Tag Archives: Events

Credenz’09: PICT’s 3-day tech event for students – 18-20 Sept

Events, , , ,

Credenz is PICT‘s annual technical event for students of Computer Engineering, Electronics & Telecommunication and Information Technology. It is one of the more popular collegiate tech fests that happen in various engineering colleges in the state.

This year, they are trying something new. They are going online and free. There are a number of contests that are open for participants from all across the country. This includes paper presentation contest, business plan proposal, technical quiz, and programming contest. Prizes worth Rs.2.5 lacs (and counting), in cash and in kind will be distributed to all the event winners. In addition, there will be seminars and workshops that will be broadcast live online, including sessions on Silverlight, Azure, Android, Google Wave, Ethical Hacking, and more.

The event is from 10:30am to 5pm on September 18th to 20th. You can register at http://credenz09.info/registration.asp. Detailed schedule and speaker profiles are available here: http://credenz09.info/sem_work.asp.

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Tech Trends for 2015, by Anand Deshpande, Shridhar Shukla, Monish Darda

In Depth, Live Blogging, Technology, , , ,

On Monday, I participated in a Panel Discussion “Technology Trends” organized by CSI Pune at MIT college. The panelists were Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, Shridhar Shukla, MD of GS Lab, Monish Darda, GM of BladeLogic India (which is now a part of BMC Software), and me.

Anand asked each of us to prepare a list of 5 technology trends that we felt would be important in the year 2015, and then we would compare and contrast our lists. I’ve already published my own list of 5 things for students to focus on last week. Basically I cheated by listing a just a couple of technology trends, and filled out the list with one technology non-trend, and a couple of non-technology non-trends.

Here are my quick-n-dirty notes of the other panelists tech trends, and other points that came up during the discussion.

Here is Shridhar’s list:

  • Shridhar’s trend #1: Immersive environments for consumers – from games to education. Partial virtual reality. We will have more audio, video, multi-media, and more interactivity. Use of keyboards and menu driven interfaces will reduce. Tip for students based on trend #1: don’t look down on GUIs. On a related note, sadly, none of the students had heard of TED. Shridhar asked them all to go and google it and to checking out “The Sixth Sense” TED video.
  • Shridhar’s trend #2: totally integrated communication and information dissemination.
  • Shridhar’s trend #3: Cloud computing, elastic computing. Computing on demand.
  • Shridhar’s trend #4: Analytics. Analytics for business, for government, for corporates. Analyzing data, trends. Mining databases.
  • Shridhar’s trend #5: Sophisticated design and test environments. As clouds gain prominence, large server farms with hundreds of thousands of servers will become common. As analytics become necessary, really complicated, distributed processes will run to do the complex computations. All of this will require very sophisticated environments, management tools and testing infrastructure. Hardcore computer science students are the ones who will be required to design, build and maintain this.

Monish’s list:

  • Monish’s trend #1: Infrastructure will be commoditized, and interface to the final user will assume increasing importance
  • Monish’s trend #2: Coming up with ideas – for things people use, will be most important. Actually developing the software will be trivial. Already, things like AWS makes a very sophisticated server farm available to anybody. And lots of open source software makes really complex software easy to put together. Hence, building the software is no longer the challenge. Thinking of what to build will be the more difficult task.
  • Monish’s trend #3: Ideas combining multiple fields will rule. Use of technology in other areas (e.g. music) will increase. So far, software industry was driven by the needs of the software industry first, and then other “enterprise” industries (like banking, finance). But software will cross over into more and more mainstream uses. Be ready for the convergence, and meeting of the domains.
  • Monish’s trend #4: Sophisticated management of centralized, huge infrastructure setups.

Anand’s list:

  • Anand’s trend #1: Sensors. Ubiquitous tiny computing devices that don’t even look like computers. All networked. And
  • Anand trend #2: The next billion users. Mobile. New devices. New interfaces. Non-English interfaces. In fact, non-text interfaces.
  • Anand’s trend #3: Analytics. Sophisticated processing of large amounts of data, and making sense out of the mess.
  • Anand’s trend #4: User interface design. New interfaces, non-text, non-keyboard interfaces. For the next billion users.
  • Anand’s trend #5: Multi-disciplinary products. Many different sciences intersecting with technology to produce interesting new products.

