Tag Archives: web

Hello Android: An overview and group discussion of Google’s mobile platform – June 6th

Events, , , , , , ,

Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logoWhat: Google Technology Users Group (Pune GTUG) presents an overview and group discussion on Google Android with Sushrut Bidwai
When: Saturday, 6th June. 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. Register here.

Details
Agenda for this meet:

  • Brief History of Android
  • Android Phones
  • Android Experiments
  • What is Android?
  • What’s in new SDK
  • Android Architecture in detail
  • Application Fundamentals
  • User Interface
  • Resources and Assets
  • Data Storage
  • Content Providers
  • Security and Permissions
  • Developing Android Applications In Eclipse, with ADT
  • First Android Application
  • Further Reading

About the Speaker: Sushrut Bidwai

For more information about PuneGTUG, see the PuneTech wiki profile of PuneGTUG. For other tech events happening in Pune, see the PuneTech calendar.

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TZen: Community Powered Innovation with the PlanetAikon platform

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planet-aikon-logoPlanetAikon is a forum that allows “community powered innovation”. It is a Pune-based startup which allows its members to “connect, collaborate and co-create”. It strives to be a unique innovation ecosystem bringing together a community of ideators, contributors and sponsors – in other words, it connects the guys with the bright ideas, the guys with the money, and the guys with skills and time to implement the idea.

This is the story of TZen, one of PlanetAikon’s success stories. It is written by Prateek Dubey and originally appeared on the PlanetAikon Blog, and is republished here with permission.

TZen – The Tool whose Time has Come

Hi- I am Prateek Dubey and I have a Story to share with You – The Story of Tzen

The Inspiration and the Rationale

It all started when Zensar Technologies Testing Center of Excellence decided about 2 yrs ago to develop a test tool which will be used for Manual Testing for Projects in Zensar and to encourage use of Test Tools among associates. Add to that the prohibitive cost of branded Testing tools and the Training & Upgrade costs associated with it were the significant business drivers which strengthened our resolve to build such a tool.

Zensar Technologies Limited
Image via Wikipedia

We developed our first Test Tool prototype which was a Test Management Layer over an Opensource Defect Management Tool called “Bugzilla”, which was based on technologies like CGI, perl and mysql.

We soon realized that our prototype was not going to fulfil the future requirements of Test Management, as CGI was slow and handling large data in an efficient way was a challenge. This was the time when we started a new prototype which was based on new AJAX Technology. An article about a newly introduced web services concept called REST sparked further ideas. After a month of design and re-design we finally had a draft design ready. We chose php for implementing our web services to support the development of a quick, easy to understand and highly responsive tool. We wanted this application to be a full-fledged WebTop Application, keeping in mind that we were designing it for the future. We came up with a prototype which was named “TZen” by our project manager Vishal Wani. Vishal encouraged us to do a Demo of our Prototype to some internal projects. The Demo was an instant hit as nobody had ever seen a Web Application which loaded only once and then ran on the browser as a Desktop Application.

With Vishal’s and Testing Practice Head Prem Apte’s continued support, we started development of our product with help from Testing Community in Zensar. As we developed TZen further we were facing serious technology challenges as “Ajax” was a new technology and we were at par with rest of the world in exploration of the same. Thus, every time we ran into an issue we had to resolve it mostly by ourselves. We were also using Technologies like Yahoo UI library and Dojo, it took us around 6 months to come up with a first fully functional TZen prototype. We deployed it at various projects and got a lot of feedback on our implementation, TZen was still very basic in functionality and we still had a lot of work to be done. During this time we had a lot of organizational changes in team and finally we were left as a 2 member team from a 4 member team.

Reinventing TZen with Community Powered Innovation

TZen went slow for about 6 months until recently when it got revived by a Zensar Opensource Innovation initiative with the help of Planetaikon Platform. We started with significant doubts about what we could achieve through an Open Community involvement. But with support of NASSCOM (under their Innovation Initiatives) and the leadership at Zensar we soon found ourselves inundated by requests from individuals from other companies to join this initiative.

  1. We had the usual initial teething issues as folks were adapting to working on a on-line collaborative co-creation platform (as against meeting face-to-face or the “business-as-usual” of e-mail exchanges).
  2. We got a lot of feedback from participants which led us to shortlist 27 (twenty seven) new features to the existing version of our tool.
  3. Those who contributed did so because of their passion to create something and did so in after-office hours and on weekends. In approximately 5 months time we were able to come up with our Release 1.1 with those 27 additional features which we have again contributed back to the community.
  4. Our Vision is to develop TZen into the most successful Opensource Test Management Platform. Our Team size has now grown to 66 (Sixty Six)!
  5. TZen is designed ground up to be Opensource and Agile development compliant product. It can be developed quickly and tested easily. This was recently re-integrated when a small set of students with only a few days of TZen exposure, created a “Commenting System” for TZen , which is going to be featured in the next TZen release again a validation of the value that communities can provide

TZen – A Snapshot

TZen provides most features that a Test Management Tools must have. These include:

  • Requirement Management
  • Test Plan Management
  • Test Case Management
  • Test Execution Management
  • Defect Management (integrated with Mantis)
  • Reports and Exports at various levels

The Road Ahead

As we progress, we look forward to the community to help us take this product to new heights. Some of the features we plan to include are

  • Extensive graph and Chart support
  • Flexible Imports
  • Custom Fields
  • Server pull services and more….

