTech.com website. You should instead subscribe to PuneTech via RSS or by email. Why? Because that ensures that you’ll never miss a post, and for us, the benefit is that we get a “loyal reader” rather than just another “monthly unique visitor.” We value the loyal readers more.

So, what’s going on with the website?

Basically, for the last few months, the PuneTech website has been consuming too much CPU, more than the acceptable use allowed by the shared host. It’s in danger of being kicked out, and the problem needs to be identified and fixed. That’s why you’re seeing all the changes on the site.

Technical details: Many people were surprised to see the “default” wordpress theme on the PuneTech website, and some also wondered whether we had migrated PuneTech to wordpress. Actually, since the first day (almost 3 years ago), PuneTech.com has always been on wordpress. Over time, we’ve had a bunch of wordpress themes (which allow us to change the look-n-feel of the site while keeping the underlying software the same), which made the site look like a magazine or something else. One of the themes was a freely downloaded theme from the internet, while the others were all hand-crafted by me.

Anyway, to see if we could fix the performance problems, we tried the following:

  • Use various DEBUG plugins on wordpress to see if any specific query/queries were taking up too much time. Doesn’t appear to be so.
  • Disable all plugins to see if any plugin was causing the problem. That’s the first time you might have seen some functionality disappear from the website. Nope – the problem still remained.
  • Turn off the “tag cloud”. That did not help either.
  • Replace the latest theme with an older theme to see if the theme had some code that was causing the problem. Again, that did not help.
  • Delete the entire installation and do a fresh install – this was to ensure that there was no malware that got into the site somehow. Apparently not.
  • Replace the older theme with the wordpress default theme – this pretty much guarantees that we haven’t done anything to screw the site up. This is the reason why you’re currently seeing the wordpress default theme.

Our host Rochen has been very supportive throughout the process, and they’re pretty solid (I host a lot of other sites with them, some with higher traffic), so I’m pretty sure the problem isn’t at their end.

Why bother with all this? Shouldn’t I simply opt for a higher plan with more CPU and forget about the whole thing? The geek in me doesn’t allow me to do that. For one, I can’t believe that a small site like PuneTech can/should cause this much CPU usage. Second, I can’t give up without finding the root cause of the problem.

Hence, I’m still experimenting. So, apologies as some of the things will randomly stop working. The site might keep changing. But, the flow of article RSS feed and the daily email will continue. Thanks for listening…

Rebooting PuneTech

In Depth, punetech

Regular readers would have noticed that PuneTech has not been updated in a while. We're are back now.

Allow me a few minutes today to talk at length about the past and future of PuneTech. The executive summary is that PuneTech is coming back with some changes, but hopefully nothing that will change the overall experience significantly. Feel free to skip the the rest of this article – it talks mainly about why the change, and what the changes are going to be.

Basically I (i.e. Navin) had taken an unscheduled break from PuneTech for the last month or so while I was trying to figure out my priorities. In the last 6 months or so, I realized that I had become rather busy with too many different activities and realized that I wasn't doing a good job of many of them, I was always behind on my work, and had started "dropping packets." I realized that this situation could not continue for too long and something needed to be done.

Specifically, as regards PuneTech, this means that I cannot spend as much time on PuneTech as I used to spend earlier. Amit and I have been doing PuneTech for more than 2-1/2 years now. PuneTech has grown in a lot of ways, reaches lots of people, and we've done lots of experiments, some of which failed, but some have succeeded spectacularly. We're proud of what we have achieved, and we will definitely keep it going. However, one of the things that we haven't managed to figure out how to do, is to get other people writing articles regularly for PuneTech. Yes, we've had the occasional guest authors, we've also re-posted from blogs of other Punekars, but that remains the exception. In general, it takes too much of an effort to get someone else to write an article. For me personally, this is one of the biggest problems, because it means that I end up writing most of the articles that appear on PuneTech, and this used to take up a lot of my time. What made me doubly sad was that there are so many interesting stories about companies and people doing tech work in Pune that need to be told – but haven't been told because I don't have the time to write them down. Some of them have been sitting in my head for more than an year, but I haven't managed to get it out because of lack of time.

Regular readers of PuneTech will be aware that PuneTech is a completely non-commercial activity. We don't make any money in any form from PuneTech and we don't intend to. Which meas that we have full-time day jobs and we can only work on PuneTech in our free time – because we love doing so. A corollary of the non-commercial-ness is that we don't spend too much money on PuneTech; that means no hired writers, no hired low-level admin folks, etc. I run the website, Amit runs the PuneTech linked-in group, and we do a lot of meeting people, connecting people, encouraging and helping other activities in the background. All of this happens as and when we get time. And sometimes it doesn't happen at all. Such is life.

