Tag Archives: user groups

POCC Meeting: SEO; web scalability; SUN startup essentials, 13 Dec

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together with a 3-point agenda. 1. Search Engine Optimization, 2. Web scalability, 3. SUN startup essentials program

When: Saturday, 13th December, 4pm – 7pm

Where: SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone – no registration required

Details:

4pm – 5pm: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

In the last POCC meeting (Pain Points of Pune Startups), people wanted to know how to do SEO for their websites, and the consensus that emerged was that you should either do SEO yourself, or at least have a good understanding of SEO before you outsource it to a consultant. As to who would be a good consultant for SEO, someone suggested that we should simply do a google search on “SEO Pune” – whoever claims to be good in this area should be the first hit. We tried that and the first Pune company that showed up was Dimakh Consultants. We’ve invited CEO Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe to give members an overview of SEO.

Dimakh Consultants is a Pune-based web consulting company with a decade long specialization in web designing, application development, hosting, networking, SEO & SEM. To date, Dimakh has managed the set-up and delivery of 5 Internet Service providers all over India. He manages more than 20 servers placed all over the world and hosts more than 1600 websites in India, US, Europe and far east. He regularly conducts workshops on SEO and SEM around the country.

5pm – 6pm: Overview of Web scalability by Sun Microsystems; and overview of Sun’s Startup Essentials Program

Representatives from Sun Microsystems will give a presentation on scalability of websites – something they are in a unique position to understand since Sun’s servers and Sun’s MySQL database form the key elements of the stack for some of the biggest websites in the world. Specifically, they’ll talk about: Web Application & Performance Considerations, Web2.0 toolkit – An overview, Sun Systems for Web Applications, Getting Best out of MySQL on Solaris.

After that, Sun will give an overview of their Startup Essentials program. This is a program designed by Sun for startups. Get industry-leading servers starting under $750. Storage up to 70% off, installed and configured under 5 minutes. Access to their network of investors. Your choice of OS (Solaris, Linux or Windows). Open Source and discounted enterprise-class software. Free technical advice and training, discounted partner hosting, and discounted storage. Anyone can apply, and you get access to all the above if you are selected.

6pm – 7pm: General Networking

Mingle. Ask follow up questions to Dimakh, or the Sun folks. Try to recruit trespassers. Brag about your startup’s achievements. Ask people if they know any angel investors. Show people how to open a beer bottle in 10 different ways. Live-twitter all the exciting developments as the meeting progresses. Play housie. (Actually that is not part of the plan, but if SocialWebFactory shows up, who knows what will happen.) Maybe even watch a movie.

Message to Pune Startups

Nominate yourself for proto.in. See Santosh’s blog post to know why you should do this, and how it will help you.

Message to Everyone

This weekend is going to be a rather active weekend (again) for tech activities. Check the PuneTech calendar for details.

Problems faced by Pune startups, and suggested solutions

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Together, we can solve our problems faster than alone
Together, we can solve our problems faster than alone

The Pune OpenCoffee Club (POCC) had a meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the various pain points faced by Pune Startups, and to see what solutions or workarounds people had come up with. POCC member Mandar Vaze has captured the main points of the discussion for the benefit of those who were unable to attend. In places where my notes had additional info that’s missing from Mandar’s notes, I have taken the liberty of interspersing my points – those are in italics.

I joined the meeting slighly late. When I arrived there were about 50+ people seating in a circle, and few more people occupying seats on the sofa behind. Topic planned for the meeting was “Startups – pain points”.

Initial round of introductions


Internet connectivity :

  • BSNL seems to be the best in terms of stability
  • BSNL’s Business plans for internet not cost effective
  • Several startups use multiple Home connection plans – Is it legal to do this?
  • Someone mentioned that for the team of 15, 40GB/month plan is sufficient
  • (Another suggestion was to take a limited bandwidth BSNL connection in the office, and then do heavy downloads at home using your personal unlimited bandwidth connection.
  • If you are using multiple connections (possibly from different ISPs) to ensure stability, then free, open source software is available that can seamlessly allow you to multiplex between these two connections. -navin)

Dealing with Power cuts :

  • Laptops work best to avoid worrying about power cuts.
  • If you need to use Desktop, LCD better than CRT (low power usage -less load on UPS/inverter)
  • With laptops, team can work from home, in case extended power cuts

