The Indian Angel Network (IAN) is the oldest angel network in India - and it has just recently started Pune operations. Click on the logo to see other PuneTech articles that reference IAN
A few days back, we reported that Startup Saturday this month features Ganesh Natarajan and the Indian Angels Network, and will be on Saturday, 11th, 3pm to 6pm. Note, however, that there has been a last minute shift in venue for this event from the usual Startup Saturday location to Yashada on Baner Road. The event will now be held in MDC Conference hall No V. This is on the 1st floor of the auditorium building (first building after you enter the gate, next to parking).
The event is free for all to attend. See the original announcement for all other details, including registration information.
We reported an incorrect date for the Building Billion Dollar Software Companies talk, by Anand Deshpande and Shirish Deodhar. The talk is on Friday, 20th August, at 10am. (It is not on Wednesday, 18th as we earlier reported).
What: Building Billion Dollar Software Companies from Pune, with Anand Deshpande and Shirish Deodhar, presented by Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) When: Friday, Aug 20, 10am-12noon Where: Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, S.B. Road Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Register by sending a mail to deshpande@synygy.com.
SEAP is the most active association of IT and ITES companies in Pune. Click the logo for other PuneTech articles about SEAP
“How we got here, and how we plan to get there” by Anand Deshpande
Anand Deshpande, founder of Persistent Systems, which recently had a very successful IPO, will talk about how he “got here”, and will share his vision on how he plans to take his company to $1B, and “get there”.
“From Entrepreneurs to Leaders” by Shirish Deodhar
Shirish Deodhar, a Pune-based-serial-entrepreneur, aims to provide guidance to the next generation of founders who will build India's software product companies. Shirish Deodhar is the author of a book on what founders of Indian software companies need to focus on to build $1B product companies in India. (See PuneTech excerpt of that book). He will share some of his insights during this talk.
(This is a live-blog of Dr. Vipin Chaudhary talk on Trends in High Performance Computing, organized by the IEEE Pune sub-section. Since this is being typed while the talk is going on, it might not be as well organized, or as coherent as other PuneTech articles. Also, links will usually be missing.)
Live-blog of a talk by Dr. Vipin Chaudhary, CEO of CRL, on High Performance Computing at Institute of Engineers, Pune. CRL are the makers of Eka, one of the world's fastest privately funded supercomputers. For more information about HPC and CRL, click on the photo above.Myths about High Performance Computing:
Commonly associated with scientific computing
Only used for large problems
Expensive
Applicable to niche areas
Understood by only a few people
Lots of servers and storage
Difficult to use
Not scalable and reliable
This is not the reality. HPC is:
Backbone for national development
Will enable economic growth. Everything from toilets to potato chips are designed using HPC
Lots of supercomputing is throughput computing – i.e. used to solve lots of small problems
“Mainstream” businesses like Walmart, and entertainment companies like Dreamworks Studioes use HPC.
_(and a bunch of other reasons that I did not catch)
China is really catching up in the area of HPC. And Vipin correlates China’s GDP with the development of supercomputers in China. Point: technology is a driver for economic growth. We need to also invest in this.
Problems solved using HPC:
Movie making (like avatar)
Real time data analysis
weather forecasting
oil spill impact analysis
forest fire tracking and monitoring
biological contamination prediction
Drug discover
reduce experimental costs through simulations
Terrain modeling for wind-farms
e.g. optimized site selection, maintenance scheduling
and other alternate energy sources
Geophysical imaging
oil industry
earthquake analysis
Designing airplanes (Virtual wind tunnel)
Trends in HPC.
The Manycore trend.
Putting many CPUs inside a single chip. Multi-core is when you have a few cores, manycore is when you have many, many cores. This has challenges. Programming manycore processors is very cumbersome. Debugging is much harder. e.g. if you need to get good performance out of these chips then you need to do parallel, assembly programming. Parallel programming is hard. Assembly programming is hard. Both together will kill you.