So, what's the fix?

I think I can significantly reduce the time I spend on a PuneTech article by essentially making you, the readers, do more work. This is what I'm planning to do:

  • From now on, articles are likely to be much more raw, much less polished. I'll be spending less time re-writing articles, finding spelling mistakes, and structuring the overall flow of the article. I'll pretty much spit out the information I have, or the thoughts I've gathered. So the overall structure of the article is likely to be a little less coherent. But I'm hoping that even in "ex-tempore" mode, I am a good enough writer that the articles will still be good enough for most of the readers. For example, this article has been written in this ad hoc style.
  • Much fewer links and images in articles. In my opinion, inserting hyperlinks to relevant information in articles does add significant value, but takes up a lot of time. So, for now on, I'm not putting links except in a few, necessary cases. For the rest, you'll need to start using google yourself. Sorry. And no more images, in most cases.
  • More quick-n-dirty, one paragraph articles. Often I try to wait until I've gathered enough information about a topic to create a good full-length article. This takes up time, mental bandwidth, and many smaller pieces of information get lost because they never amounted to more than a paragraph. For a while, I'm going to change my tactics and start posting shorter pieces, which have less information content, but are still useful. This will result in an increase in the number of PuneTech posts. I'm hoping to be able to do that without significantly damaging the signal-to-noise ratio of PuneTech. So, the current plan is to try this for a few months and then solicit feedback from the readers as to whether it is an overall positive or a negative. If you get PuneTech via email, then you'll continue to get one email per day, but each email might contain multiple articles – so keep that in mind and scroll down till the bottom of the email before marking it as read. Those following via RSS will see multiple smaller articles showing up during the day (hopefully). If you're not subscribed via email/rss, what's wrong with you? Please subscribe!!
  • The PuneTech wiki is officially deprecated. One of my dreams when I started PuneTech was to create a wiki for tech information about Pune which would be updated by people from the community. However, I never was able to crack that – and the wiki never really took off. Sure, there have been some good pages that we managed to create: like the Pune User Groups and Organizations page, the Top-ranked Websites in Pune page, etc. But those are few and far between. So, the PuneTech wiki, which has anyway crawled along anaemically for a while is now officially put in coma. The wiki will continue to exist, and the existing pages will remain, but we're no longer putting any effort into it. Oh well. One of the experiments which failed.
  • The PuneTech calendar is, we believe, one of the experiments that worked really well, and we'll continue to keep updating it. But it is work, and we would like to ask our readers to help us out here. It would really reduce our workload if you could add events to the upcoming PuneTech page directly. The instructions for adding an event are given on that page, and if you add the event to the PuneTech group (as given in the instructions), it will automatically show up in the PuneTech calendar. (Yes, we know that the calendar has not really been updated in a while, but we'll hopefully fix that in a few days…)

That's all for now. Let the experiment begin. If you have any suggestions, or other feedback, please let us know in the comments below.

PuneTech is back from a vacation

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Click on the logo to get all PuneTech articles about PuneTech
Click on the logo to get all PuneTech articles about PuneTech

As you might (or might not) have noticed, PuneTech and the PuneTech Calendar have not been updated since the beginning of May. The reason is that PuneTech was on a summer vacation during this time. We’re back from the vacation, and our regularly scheduled programming is resuming starting today.

Subscribe to PuneTech for the latest information about some cool tech events, some interviews, and other interesting articles.

If you’re interested in writing articles for PuneTech, or you’re interested in interviewing some interesting Pune companies, or personalities, please let us know.

PuneTech’s “Monetization Plan” was an April Fools Day Prank

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Our article yesterday, about our “Sponsored Saturdays” and “Pay Per Tweet” monetization plan was an April Fools Day prank.

Actually, we were overwhelmed by the amount and intensity of the response generated by that article. In fact, we feel bad for having toyed with the feelings of all the people who actually got fooled by that article and brought such strong emotions and passion to the comments.

Sorry.

And hopefully, you’ll forgive us this moment of fun.