These lists of 5 trends had been prepared independently, without any collaboration. So it is interesting to note the commonalities. Usability. Sophisticated data analysis. Sophisticated management of huge infrastructure setups. The next billion users. And combining different disciplines. Thinking about these commonalities and then wondering about how to position ourselves to take advantage of these trends will form the topic of another post, another day.

Until then, here are some random observations. (Note: one of the speakers before the panel discussion was Deepak Shikarpur, and some of these observations are by him)

  • “In the world of Google, memory has no value” – Deepak
  • “Our students are in the 21st century. Teachers are from 20th century. And governance is 19th century” -Deepak
  • “Earning crores of rupees is your birthright, and you can have it.” – Deepak
  • Sad. Monish asked how many students had read Isaac Asimov. There were just a couple
  • Monish encouraged students to go and read about string theory.
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Web Scalability and Performance – Real Life Lessons (Pune TechWeekend #3)

In Depth, Live Blogging, Technology, , , ,

Last Saturday, we had TechWeekend #3 in Pune, on the theme of Website Scalability and Performance.  Mukul Kumar, co-founder, and VP of Engineering at Pubmatic, talked about the hard lessons in scalability they learnt on their way to building a web service that serves billions of ad impressions per month.

Here are the slides used by Mukul. If you cannot see the slides, click here.
Web Scalability & Performance

The talk was live-tweeted by @punetechlive and @d7ylive. Here are a few highlights from the talk:

  • Keep it simple: If you cannot explain your application to your sales staff, you probably won’t be able to scale it!
  • Use JMeter to monitor performance, to a good job of scaling your site
  • Performance testing idea: Take 15/20 Amazon EC2 servers, run JMeter with 200threads on each for 10 hours. Bang on your website! (a few days later, @d7y pointed out that using openSTA instead of JMeter can give you upto 500 threads per server even on old machines.)
  • Scaling your application: have a loosely coupled, shared nothing, stateless, distributed architecture
  • Mysql scalability tip: Be careful before using new features, or new versions. Or don’t use them at all!
  • Website scalability: think global. Some servers in California, some servers in London, etc. Similarly, think global when designing your app. Having servers across the world will drive architecture decisions. When half your data-center is 3000 miles from the other half, interesting, non-trivial problems start cropping up. Also, think carefully about horizontal scaling (lots of cheap servers) vs vertical scaling (few big fat servers)
  • memcache tip: pre-populate memcache with most common objects
  • Scalability tip: Get a hardware load balancer (if you can afford one). Amazon AWS has some load-balancers, but they don’t perform so well
  • Remember the YouTube algo for scaling:
    while(1){
    identify_and_fix_bottlenecks();
    eat_drink();
    sleep();
    notice_new_bottleneck();
    }
    there’s no alternative to this.
  • Scalability tip: You can’t be sure of your performance unless you test with real load, real env, real hardware, real software!
  • Scalability tip – keep the various replicated copies of data loosely consistent. Speeds up your updates. But, figure out which parts of your database must be consistent at all times, and which ones can have “eventual consisteny”
  • Hard lessons: keep spare servers at all times. Keep servers independent – on failure shouldn’t affect other servers
  • Hard lessons: Keep all commands in a script. You will have to run them at 2am. Then 3am. Then 7am.
  • Hard lessons: Have a well defined process for fault identification, communication and resolution (because figuring these things out at 2am, with a site that is down, is terrible.)
  • Hard lessons: Monitor your web service from 12 cities around the world!
  • Hard lesson, Be Paranoid – At any time: servers can go down, DDOS can happen, NICs can become slow or fail!

Note: a few readers of of the live-tweets asked questions from Nashik and Bombay, and got them answered by Mukul. +1 for twitter. You should also start following.

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Seminar on Google Wave: Intro, Gadgets, Robots – Pune GTUG Meet – Sept 12

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Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logoWhat: Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents a seminar on Google Wave – Introduction, Gadgets and Robots
When: Saturday, 12th Sept. 4pm to 6pm
Where: Synerzip. Dnyanvatsal Commercial Complex, Survey No. 23, Plot No. 189, Near Mirch Masala Restaurant , Opp Vandevi Temple, Karve Nagar (Map).
Registration and Fees: The event is free for all, no registration required.