This will be one of the biggest challenges in computer science in the near future. A typical laptop might have 8 to 10 processses running concurrently. So there is automatic parallelism, as long as number of cores is less than 10. But as chips get 30, 40 cores or more, individual processes will need to be parallel. This will be very challenging.
Oceans of Data but the Pipes are Skinny
Data is growing fast. In sciences, humanities, commerce, medicine, entertainment. The amount of information being created in the world is huge. Emails, photos, audio, documents etc. Genomic data (bio-informatics) data is also huge.
Note: data is growing way, way faster than Moore’s law!
Storing things is not a problem – we have lots of disk space. Fetching and finding stuff is a pain.
Challenges in data-intensive systems:
Amount of data to be accessed by the application is huge
This requires huge amounts of disk, and very fat interconnects
And fast processors to process that data
Conventional supercomputing was CPU bound. Now, we are in the age of data-intensive supercomputing. Difference: old supercomputing had storage elsewhere (away from the processor farm). Now the disks have to be much closer.
Conventional supercomputing was batch processed. Now, we want everything in real-time. Need interactive access. To be able to run analytic and ad hoc queries. This is a new, and difficult challenge.
While Vipin was faculty in SUNY Buffalo, they started an initiative for data-intensive discovery initiative (Di2). Now, CRL is participating. Large, ever-changing data sets. Collecting and maintaining data is of course major problem, but primary focus of Di2 is to search in this data. e.g. security (find patterns in huge logs user actions). This requires a new, different architecture from traditional supercomputing, and the resulting Di2 system significantly outperforms the traditional system.
This also has applications in marketing analysis, financial services, web analytics, genetics, aerospace, and healthcare.
High Performance Cloud Services at CRL
Cloud computing makes sense. It is here to stay. But energy consumption of clouds is a problem.
Hence, CRL is focusing on a green cloud. What does that mean?
Data center optimization:
Power consumption optimization on hardware
Optimization of the power system itself
Optimized cooling subsystem
CFD modeling of the power consumption
Power dashboards
Workflow optimization (reduce computing resource consumption via efficiencies):
Cloud offerings
Virtualizations
Workload based power management
Temperature aware distribution
Compute cycle optimization
Green applications being run in CRL
Terrain modeling
Wind farm design and simulation
Geophysical imaging
Virtual wind tunnel
Summary of talk
Manycore processors are here to stay
Programmability have to improve
Must match application requirements to processor architecture (one size does not fit all)
Computation has to move to where the data is, and not vice versa
This is a live-blog of the Pune Open Coffee Club session on use of cloud apps for your business. Since this is being typed as the session is in progress, it might be a bit incoherent and not completely well-structured, and there are no links.
Pune Open Coffee Club is an informal group for all those interested in Pune's startup ecosystem. As of this writing, it has more than 2700 members. Click on the image to get all PuneTech articles related to the Pune Open Coffee Club
This session is being run as a panel discussion. Santosh Dawara is the moderator. Panelists are:
Nitin Bhide, Co-founder of BootstarpToday, a cloud apps provider
Basant Rajan, CEO of Coriolis, which makes the Colama virtual machine management software
Anthony Hsiao, Founder of Sapna Solutions
The session started with an argument over the defintion of cloud, SaaS, etc., which I found very boring and will not capture here.
Later, Anthony gave a list of cloud apps used by Sapna Solutions:
Google apps for email, calendaring, documents
GitHub for code
Basecamp for project management
JobScore for recruitment (handles job listings on your website, and the database of applicants, etc.)
GreyTip (Indian software for HR management)
Question: Should cloud providers be in the same country? Answer: you don’t really have a choice. There are no really good cloud providers in India. So it will be outside.
Question: Are customers ready to put their sensitive data on the cloud? Audience comment: Ashish Belagali has a startup that provides recruitment software. They can provide it as installable software, and also as a hosted, could app. However, they’ve found that most customers are not interested in the cloud app. They are worried about two things: a) The software will be unavailable if internet is not available, and b) The data is outside the company premises.