– – –

The post generated a huge number of comments. At the time of writing this article, there are 78 comments. There were three kinds of commentors on that post:

  • Those who left a comment pointing out that this was an April Fools Day prank. We held all those comments in moderation until this morning, to ensure that the fun did not end prematurely. So nobody saw those comments yesterday, while the debate raged on. They are now visible, but marked with a [***]. So when you read all those comments, remember that the comments marked with a [***] were not visible yesterday.
  • Those who realized that this is a prank, but decided to join the fun and leave fake comments. I should point out that this was not pre-planned by us. Of these commentors, only Arun and Amit Kumar knew about the prank beforehand – all others guessed and jumped into the fray on their own. You guys made this much more fun than we had imagined!
  • Those who did not realize that this is a prank, and either expressed their displeasure with the new policy, or defended our right to monetize in this way. To all of you: our sincere thanks for taking the time out to let your feelings be known. While this time it was just a prank, we do really hope that in the future you will let us know your feedback when tricky policy issues regarding PuneTech do crop up, as they sometimes do. Especially the ones who blasted us – we do need readers like that to keep us pointed in the correct direction. Thanks again.

– – –

In any case, you must read the comments. It will be an entertaining experience. As they say, iss meiN drama haiN, emotion haiN, comedy haiN, tragedy haiN. Just remember that all comments marked with a [***] were not visible yesterday.

Also, you do subscribe to the PuneTech comments feed (or comments-by-email), don’t you?

– – –

Even the PuneMirror got fooled. In this (unrelated) article they wrote about TechMarathi, they included the following line:

[PuneTech] was until recently a non-profit venture. They have just introduced a paid content section for one day of the week.

Oh well…

– – –

Vishwajeet left a comment with the best conspiracy theory explanation:

It seems you have taken an appropriate day for announcing this, if it does not goes well among the community than you can take it back as April fool’s day prank 🙂 way to go.

No. This was always an April Fools Day prank. Arun, Anup and Amit Kumar, the 3 fake “customers” whom we “quoted” in the article knew that this was a prank (because we had to take their permission to misuse their names in this way).

– – –

Titash asked this pertinent question:

Is monetisation a must for every human endeavor?

Although we argued with Titash yesterday while the game was being played, in reality, we do agree with Titash. Our answer is a resounding no. We have no intentions of monetizing PuneTech.

There was some discussion about sustainability of PuneTech, but here’s the point: It takes very little hard cash to keep PuneTech running. The only expenses we have are the domain name and hosting, both of which are cheap enough that we don’t mind paying from our own pockets.

The main “investment” in PuneTech is in terms of time – our own time, as well as the time of so many other members of the tech community in Pune who do things for the community. So, if we must worry about sustainability, we should think in terms of time and not money.

Money cannot buy the quality that Pune Tech needs. Passion is not for sale. Sure, we could use money to pay for getting PuneTech a decent, much needed, design. But that’s not really what PuneTech is about. Money won’t buy high quality content. Money couldn’t have bought this article by Dhananjay Nene, nor this article by Addepalli. You couldn’t have paid Abhijit Athavale to start PuneChips and TechMarathi certainly wont be able to afford all the volunteers who work on it.

Time is more than money! So please “sponsor” PuneTech by donating some of your time. Write an article.

– – –

13-year old UpaPilot commented:

Rs. 10k per post? Are you mad?

I think he was on to something there…

– – –

Asuph said:

And Navin, you’re taking this too far. Even fake ‘angry’ commentors!

No, we did not fake any angry commentors! The fake angry commentors were genuine. This is just another example of the community coming forward to help out. Isn’t UGC (user generated content) great?

– – –

The Discrete Log vs Indiscrete Log comments were just too funny! Hats off Shashikant and Dhananjay!

– – –

Still can’t decide whether Anil was fooled (exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3) or not. But I guess this comment forces us to give him the benefit of doubt.

– – –

You can all go back to work now. The …umm… “future of Pune will suffer” if you don’t!

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Introducing “Sponsored Saturdays” – paid articles on the PuneTech blog & twitter account

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(Update: This article was a PuneTech April Fools Prank. For a full apologyexplanation, see our article on 2 April.)

At PuneTech, one of the things that gives us pleasure is coming up with new ways in which this site can help the tech community in Pune. To quote Dhananjay Nene, we display a “willingness to experiment, learn and retry.” With this in mind, we are introducing a new feature that will help local small businesses, our readers, and us, all at the same time – Sponsored Posts on PuneTech – a win-win-win situation.