    • Assuming team mates stay in different area than office
    • When team grows, this may not scale – possible security issues
  • Suggest using 9-cell battery
  • Have common pool of spare charged batteries around to extend the battery life even further
  • Spare batteries cost around Rs. 3000 as against UPS for Rs. 5000
  • UPS/Inverter :
    • Anjali (I think) mentioned that 4.8 KVA inverter costs about Rs 48000
    • She also suggested that multiple smaller UPS better than single bigger one of higher capacity – avoid single point of failure.
    • Someone asked to post reliable vendor for UPS/Inverter

Incubation Space :

  • IT Park / Incubation centers were suggested as a solution where you don’t need to deal with any of these hassles. They take care of power, internet, and other facilities issues that you don’t want to worry about. Pune IT Park and Connaught Place were the two possibilities suggested. This entire section written by Navin with inputs from Amit since after actually visiting Pune IT Park and Connaught Place and clarifying many of the misconceptions people at the POCC meeting had about these places
  • At Pune IT Park the cost in the region of approximately 5500 per month, per person – and this includes the internet connection. (Someone at the meeting had indicated a cost of 8000 – which is incorrect.)
  • Facilities include shared reception, printer and fax machines, gym, swimming pool, 24×7 security, shared parking, internet connection for smaller (e.g. 4-person setup), free coffee/tea, (paid) cafeteria.
  • Someone mentioned that you can stay there for only 2 years after which you have to leave. This is not true.
  • Capacity of up to 20 seats is available currently (Someone mentioned that there is a long waiting list – that appears to be no longer true.)
  • Connaught place near Bund Garden has offices for rent – but their rates suggest that they are not targeting startups, but are probably geared towards senior executives of MNCs. Our rough calculations indicated that the cost would be in excess of 30,000 per month for two people.
  • Another possibility suggested by a few people was to convince some friend of yours who owns a company to give you a couple of seats to work on your startup. We’ve heard of a number of people going this route.

How to share experiences?

  • Several people seem to get stuck at same issues – How can we address this?
  • Wiki doesn’t work
  • (For many startup issues, especially those related to partnership / proprietorship / private limited, registrations, and other legal issues, Vikas Kumar, CTO of BrainVisa pointed out that he knows many of the answers, based on his own experiences, but doesn’t have the time to put the information on a wiki, or even to respond to questions on a mailing list. However, if someone were to call him up on the phone, he would be happy to help them out. -navin)
  • “Ask Pune Tech” was started as one possible solution for this problem.

Student internships

  • People wanted to know whether it is possible to successfully use students from local colleges to do useful work for the startup, either as part of a paid internship or as part of their final year project.
  • Many people have had bad experiences. Some had good experiences too. People had good experiences with the following colleges: COEP, PICT, MIT, SICSR.
  • Sahil, who is a student at SICSR, suggested that we should use the SICSR R&D cell, which has enthusiastic students who would be happy to work on such stuff. Just drop into SICSR and visit the R&D cell.

Other topics discussed

  • Anthony talked about Startup Hive – How resources can be shared. (Basic idea is for a bunch of startups to take space near each other, possibly in the same complex, and this would lead to a lot of synergies, energies and other goodness. -navin.)
  • There was a discussion about SEO/SEM – several people were of the opinion, that it is better to learn yourself than out source. (With this in mind, we are trying to organize a lecture on SEO from an expert for this month’s POCC meeting. An announcement will be made in a few days. -navin)
  • Shushrut mentioned about IBM SMB website. Similarly there is ICICI SME website. (These sites have lots of resources for startups. Check them out for answers to common questions. Another suggestion was ammas.com -navin)

Presentations :

Bandhan.com – Search engine for searching bride/groom

  • Main problem they are trying to address is how to market their product
  • They (bandhan.com) wish to “play nice” with established players like Bharat Matrimony and shaadi.com by not offering syndicated search to other sites

The Tossed Salad – Lifestyle magazine

  • Problem they are trying to solve – How to market
  • Several suggestions about finding niche, rather than being generic
  • Amit suggested looking at seekingalpha.com and punekar.in

After these presentations, there was Startup Cinema – “The office space”

About the Author – Mandar Vaze

Mandar Vaze is Linux Enthusiast since 1997, using linux at home on and off. He was associated with Twin Cities LUG in US, and PLUG after returning back to India. After working in corporate environment for 13 years, he has recently quit his job at Avaya. He plans to have his own business some day, but currently looking to be associated with some Pune based start-up as a consultant. He thinks Pune Tech is cool 🙂

What to expect at Barcamp Pune

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Update: Our hearts go out to the people of Mumbai, but our bodies continue their day-to-day activities in Pune. Barcamp Pune 5 will happen. It starts at 10am, at SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research), Model Colony, Atur Centre, Opp. Om Super Market, Pune (map).