Point by Nitin Bhide of BootstrapToday: Any cloud provider will take security of your data very seriously. Because, if they screw this up even once, they’ll go out of business right away. Also, as far as theft of data is concerned, it can happen even within your own premises, by your own employees.
Comment 1: Yes, the above argument makes logical sense. But most human beings are not logical, and can have an irrational fear and will defend their choice.
Comment 2: This fear is not irrational. There are valid reasons to be unhappy about having your sensitive data in the cloud.
Comment 3: Another reason why this fear is not irrational is to do with CYA: cover-your-ass. If you put data in the cloud and something goes wrong, you will be blamed. If you put the data locally and something goes wrong, you can claim that you did everything that was expected of you. As long as CYA exists (especially in enterprises), this will be a major argument against the cloud.
Question: Does anybody use accounting packages in the cloud? Answer: No. Most people prefer to stick to Tally, because of its compliance with Indian laws (or at least its compliance with Indian CAs). There doesn’t seem to be any online alternative that’s good enough.
At this point there was a longish discussion about the availability and uptime of the cloud services. Points made:
Cloud app providers have lots of redundancies and lots of backups to ensure that there is no downtime
However, there are enough instances of even world-class providers having downtime
Also, most of them claim redundancies, but give no guarnatees or SLAs, and even if they do give an SLA, you’re too small a player to enforce the SLA.
Also remember, that in the Indian context, downtime of the last mile of your internet will result in downtime of your app
Point to remember is that an app going down it not the real problem. The real problem is recovery time. How long does it take before it comes back up? Look at that before choosing upon your app.
It would be great if there was a reputation service for all cloud apps, which gives statistics on availability, downtime, performance etc. There isn’t right now, and that is a problem.
Remember, there is an economic cost of cloud apps that you will incur due to downtime, but also remember that there are definite economic savings too. For many startups the savings outweigh the potential costs. But you need to look into this for yourself.
Question: What kind of cost savings can a startup get by going to the cloud?
Nobody had concrete answers, but general points made:
Can you really afford to pay a system administrator who is competent, and who can administer a mail server, a file server, a this, and a that? There were some people who said that while admins are expensive in the US, they are not that expensive in India. However, more people felt that this would be expensive.
All significant large cloud services cost a very tiny fraction of what it would cost to do it yourself.
It is not a question of cost. As a startup, with my limited team, I wouldn’t have time to do this.
Basant Rajan points out that so far the discussion has been about either something that is in the cloud, or it is something that you do entirely yourself. These are not the only options. There is a third option – called managed services, or captive clouds. He points out that there is a Pune company called Mithi software that offers a whole bunch of useful services that they manage, on their machines, in your premises.
Question: What about compatibility between your apps? If the recruitment app needs to talk to your HR app are you in trouble?
Answer: The good ones already talk to each other. But yes, if you are not careful, you could run into trouble.
Some Pune startups who are providing cloud based apps:
Pune startup BootstrapToday provides an all-in-one solution in the cloud for development:
Source code control (using SVN). All the rest of these services are home grown.
Wiki pages
Bug tracking
Project management
Time Tracking (coming soon)
Project Tracking (coming soon)
Pune startup Acism has developed an in-house tool for collaboration and project communication which they are making available to others.
Pune startup CoLayer has been around for a long time, and has a product for better collaboration within an enterprise. It is like Google Wave, but has been around for longer, and is still around (while Wave is not).
Pune startup Colama offers private clouds based on virtualization technology. They are currently focusing on software labs in educational institutions as customers. But this technology can also be used to create grids and private clouds for development, testing and training.
Recommendations for cloud apps:
General recommendation: if you’re not using Google Apps, you must. Mail, Documents (i.e. Office equivalent functionality), Calendar.
Bug Tracking: Jira (very good app, but expensive), Pivotal Tracker (only for those familiar with agile, suggested by @dnene), Lighthouse App (suggested by: @anthonyhsiao), Mantis.
Project Management: ActiveCollab (self hostable), DeskAway, SugarCRM on Google Apps (very good CRM, very good integration with Google Apps, has a learning curve).