Of the 2 years we’ve been in existence, for 1-1/2 of them we’ve been refusing offers for paid advertisements and paid job postings on PuneTech because we don’t want to commercialize PuneTech. However, after receiving many impassioned pleas from small local startups, we have reached the conclusion that we have hit upon a major pain point, a desperate need that needs to be filled. Small startups cannot afford the normal PR and job posting channels and the future of Pune is suffering because of that. There is no good channel for small local companies to market themselves and get much needed visibility. Mainstream media is too big, too broad, and too expensive – and most importantly, generates very little long-term impact (or conversions).

After thinking over this problem for a long time, we have decided to allow commercial postings on PuneTech. We believe this is not really a reversal of our “not commercial” policy – is more of a social service.

With this in mind, we are introducing Sponsored Saturdays. Every Saturday, the PuneTech blog and front page will feature a paid article, which will either be a company profile written by the company itself, or a set of job postings by the company. The article will be clearly marked as a “Sponsored Post”. A flat price of Rs. 10,000 entitles a sponsor to post an article on the PuneTech blog on the next available Saturday slot. This will also be cross posted to twitter, the PuneTech linked-in group, and will go out in the PuneTech RSS Feed and to the e-mail subscribers. There will be no other posts on PuneTech for the next 48 hours – i.e. the sponsored post will stay on the front page until Monday morning. Single tweet postings may be purchased at Rs. 500 per tweet. We will consider special discounted rates for small and deserving companies who are not yet funded.

We are very pleased with the reactions we are getting from our early sponsors. Anup Tapadia, founder of of TouchMagix, who bought the first sponsored slot this Saturday, has high hopes from this program:

Through the normal channels, it is really difficult to find high quality programmers for the kind of cutting edge work we are doing in Pune. For example, a post on the standard job sites brings us hundreds of resumes, but not one of the candidates can answer basic computer science questions. Given the kind of readership PuneTech has, we are expecting to get some very good resumes.

Amit Kumar Singh, who plans on using this service to find customers for his software, says:

Finding the first few customers for a new product is the most difficult. And a sale to local customers will be much easier because the trust factor will be higher. All I’m expecting is 10 signups, and I’m sure word-of-mouth will take care of the rest.

Arun Prabhudesai of Trak.in commented:

All bloggers and mainstream media are doing this, either publicly or secretly. I don’t understand why you guys waited so long. But I’m glad you are finally doing it. Count me in.

For sponsoring a post, and for a copy of the detailed terms and conditions, please write to: sponsor@punetech.com. We do have some legal fine print, but the basic terms are these – the sponsored posts must be related to Pune, must be relevant to readers of PuneTech, and must adhere to the standards of quality of the rest of the PuneTech website. PuneTech reserves the right to refuse any sponsored post for any reason whatsoever, and the decision of the PuneTech editors if final.

We hope that many local companies take advantage of this opportunity.

Note: A majority of the PuneTech advisory board are in full support of our decision, and completely agree with us that this move will be welcomed by the tech community in Pune. In the interest of full transparency, we would like to disclose that two of our advisors who did not agree with this decision have resigned from the board. However, we are confident that after a few months of successfully running this program, we will be able to convince them to re-join.

We will continue to tweak and fine tune this program based on the response and feedback we receive. So please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.


2nd April Update: As noted at the top, this article was an April Fools Day prank. To ensure that comments on this post did not give away the prank too early, all comments that mentioned “April Fools Day” were held in moderation until the end of the day. All these comments have now been approved, but we have prefixed these comments with a [***]. When reading the comments below, please note that all comments beginning with the [***] were not visible to anybody on 1st April.

Was yesterday’s PuneTech article inappropriate?

In Depth, punetech, ,

Yesterday, on the occasion of Persistent Systems‘ IPO, we ran an unabashedly positive post about Persistent and Anand Deshpande’s contributions to the Pune technology community. This resulted in some eyebrows raised about the appropriateness of the article. There were two concerns:

  • The timing of the article, while an IPO is in progress, could be inappropriate
  • Writing such a positive article about an important/influential personality (especially when we don’t have a history of writing similar articles about other people) might result in a perception that we were trying to suck up.

After asking a few of our friends, we realized that enough people had similar concerns, and we decided that the issue needs to be discussed openly in the interest of transparency.

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This is a PuneTech article about PuneTech itself. Click on the logo to get all such PuneTech articles about PuneTech

At the outset, we’d like to make clear that nobody connected to PuneTech has any direct or indirect financial interest, nor any other kind of vested interest in Persistent or its IPO. None of us has any shares/stocks of Persistent, nor do we have any financial dealings of any kind with Persistent. In line with our stated editorial policy, PuneTech never takes any compensation, monetary or otherwise, for any content on PuneTech.