Barcamp Pune 5 is this Saturday (29th November) and I am hoping that this time, a lot of people who are not familiar with the concept of barcamp will show up. Earlier, we wrote about what is barcamp, and why you should attend. For those still sitting on the fence, wondering whether to attend, let me try and give an idea of what to expect at BCP5.

The barcamp page shows 250+ registrations. So expect at least 150 people or more to show up.

Expect chaos. I mean that in a good way. Conferences are thoughtfully organized by committees of experts to include topics that you should know about. Barcamp is not a conference – it’s an unconference. No suits, no committees. What you will get is talks on topics that you want to know about.

Expect a tweet-up. At 5:30pm. A meeting of people who use and love twitter. If you are not a twitter-user yet, you should be. Attend the tweet-up to find out why.

Expect talks from a set of very wide-ranging topics (mostly tech): how to secure your home wireless network from hackers, PHP, how to build iPhone applications, the semantic web, using maps in your applications and websites, robotics, bootstrapping your startup. And many more. It’s an unconference, so can’t know in advance all the different presentations that will ultimately happen. And some of the presentations will actually happen with 4 people huddled around a laptop in a corner on the floor.

Expect enthusiasm. Expect to see lots of energy. People passionate about technology. Blogging. Web-2.0.

Expect to see people not just from Pune, but also Mumbai, Bangalore, Aurangabad, Hyderabad and other cities. Yes, barcamps are worth travelling 800km for.

Expect to see students, junior techies, people with 15+ years of experience, programmers, managers, designers, NGO volunteers, open source fanatics, .NET gurus, savvy businessmen and geeks.

Expect to make new friends. You’ll meet lots of interesting people. If you are thinking of a startup, you might meet your co-founder. If you are interested in Erlang, you might meet other Erlang enthusiasts. If you are a recruiter, you might meet your latest recruits. If you are single, you might meet your future partner (hey! it happens).

Expect to go off to dinner parties with strangers.

Expect to give and receive business cards – some old school habits die hard.

Expect people to take lots of photographs and upload them to flickr. Expect blog posts about barcamp to trickle in all through the next week. Expect wi-fi. Expect live-blogging. Expect twittering.

Expect struggling startups to demonstrate their work. Some of them would have been doing this for the nth time, because they’ve been going to every barcamp in the country to get visibility for their startup. In other cases, you’ll be the first people in the world to see the new product.

Expect the unexpected.

Expect to learn. To teach. To discuss. To argue. To agree. To disagree. To clap. To laugh. To giggle. To boo (yes, that happens too.)

Expect the boring people to stay at home, and only the interesting people to show up.

Expect those who wanted to come but could not to be profoundly unhappy.

Expect those who did not attend to have missed something great.

Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting: Pune startup’s pain points

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together. Solving the pain points of Pune’s startups

When: Saturday, 22nd November, 4pm – 7pm

Where: SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone – no registration required

Details:

The

Are you a Pune startup struggling with issues that you shouldn’t need to struggle with? Electricity. Access to good service providers: CA, STPI registration, Website design, hosting? Difficulty with hiring? Need an SEO expert, but no idea who is realiable/worth it? Looking for someone to help you with facilities/furniture? Looking for Masters/PhD in mathematics/statistics to consult and don’t know where to look? Its very likely that your peers have faced the same problems and some have found solutions the hard way. Let’s discuss in a group and look for specific suggestions from those who’ve been there, done that. We’ll try to moderate the discussion aggressively to ensure relevance, and prevent tangents and rambling, or pointless bitching. We’ll try to collect and tabulate the most useful answers and post them on the web for the benefit of others. If you are unable to attend the meeting, but do have a question that you would like to raise, you can email them to me (navin@punetech.com) and I’ll try to get them asked/answered.