For hosting your own cloud (i.e. bunch of servers with load balancing etc.): Rackspace Cloud is good but expensive. Amazon Web Services is cost effective, but has a learning curve.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this part of the session got truncated. Hopefully we’ll have some more time in the end to pick this up again.
IndicThreads conference pass giveaway
IndicThreads will give a free pass to their Cloud Computing conference that is scheduled for 20/21 August to the best blog or tweet either about this POCC event, or about Cloud Computing in general. The pass is normally worth Rs. 8500. To enter, tweets and blogs should be brought to the attention of @indicthreads on twitter, or conf@rightrix.com. This PuneTech blog is not eligible for the free pass (because I already have a pass), so the field is still open 🙂
What:NCL & Venture Center Presentation on Technology Development Opportunities for Orthopedic Products in the Indian Market, by Dr. Vijay Panchanadikar, Orthopedic Surgeon. When: Wednesday, 4th August, 3:30pm-5pm Where: Chemical Engineering Hall, NCL, Pashan Road. Map (CE is Hall #10) Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required
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The NCL Innovation IDEA Catalyst Workshop Series
This talk is a part of a workshop series (The NCL Innovation IDEA Catalyst Workshop Series), that focuses on exploring technology development and commercialization opportunities by connecting scientists/technologists with people who understand market and industry needs. This talk is the first in this series and features an orthopedic surgeon pointing out opportunities in his area in the Indian market, if only some technologist would develop the technologies needed.
Tech Opportunities for Orthopedic Products
Polymers, ceramics and specialty alloys are increasingly used as bearing and/or volume-filling materials in orthopedic implants such as hips and knees. However, there are several issues with existing products, such as the need for highly skilled surgeons, limited bio-compatibility of implant materials, inappropriate pricing for Indian markets, etc. In this talk, Dr. Panchanadikar will show real life examples of implants used for a variety of orthopedic surgeries, and highlight the problems faced by orthopedic surgeons during the use of implants. He will describe a âwish listâ of products for the orthopedic implant market as well as the need for software solutions to improve the accuracy of guide wire positioning as well as imaging & simulation tools for skills development of young surgeons. This talk is a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between scientists with competencies in biomaterials and surgeons with awareness of market needs and product opportunities.
About the speaker – Dr. Vijay Panchanadikar
Dr. Panchanadikar is an orthopedic surgeon from Pune, who has over two decades of experience in this field, and performs over 100 major orthopedic surgeries each year. His areas of interest include trauma surgery, joint replacement and computer imaging in orthopedics. He has published several papers and has delivered lectures and presentations at several conferences across India. He also teaches DNB students at Sanjeevan Hospital and holds a keen interest in developing interactive learning aids for orthopedics. He holds copyrights in India for imaging software used for accurate positioning of guide wire in surgeries for fractures of various bones.
What: Product Camp Pune – A Collaborative, User-Organized, Conference (i.e. a barcamp) on Product Management and Marketing When: Sunday, August 1st, 10am-4pm Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map. Registration and Fees: This event is free for all. Register here
ProductCamp Pune is a free event that will give you an opportunity to meet people involved in product management and marketing. Click on the logo to be taken to the registration page.
The Importance of Product Management and Marketing
Have you ever wondered why some really cool products fail in the market, and some products that seem really stupid succeed? Have you ever noticed that some of the best features of the products you’re working on are hardly used by anybody? Have you ever completely failed to understand the roadmap of your product?
If you have experienced any of the above, you’re not alone. Most people, especially techies, and especially Indian techies, have a very poor understanding of what customers really want, what they need, and what they would be willing to pay for. This is the job of Product Management and Marketing. Most people’s career would improve significantly if they spent some time acquiring this skill, or at least understanding the basics.
If you can be a product manager, you can acquire the experience of acting as a CEO. The skills gained in product roadmapping, prioritizing tasks, interoffice communications, customer understanding, and product marketing are absolute necessities for being an effective enterprise lead.