Still, in discussion with our friends, a number of issues of credibility, objectivity, neutrality, and perception management were raised. (Regular PuneTech readers will remember a similar discussion that happened in response to another such positive post from us.) We have listed below some of the issues that were pointed out to us, followed by our current thinking on each.

  • “Is PuneTech more like a newspaper or is it more like a blog? Deciding that will drive some of these decisions.” Our view: We don’t necessarily want to label PuneTech as one or the other. It is what it is. But, as is clearly stated in the PuneTech editorial policy, we are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. PuneTech articles will reflect the opinions of the authors, and the selection of what topics and articles to publish reflects our editorial judgement.
  • “PuneTech is a blog. It will have opinions. It is not possible to be objective. Why do you care what other people think?” Our view: Although we feel that we are entitled to our opinions, and our opinions have value, we would like to ensure that our readers do not question our motives. We will lose a lot of credibility and readership if people feel that some of our posts are motivated by vested interests. The fact that we publish our editorial policy, our comments policy, posts like these, and we welcome comments that disagree with our views are attempts at bringing some transparency to this process.
  • “PuneTech should reflect the true opinions of the authors – that is in fact one of the reasons why readers read PuneTech. Once you start censoring your opinions by worrying about ‘What will others think’, PuneTech will become bland, and lose a lot of its value.” Our view: we completelly agree with this.
  • “Since PuneTech comes across as largely neutral in most articles, the occasional article that is highly opinionated does result in some raised eyebrows.” Our view: Agreed. At this stage, we think we would rather risk a few raised eyebrows once in a while, than to ‘neutralize’ all our articles.
  • “The timing is suspect. With an IPO in progress, such a one-dimensionally postitive article might be seen as an attempt to curry favor with Persistent or Anand by offering a positive public opinion when it was really needed.” Our view: We stand by the opinions expressed in the article, but we concede that our timing could have been inappropriate. But since this kind of a situation is not likely to recur anytime soon, we are not going to worry too much about trying to formulate a PuneTech policy to govern such things. But we’ll try to be careful in the future.
  • “Why only Anand Deshpande? Would have been much better to have a series of articles on all the people who’ve benefitted the tech community in Pune.” Our view: We think this is a great idea, and we’ll try to do that. However, please note that we’re severely limited in the amount of time we can spend on writing PuneTech articles. PuneTech is neither the primary, nor the secondary activity for any of us, so it might be a while before these articles appear. Please bear with us. Anybody willing to help us out by writing any such article please get in touch with us.

In conclusion, we will continue to write opinionated articles, and every once in a while we will have an article where we are being very positive about some person, or initiative, or company. We ask of our readers that if you ever feel unsure of our motives, please let us know either publicly in the comments, or privately via email (punetech@punetech.com). We’ll start worrying when this happens to often.

If you have strong opinions about this topic, please let us and other PuneTech readers know in the comments. Thanks.

Suggest ways for Pune Techies to collaborate online and win a Google Wave invitation

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Update: the competition is over – Sandeep Gautam has won the Google Wave invitation for this suggestion.

The offline tech scene in Pune is thriving, as one look at the PuneTech events listing and the PuneTech calendar will show.

And there are a whole bunch of online places for techies in Pune to hang out:

Most of these are basically mailing lists, and forums. I wonder whether there are other ways in which techies in Pune can find other like-minded people, and collaborate in more ways. Would chat be interesting, like proto.in uses? Or IRC? Should we be focusing on Orkut or Facebook or both? Is there something intersting that can be done with YouTube?  Can we use some new technology in new ways to bring people closer together? Maybe Google Wave?

Give your suggestions in the comments section below. The best suggestion gets a Google Wave invitation. You can get the invitation for yourself, or you can use it to invite someone else. If you’re not interested in the invitation, please say so in your comment.

Give a specific suggestion for online collaboration/communication amongst Pune’s techies. Don’t just give the mechanism of collaboration – also give the purpose. For example, saying, “use an online chat room” is useless. Much more useful is something like “use an online chat-root where students from engineering colleges can ask questions about career to people from industry.” Also, a suggestion that is easy to implement is much more valuable than a suggestion that is going to require a lot of setup and/or effort. And, you get lots of plus points if you’re also willing to drive the effort. (And if you like somebody else’s suggestion, and would be willing to help/join that effort, please leave a comment indicating that.)

(Thanks to Amit Somani for graciously agreeing to donate one of his Google Wave invitations for this purpose.)

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