Also, if you are a Pune startup and would like to demo your product to or present it to the community at this get-together, please get in touch with us.

The Pune OpenCoffee Club meets on the third Saturday of every month from 4 to 7 pm at SICSR. (This time, we moved it to the 4th Saturday due to a phantom conflict with Barcamp Pune.) In addition, there is Startup Cinema – information about with you can find on the POCC mailing list. Often, there are also other ad hoc meetings organized by members of POCC. See the PuneTech calendar for a comprehensive list of all upcoming tech events in Pune.

What is barcamp, and why you should attend barcamp Pune (Nov 29)

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What: Barcamp Pune 5

When: 29th November, all day

Where:  SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and fees: Are you kidding? (Actually, register at the barcamp homepage.)

What is barcamp?

A barcamp is a conference that is the opposite of conference. Conferences are arranged by people in suits who have expert committees to decide agendas, and scheduled printed on glossy paper 3 months in advance. By contrast, a barcamp is organized (or unorganized, actually) by the T-shirt and jeans types. There is no agenda, no schedule. You just show up, and anybody can announce a talk, and preferably it shouldn’t be pre-prepared. For a more formal introduction to barcamp, check out the wikipedia entry for barcamp. (Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t have an entry for barcamp!)

So anyway, a barcamp sounds like chaos, right? Surprisingly, it works very well. A barcamp is one of the best places to go to get a feel for the pulse of the tech community. You’ll meet interesting people and get introduced to interesting new technologies. Tarun Chandel, the grand old man of barcamps in Pune, said this after Barcamp Pune 4:

Let me go back around 20 years and take a look at the life of a developer. It was simpler than your life isn’t it? He just had to learn one or two languages and the career was rolling (you don’t believe me ask any of your bosses). Let me come back to you. I am sure you all know at-least 3 languages in which you can produce code for living. But how many of you are confident that you will be able to make a career like the guys did 20 years back?? The reality is that the innovation is happening at an unbelievable rate today, oh sorry I cant fool you guys you are insiders and as insiders we know that the splurge of various technologies, languages, platforms is because of the work that people have been doing for a long time. For an outsider there are too many things happening suddenly but for an insider this is not a surprise but a time when all the things are peeking and coming together perfectly. To be successful at this time we have to make sure that we are riding on the top of the tide. It is easier said than done. It takes a lot of time and effort to be just aware of all that is happening in the technology space. A developer needs to be aware of so many things at once and not only that he should be ready to work with newer things as early as they happen. It is not easy to keep pace with the speed of innovation and ever changing world of technology, how much time do you guys get out of your project work? The pressure is enormous to deliver, where is the time for other things?

Barcamp Pune or similar events are the place that gives you a present snapshot of the world around you (or let me put it this way gives you a heavy dose of all the technology related things that you missed or are still missing). There is a learning curve in all the places so is there a leaning curve in Barcamp Pune as well. You come here and get excited about new things technologies, you go back and whenever you get time, say the code repository server is down or your manger has fallen ill you can read in details about what you learned here. You come back for the next time and you attend a workshop on the same got to learn how to code or use the technology. You go back home and run some code get your hands dirty learn few new things. You again come here and this time you share with other campers what you have learned and they will share what they learned and you will improve yourself. Isn’t that great!!! I read somewhere that you retain 95% of what you share with others.

We have a very experienced Barcamp crowd in Pune but just for those who were there for the first time, let me repeat what I said at the starting session of the event that, the onus of getting best out of camp lies with you. There is a famous rule of Barcamp “Law of 2 feet” that is, you will have to use your 2 feet to walk to a place where you can learn, if you are not learning walk out of that place (no one will mind) and go to a place where you can learn or share. Meet as many people as you can and network and use this gathering of intelligent people wisely.

So mark your calendars, and head to SICSR for a Saturday of unorganized tech fun.

And check the PuneTech calendar for other exciting tech events that have been planned for you in the next few months (for example, I bet you did not know about the Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering?)

In the downturn, get involved with the tech community

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The next few months are going to be a thrilling time to be a techie in Pune. On the one hand, the financial meltdown is suddenly making its presense felt uncomfortably close to home – multiple companies are firing 5% of their employees, and ASSOCHAM promises more (retracted under pressure); bonuses are being cancelled; salaries are being reduced (yup! negative increments). The word “thrilling” goes both ways.