Similarly, Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape, successful serial entrepreneur, and investor points out that “the only thing that matters” for success of a startup is product/market fit. Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. If you don’t have product/market fit, then you’re bound to fail, no matter how great your product is, and no matter how great your team is. With a bad product/market fit, you’ll struggle for years trying to find customers who don’t exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.
This is a new area for techies in India
For obvious reasons. Most of the work in the software technology sector in India has either been software services for companies abroad (in which case your company has no control over the product roadmap), or product development for companies whose main markets are in the US/Europe (in which case, the people doing product management/marketing are in US/Europe).
However, as the tech industry in India slowly matures, more and more product management and marketing roles are becoming available.
Here’s your opportunity to get started along this path
ProductCamp Pune is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process.
The events in Pune in the next four days are a great example of the diversity of Pune in the “science and technology” sector. Far too often, we assume that technology means software technology, but Pune does have much more. NCL is one of the top institutes in the country for chemical technology, and has a history of coming up with chemical science breakthroughs that make it into commercial products. Today, a scientist from NCL will give a talk on the patent and other intellectual property issues that scientists and small businesses should know about. The Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana is a great institute of Mathematics, and it regularly schedules very interesting talks for people interested in Mathematics. (And if you’re a software engineer who is not interested in Mathematics, you should be ashamed of yourself.) Monday will have a talk on probiotics – the use of bacteria and other micro-organisms in industrial waste treatements and other cleantech. And by the way, if you’re interested in finding out what other world-class institutions Pune has, (and it’s a huge number!), check out PuneTech’s top ranked websites of Pune page.
Click on the logo to get all PuneTech articles about events in Pune
PuneCleanTech is proud to present an enlightening talk on ‘Probiotics in CleanTech’ on July 5th, 2010 at 4:00pm at the NCL Innovation Center. The talk will be presented by Dr. Pillai, a renowned authority on the subject. This event is supported by Fusiontech Ventures and NCL Venture Center.
As you know, Probiotics is the use of beneficial micro-organisms to increase the health, vitality and efficiency of various animal processes. The same techniques can be applied to Industrial activity in areas such as soil remediation, effluent treatment, waste management etc. The talk will focus on such applications of Probiotics.
The talk will be suitable for all entities that are actively dealing with such technologies (such as Praj) or might benefit from their applications to industrial and municipal waste management. As a result, institutions such as MCCIA and Pune Municipal Corporation might benefit from this talk. If you agree, please canvass it within your or affiliated organizations.
This broad-ranging talk should be interesting also for concerned citizenry (such as ecological society) and the scientific/technological elites (such as NCL), as well as, educational and research institutes.
As always, the talk is free but the seating is limited to first 60 people. There is no RSVP and the seating will be on a ‘first at the door gets the first chair’ basis 🙂
Dr. Nitin Tiwari, a scientist with NCL and part of the NCL IP Group will talk about Intellectual Property. The focus will be general awareness of IP for small and medium enterprises.
Are the following significant problem areas for your startup?
* Non-payment from clients who have already taken delivery (ITES, other domains)
* Intellectual Property (trademark violations, copyright enforcement)
* Industry Ethics, price cutting by competitors (who then don’t deliver quality)
Our next meetup is focused on how entrepreneurs deal with these issues.
PLUG meeting for July is scheduled on Saturday 3rd July, 4 pm @ SICSR
These are the details:
Location: SICSR, Atur Centre, Model Colony.
Room No 704. 7th floor ( room no. may change )
Time: 4 pm
Agenda:
1. We will have a talk on distributed version control and TeamGit by
Abhijit Bhopatkar. Abhijit Bhopatkar is the author of TeamGit
(http://www.devslashzero.com/teamgit).
Audience: Anyone interested in version control
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control), TeamGit, and/or
contributing to an interesting Qt project.
2. Open discussion and QA session
This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.