Details
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.  A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Seminar Topics

  • Introduction to Google Wave
  • Building Extensions to Google Wave
  • Building Gadgets – Walk through of building a Gadget
  • Building Robots – Walk through of building a Java based Robot
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Pune Drupal Developers/Users meeting

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Drupal
Image via Wikipedia

What: Get-together of Pune’s Drupal development/user community
When: Sunday, 30th August, 4pm
Where: Richmond Ventures, C-30, Liberty Society – Phase 2, Behind Baskin Robbins Icecream, Near Pizza Hut, North Main Road, Koregoan Park
Registration and Fees: This meeting is free for all to attend. No registration required.

Details:

The Agenda for the meeting is :

  • Networking of Pune’s Drupal community
  • Discussion on Drupal based Social Networking sites
  • Discussion on Zen theme usage.

This is organized by Nikhil Kala and Rajeev Karajgikar. Anyone interested in knowing more about Drupal is also invited.

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PuneChips Event: ASIC Verification trends and challenges – Jagdish Doma, former director of VLSI design Conexant Systems – 20 Aug

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The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8...
Image via Wikipedia

What: Trends and Challenges by Jagdish Doma, former director of VLSI design for Conexant Systems
When: Thursday, 20th August, 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Where: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road. To reach Venture Center, go past NCL towards Pashan, pass the cricket ground adjacent to NCL and then you’ll find NCL Innovation Park / Venture Center on the right hand side. Map
Registration and fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

ASIC verification – Trends and Challenges

Jagdish will discuss the ASIC verification flow, various verification and validation techniques, and strength areas and limitations of each technique and the key challenges faced by companies during the ASIC verification cycle.

About the speaker – Jagdish Doma

Jagdish served as Director of VLSI Division for Conexant Systems in Pune where he was responsible for managing diverse teams involved in design, verification, validation, implementation, physical design and software development. During his 19 year career, Jagdish has held various senoir techical positions at Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic and AMD. He brings a wide range of experience in Architecture, Design, pre-silicon verification, post-silicon validation and leading organizations to successful product development. Jagdish holds Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from University of Pune and a Master’s in Electrical Engineering fromTexas A&M University.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. PuneChips was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start and grow their businesses.

PuneChips has been started by Abhijit Athavale, president and CEO of Markonix, and a high-tech marketing consultant. He has 16+ years of high-technology industry experience. Prior to Markonix, Abhijit spent over 11 years at Xilinx, Inc. in various engineering, applications and marketing roles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he has held executive management positions at several companies. He has a masters degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from University of Pune. He is an accomplished speaker and author of several publications including a book.

For more information, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneChips, and/or join the PuneChips mailing list.

Please forward this mail to anybody in Pune who is interested in semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

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PUG’s Microsoft Technologies Developer Conference – 8th/9th Aug

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PUG DevCon 2009
PUG DevCon 2009

What: Pune User Group (PUG)’s DevCon conference on Microsoft technologies
When: 8, 9 August, 9:30am to 5:30pm
Where: College of Engineering Pune (COEP)
Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone. Register here.

Details:
PUG Devcon is an event for developers to share, collaborate and meet up with like minded technology enthusiasts. Along with interesting interactive sessions, DevCon proves to be a platform for learning and sharing new technology. You get to meet the industry gurus, people in Microsoft and explore the issues in working on mobile devices, working on Windows application development, integrated Web solutions, Microsoft Office programming ,language enhancement and IDE productivity features. Issues such as easier development of applications across client types and migrating applications to .NET are all discussed here and new optimized solutions are provided.

DevCon is a Developer Conference from the developers, by the developers and for the developers. Developers may be professionals or students who will represent next generation developers. The agenda consists of two tracks that will cover .NET, Azure, Silverlight, and a bunch of other technologies. For information about the expected presenters look here.

Featured Products/Topics: .NET 4.0 Internals, Azure Services Platform, Silverlight 3 with Blend 3 Sketch Flow and DeepZoom, ASP.NET MVC, MS Office for Developers, PowerShell extending and embedding.