On the other hand, there are some really great tech events that are coming up and what better to do during a downturn than network with a bunch of people who are passionate about technology that you are interested in! (I know that a lot of you techies really dislike networking – I was like that once. One of these days, I am going to write an article for engineers on how to do networking without feeling like a cheap salesman.)

This is your chance to get involved with the tech community. It means increased exposure to interesting work that is going on elsewhere in Pune. It means improving your tech skills by becoming aware of latest trends and techniques. It means making friends with some really passionate people who share your interests. It means greatly increasing your chances of getting lucky.

With that in mind, I am listing the major tech events that are coming up soon. Many of them (but not all of them) are volunteer driven, so they need your help. Please get involved. Help the community, help Pune, and help yourself all in one shot.

Barcamp Pune 5 aka BCP5. The big daddy of volunteer-driven tech events in Pune. This will be the fifth installment. A must visit, if you want to see energy and enthusiasm. And it is in a bit of trouble as the date keeps getting postponed due to lack of a venue. Get involved, make it happen and become famous, and earn the gratitude of the community who are keenly looking forward to the barcamp. Date not yet fixed – tentatively November 15th (but almost certain to be postponed now).

The IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies. Not a volunteer driven event, but a big event for all Java lovers. If you work in Java, it would be difficult to justify why you are not attending, and Java people from all over India will be attending. Dates: 25 to 27 November.

ClubHack, a group of volunteers interested in educating the public on security issues, is organizing the ClubHack 2008 conference which will feature presentations and workshops on security issues that you must worry about in this big bad world of viruses, trojans, phishing, and all sorts of dangerous threats that are lurking around the corner waiting to pounce upon your computer and your bank account as soon as you let down your guard. Better to be prepared than to be sorry. Dates: 6 & 7 December.

The OpenSocial Developer Garage. A volunteer-driven get-together of OpenSocial developers from all over India. They are looking for a venue, for sponsors, for speakers, and for volunteers. Check out the OSD mailing list. Date: 20 December.

The TCS Excellence in Computer Science Week will feature lectures by experts from all over the world on the topic of de-centralized and co-operative computing. The last day to apply is today, so hurry. A world-class event is happening in your backyard, and is free – why wouldn’t you go? Date: 5 to 9 January.

Other, smaller, but more regular events:

The Pune GNU/Linux Users Group meets on the first Saturday of every month, but this time they postponed it by a day due to Diwali vacations. They are meeting tomorrow (Saturday, 8th November) at 4pm. Getting involved with the open source community is a great way to sharpen your skills, improve your resume and get to know some of the most passionate techies. They also have a Code Camp coming up on November 21st.

The Pune OpenCoffee Club, a group of Pune-based entrepreneurs and expectant entrepreneurs meets regularly and informally. Just yesterday they got together for a movie courtesy Entrip.com. The POCC monthly meeting, normally on the third Saturday of every month, might happen on the 4th Saturday (22 November) this month so as to not clash with the barcamp. Keep checking the PuneTech calendar – the event will be announced there soon.

The Pune Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI-Pune), is a very active organization, and their regular monthly meetings happen on the second Saturday every month. That luckily happens to be tomorrow, and this time will feature three talks, one on “Six Sigma for organizational excellence”, another talk giving information on the “Right to Information” (and you have a right to have that information), and finally one on “Trends in Project Management”.

So get out there, and start networking, start volunteering. Please.

Pune GNU/Linux Users Group meeting – Nov 8

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What: Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) monthly meeting

When: Saturday, 8th November. 4pm to 6pm.

Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), 7th floor, Atur Center, Model Colony, Pune, India (Map)

Registration and Fees: The event is free for all. No registration required.

Details

The PLUG meeting is open to all, there are no charges or pre-requisites to attend the meeting. If you are intrested in FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) you are welcome to the meeting. If you want to give a talk or a demo, you are welcome.

This meeting happens on the first Saturday of every month, at the same place and time (but was delayed by a week this month because of Diwali). Usually, a PuneJava talk organized by IndicThreads also happens immediately after the PLUG meeting, but is not happening probably because of the big upcoming Java conference around the end of November organized by the same people.