What: vodQA Nite, an event for the software testing industry When: Thursday, 10th June, 5:30pm Where: ThoughtWorks Technologies, GF-01 and MZ-01, Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada. Map Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Register here
‘vodQA Nite’ offers a unique opportunity to interact with people who are equally passionate about software testing and continuously strive to better the art. The format of ‘vodQA Nite’ is scheduled such that each speaker will have 10-12 minutes to present followed by a couple of minutes of “open” discussion with participants. The topics covered in this workshop will be appropriate for any level of testing experience.
Connect with like-minded peers, and gain insight from industry practitioners.
Quality analysts and testing aficionados who want to interact with the testing community. This is also relevant to those interested in the nuances of test automation and how testing works in an Agile environment.
There are a number of interesting tech events in Pune today and tomorrow. Here is a brief overview of each. All of these events are free, and no registration is required.
PLUG Meet – Presentation on Unicode by G Karunakar
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 5, 4pm-6pm, 7th Floor, SICSR, Model Colony,
The Pune Linux Users Group’s monthly meeting happens on the first Saturday of every month, from 4pm to 6pm at SICSR, Model Colony. This month, the agenda includes a talk by G Karunakar on Unicode. Linux CD/DVDs will also be available at the meeting for anyone looking to install linux.
This is a great place to meet open source enthusiasts in Pune
Mentoring Workshop on clean energy financing in Pune
Today, Friday, June 4, 10am-1:30pm, 1st Floor, Hotel Le Meridien
Private Financing Advisory Network (PFAN) is a multilateral, public-private partnership initiated by the Climate Technology Initiative (CTI) and funded by USAID. PFAN seeks to identify clean energy projects at an early stage and act as a project financing coaching and consultancy service to facilitate financial closure of such projects. After establishing dedicated in-country networks in China, Indonesia and Philippines, PFAN has now launched its services in India.
This workshop will introduce Indian clean energy entrepreneurs and stakeholders to the PFAN initiative and how they can leverage this platform to connect with investors and avail pro-bono mentoring services.
Agenda:
9.30 pm: Registration
10:00 am: Welcome Note, Suneel Parasnis, Team Leader – Clean Energy Finance, Contractor, USAID ECO-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program
10:10 am: Introduction to CTI-PFAN, Kavita Kaur, Country Manager – PFAN India, Contractor, USAID ECO-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program
10:30 am: MOU Signing – IT Power India and IndiaCo Ventures
11:00 am: Investor’s Expectations out of Business Plan â Rahul Patwardan, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, IndiaCo Ventures
11:30 am: Tea/Coffee Break
11:45 pm: Promoting Clean Energy – R.Chandrasekhar, CEO, IT Power
12:15 pm: Components of a Good Business Plan âSuneel Parasnis, Team Leader, ECO-Asia
1:00 pm: Panel discussion
1:30 pm: Lunch
PuneCleanTech meet: Energy Efficiency – Opportunities and Challenges
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 5, 11am, Venture Center, NCL Innovation Center, Pashan Road
The new gee-whiz technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels et cetera take all the limelight these days. But the fact remains that they are still a miniscule part of our energy mix and will remain so for the foreseeable future. A far bigger opportunity, however, exists all around us. There is enormous potential for making the conventional energy generation, distribution, storage and utilization much more efficient than what it is.
What is this opportunity? Where is it? How does one find it? How big is it? What can be done about it? How can it be addressed? Does anyone address it today? How do they do it? What qualifications do they need to do it?
Mr. Shishir Athale, founder of Sudnya Industrial Services, an energy services company, will discuss all these questions on June 5th, 11am at the NCL Venture Center (June 5th is also the Environment Day, a fitting coincidence!).
Tomorrow, Saturday, 5 June, 4pm-7pm, 4th Floor, SICSR, Model Colony
The initial stages require only a handful of core team-members (3 to 5). These few are crucial to the success of the startup product or service. Finding these people, is one of the primary challenges facing startups today. Chetana Mehta will tackle a whole bunch of questions related to this topic. Chetana Mehta, ex-VP HR at GS Lab helped grow Persistent Systems, GS Lab when they were at a similar stage has offered to cover some aspects of nurturing and training teams.