Recommended Audiences: IT Professionals, Microsoft Partners, Solution Architects, Software Developers, Students, Technical Decision Makers, Developers, Architects

For more information about the organizers, see the PuneTech profile of Pune User Group.

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Proto.in Facebook Developer Garage is free & open to all (not just proto.in attendees)

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Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in
Click on the logo to see all PuneTech articles about proto.in

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you should be aware that Proto.in, India’s premier startup event, is happening in Pune this weekend. Around the end of proto.in, there’s an event for Facebook application developers, which is actually open to all developers, not just those registered to attend proto.in. So all Pune facebook app developers, or potential facebook app developers should make a beeline for this event – a great place to meet a lot of experienced facebook developers from not just Pune, but the whole country.

Proto.in will be partnering with Facebook to organize the Facebook Developer Garage. It will have Ruchi Sanghvi, senior product manager at Facebook participating as the speaker. She will talk about how developers can create web applications on Facebook with social utility and business potential targeted towards the rapidly growing Indian market on Facebook. According to Pune Mirror Ruchi is:

a Fergusson College pass-out now settled in San Francisco. Ruchi, the product manager for Facebook News Feeds, is one of the brain’s behind Facebook’s current look.

The Garage should be useful for web developers who are interested in the Facebook developer contest (which has a total cash prize worth US$14,000. For more details on the Facebook Developer contest, please visit http://www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.)

As a passionate web developer trying to make an impact, you certainly cant miss this opportunity.

It will be at 5pm on Saturday 25th July, in the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent, S.B. Road. Just show up. It’s free, and no registration is required.

Event: IC Design Challenges in the Telecom sector – Shrinath Keskar, ex-MD Ikanos, India – 29th June

Events, punechips, , , ,
The integrated circuit from an Intel 8742, a 8...
Image via Wikipedia

What: Talk by Shrinath Keskar, fomer MD Ikanos Communications India, on IC Design Challenges in the Telecom Sector.
When: Monday, 29th June, 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Where: Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road. To reach Venture Center, go past NCL towards Pashan, pass the cricket ground adjacent to NCL and then you’ll find NCL Innovation Park / Venture Center on the right hand side. Map
Registration and fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required.

About the speaker – Shrinath Keskar

Shrinath Keskar, former M.D. of Ikanos Communications of India has over 17 years of experience in the field of Semiconductors. He joined Ikanos in the year 2000 and has been with the company since then. Shrinath also worked with Fortune 500 hindered companies such as Motorola and Sun Microsystems before joining Ikanos. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A &M and B.E. from College of Engineering, Pune.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. This event is the inaugural event for PuneChips. PuneChips was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start and grow their businesses.

For more information, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneChips, and/or join the PuneChips mailing list.

Please forward this mail to anybody in Pune who is interested in semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

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The PuneTech SMS Reminder Service – Get event reminders on your mobile

Events, Featured, punetech, ,

PuneTech logoHave you ever forgotten about an interesting tech event in Pune, and then regretted the fact that you did not attend it?

PuneTech is pleased to announce the Free PuneTech Event Reminder SMS service that will send you reminders about tech events in Pune one day before. Basically, this is a Google SMS channel, where we post the basic information about events: title, date, venue. In most cases, this will be posted twice – once when the event is announced (or when we find out about it) and once one day before the event. In case of events with submission/registration/nomination deadlines, we’ll also post a reminder a day before the deadline. Every reminder will be contained in a single SMS. For details, you’ll be expected to use a web browser to check out the PuneTech calendar (or ideally, you’ll already know all the details of the event because you are already subscribed to the PuneTech daily email updates (which is also free)).

This service is totally free. To subscribe, SMS “REGISTER” to +91 9870807070 to register with Google SMS channels, and when you receive confirmation, reply to that message with “ON PUNETECH”. Remember the second part – your PuneTech reminders will not start until you’ve sent the “ON PUNETECH” message. You can also subscribe via a web browser by going to the PuneTech SMS Channel page, sign in with your google account (i.e. if you use GMail, enter your GMail username and password, if you don’t have a google account, create one), and then follow the instructions there. For more details about the Google SMS service, see their homepage and FAQs.