As usual, keep checking the PuneTech calendar for interesting tech events in Pune.

Growing a Community Powered Website

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(In this article, Manas Garg, a regular contributor to PuneTech, explores the various factors involved in the growth of a community powered wesbite. These ideas are relevant to any website/company that expects to get a lot of its content from the actions of its users – and there are a number of such sites from SadakMap, and JustMeans to the Pune OpenCoffee Club, and of course, PuneTech itself. Even otherwise, these are important issues that any technologist living in a web-2.0 world must understand.)

Community Powered Websites (CPWs) are a rage today. And there are good reasons for that. First, you only build a website and the content (which is the primary value to these sites) comes from people. These people don’t charge you anything, in fact, you can make some money by running ads to these very people.

Secondly, the people who bring in the content also become the users of the website. Which means, people bring the content, people consume the content, and you just provide a framework for doing that using a website. Great!

Two primary factors contributing to the success of a Community Powered Website (CPW) are its tendency to grow and its immunity to abuse. This is, of course, in addition to the functional value that this website has.

Growth for a CPW means, more data, more contributors and more users. Simple. And immunity to abuse means when bad people come to your site to do bad things, your site can shrug off these attacks and get on with life. For Wikipedia, a bad thing is someone putting spam on a page. For twitter, a bad thing is someone hacking the system and making thousands of people follow him/her.

In this article, I have put down some of my thoughts on how we can make a CPW “tending to grow”. I do not claim expertise in this area. Nor do I claim to be exhaustive. I am just trying to make sense out of the way web is evolving today and community power is a very interesting phenomenon in that.

So, let’s start…

For any CPW, we anyway have to do things which people find valuable/useful and for which they would want to use the website in the first place. For instance, facebook, delicious, twitter, wikipedia have some fundamental value for which people would like to use them. On top of that functional value, there is a social design which makes them “tending to grow”.

A simple example is Blogger. It has some functional value (i.e. a blogging platform) for which people use it. But as long as the game is purely functionality based, people will choose Blogger only if its functionality is the best. Tomorrow, if a new blogging platform with better functionality comes along, new blogs may use that platform. That’s the reason blogger team is adding some social touch so that more and more people “choose” blogger if their contacts are already on blogger.

So, this is the “tendency to grow”. It is outside the purview of functionality. And it’s becoming more and more important because it’s becoming very easy for anyone to match a given set of functionality.

Now, let’s look at the contributors to this “tendency to grow”…

The Network Effect

In short, network effect is when a service becomes more and more valuable when more and more people use it which thereby increases its adoption and hence the value. This creates a self sustaining loop. The loop doesn’t go infinite as eventually there is a max limit to the final value. But it can certainly take us very far.

The general purpose social networking sites are the best examples of network effect. More the users we have, more the chances of getting more users. That’s why they have grown phenomenally in a short time span. Delicious doesn’t trigger the network effect even though it is social. There is no reason for me to join delicious even if all my friends are using it. On the other hand, I would naturally join LinkedIn because all my “connections” are using LinkedIn. Blogger, by being more social, is trying to bring in the network effect.

How to bring in the network effect is a subject worth another complete article or may be a book. Suffice it to say that a network effect has to be designed for in any CPW. Once we have modeled our website, we can test that model (mentally of course) for what kind of network effect this model can produce. If we are building a CPW but don’t design it for network effect, we are limiting the mileage we can get out of it.

Ease of contribution

It’s difficult to have a general purpose definition of what contribution is as it depends on the website. For flickr, photographs are contributions, for facebook, pretty much everything a user does on the site is a contribution. Even visiting someone’s profile on facebook is a contribution to facebook as the very fact that you visited that profile is shown on that profile.

On every Wikipedia page, you’ll see a clear “Edit” link to edit that page. For every section within the page, the edit link for that section is well placed. It almost “invites” you to edit. When the very design of a website has a look that invites you for contributions, it’s got the tendency to growth 🙂

For receiving contributions, there are two possibilities –

  1. Unintentional contribution. We contribute bookmarks to delicious for our own purpose. We contribute photographs to flickr for our own purpose. While we are doing our own things, unintentional contributions are being made to the system. When we share something with our friends on facebook, the system is getting richer automatically even though the users are not working towards making the system richer 🙂
  2. Intentional contribution. Wikipedia is a place where people specifically contribute with the intention of making the system richer. It’s not like sharing something with friends or saving something for future reference. There is an explicitness here.

Needless to say, it’s easier to get people on board when their contribution is unintentional i.e. they are doing their own thing and the system just gets richer. This lends a greater tendency to grow to the CPW.

I am sure there would be several other aspects of making a CPW tending to grow which escaped my limited knowledge and the retarded mind. Will some people with experience in this area throw a little bit of light here?

About the Author – Manas Garg

About the author: Manas is interested in a variety of things like psychology, philosophy, sociology, photography, movie making etc. But since there are only 24 hours in a day and most of it goes in sleeping and earning a living, he amuses himself by writing software, reading a bit and sharing his thoughts.
About the author: Manas is interested in a variety of things like psychology, philosophy, sociology, photography, movie making etc. But since there are only 24 hours in a day and most of it goes in sleeping and earning a living, he amuses himself by writing software, reading a bit and sharing his thoughts.
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POCC Meetup Reminder – Meet Pune Entrepreneurs on 18th Oct

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What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together. Startup speed date. Get to know a lot Pune startups/entrepreneurs in a short time.

When: Saturday, 18th October, 4pm – 7pm

Where: SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone, but RSVP unmesh at gmail dot com

Details:

The idea is for POCC members to get to know the city-entrepreneurs better and on the flip side, the entrepreneurs get to practice their elevator-pitch, field biting questions, and maybe find that one person they sorely need on their team. Please note that this is not a hiring event so please leave those resumes behind.

Here’s the format of a Startup-speed-date:
1. All the startups will first give a brief introduction.
2. Startups will occupy tables
3. Folks would get to do a sit-down with the startup for a max of 5 (? tbd) minutes
4. At end of the 5 min round the folks move on to the next table
5. this process continues till all in the room have gotten a chance to meet the ones manning the tables
6. At the end of the event you have a chance to win prizes (no iPods – all startups here) by guessing the startup from quiz questions.

Entrepreneurs signed up so far

1. ThinkingSpace Technologies – http://thinkingspace.in
2. Chroma Systems Pvt Ltd. – http://www.chromasystems.com/
3. Lipikaar – Express yourself in Language – http://www.lipikaar.com/
4. pringOO – express your Individuality – http://www.pringOO.com
5. Shop Online at Laxmi Road – http://www.laxmiroad.in
6. http://www.justmeans.com – News, Jobs, and Networks for people who create change
7. Pay for Performance SEM Solution – http://www.Sokrati.com
8. A Wissen Systems initiative – http://startupforstartups.com/
9. Kaboodle – Social Shopping Network – http://www.kaboodle.com
10. Information Engine (Search Startup) called “42” – http://42.dnsdojo.com/wiki42/42_video.html
11. AI for information access on mobile – http://www.alabot.com/
12. Sales/Marketing services for SME’s – http://www.markonix.com
13. Contextual widgets for your website/blog – http://hover.in
14. Prasanna Walimbe – http://www.virtuaresearch.com/ SaaS for equity research.
15. Parth Pandya – http://www.wissentechnologies.biz Provider of software solutions

…and the list is growing.

If you are an entrepreneur then you should sign up, because letting the community know what you are upto is always a good thing. Just send an email to unmesh at gmail dot com. If you are interested in the startup ecosystem in Pune, you should be there.

The Pune OpenCoffee Club meets on the third Saturday of every month from 4 to 7 pm at SICSR. Often, there are also other ad hoc meetings organized by members of POCC. See the PuneTech calendar for a comprehensive list of all upcoming tech events in Pune.

Tech User Groups / Communities / Mailing lists in Pune

Miscellaneous, , ,

This is information about various technology-oriented groups and organizations in Pune. As Gireendra Kasmalkar advises getting involved in communities like this is an important factor in your success. So, pick one (or more) and get involved!

If you are aware of an active tech group in Pune that is not on this list, let us know and we’ll add it.

And of course, in this list, don’t forget PuneTech, your one stop shop for all information about interesting technology in Pune: events, news, companies, technologies, and people. Subscribe now for updates by email or via RSS. If the information isn’t already there in the PuneTech wiki, then ask us and well try to find it for you.