TZen has got a lot of business, technical and innovation opportunity ready to be explored and taken forward, improvements at every level are in progress.

We are now throwing open another call to professionals who are keen to participate in taking TZen to its next high. We are looking for Php 5 developers, Testing Domain Experts, Usability Domain Professionals and Testers.

Come add to our adrenalin and let us show the world how the audacity of Ideas can be supported by the passion of communities.

Join us @TZen on Planetaikon. We are counting on YOU.

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PuneGTUG: What Google Technologies would you like to hear about?

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Pune Google Technologies User Group GTUG logoThe Pune Google Technologies User Group (PuneGTUG) is a group of developers interested in various Google technologies – from the Google App Engine, to Google Charts, to Google Maps and a whole bunch of others that make development of web applications (and in some cases non-web applications) easy (and of course they are free). The PuneGTUG has regular meetings where somebody gives and overview of a particular Google technology, to give developers an idea of what is possible with this technology, why use it, and how to get started. It is also a great place to meet like-minded developers in Pune.

Last weekend, for example, PuneGTUG had a presentation on the Google App Engine. The presentation was attended by about 25 people, and Pranav Prakash did a good job of giving an overview of GAE and also built a sample app right there to give the audience an idea of what exactly is involved in building an app. The slides of the talk are here.

PuneGTUG would like to hear from you as to what technology you are most interested in learning about. More generally, they are interested in finding out how this forum can be made more useful for you. And, of course, if you could speak on one or more related topic, then please let them know – speakers are always welcome.

So please fill in this form, to let them know.

And if you’re interested in keeping in touch with the activities of the PuneGTUG, join the PuneGTUG mailing list, and subscribe to the PuneGTUG blog.

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Pune Rails Meetup #1 – 21st May

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Pune Rails LogoWhat: A get together for Pune’s Ruby on Rails enthusiasts
When: Thursday, 21st May, 8pm
Where: North Main Lounge, Koregaon Park
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. No registration required
Links: Follow @punerailsmeetup on twitter, Facebook Pagex

Details:
A meetup for all the developers in and around Pune working on ruby on rails – the coolest web technlogy available. A meetup to chill out together and talk! It is being organized for the first time to initiate and encourage interaction between the rails community in Pune!

Also: Check the Facebook Page for PuneRailsMeetup

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Joomla Training by JUG Pune – 9th May

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joomla-logoWhat: Joomla Training for beginners by Joomla User Group Pune
When: Saturday, 9th May. 11am to 1pm
Where: Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Atur Centre, Model Colony. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. You need to register here. The registration currently appears to be full, but if you are enterprising enough, I’m sure you can get registered even now

Details:

If you don’t know about the Joomla User Group Pune (JUG Pune), you’ve not been paying attention. They recently organized the very successful Joomla! Day India.

Now, for those who were always interested in Joomla! but were afraid to ask, JUGPune has organized a short training course introducing beginners to Joomla! The training will cover:

  1. Introduction to a CMS
  2. Key advantages of Joomla
  3. Creating pages and menus in Joomla
  4. Introduction to modules, plugins and components

Unfortunately, the registration page indicates that the registrations are full currently. But don’t let a little thing like a housefull stop you. I’m sure that if you are really interested, and if you pain the organizers enough, they’ll increase the registrations to allow you to register. The place to whine is the JUGPune mailing list, or even on twitter.

And as usual, keep an eye on the PuneTech calendar, because you don’t want to miss all the interesting tech events that happen in pune every week.

Internet Traffic Tracking and Measurement

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comScore Search Ratings, Dec. 2005-2006, Live,...
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr

(As the web upgrades to web-2.0, it becomes a difficult challenge to figure out the value of companies that are serving this market. Since most web-2.0 companies are in an early stage of their evolution, they can’t be measured on the basis of the revenues they are earning. Instead, one needs to guess at the future earnings based on measuring the thing that they’ve currently managed capture – i.e. the number and demographics of visitors, and the amount of attention they are paying to the site. Pune-based entrepreneur Vibhushan Waghmare, who has co-founded a marketing analytics startup, MQuotient, gives us an overview of this space, points out some problems, and wonders if there is an opportunity for some entrepreneur to step in and provide solutions.)

Introduction

A good product or service will always attract appreciation and success, but what will make it stand out from crowd and fetch the premium is knowledge of exactly how good it is from the rest. Qualitative strategy decisions are important to set the direction, but real numbers and insights from these numbers are required to actually know how fast/slow is one moving in that direction and how far it is from the target.

This applies to online internet businesses as well. As against the established brick-and-mortar businesses which are driven primarily by monetary profitability, evolving online businesses have been searching for the parameters to judge and measure the success or failure of the business.

A few days before the Dot Com bust (of early 2000s) happened, we had seen how internet companies’ valuation shot off the roof based on parameters like eyeballs they generated – and hypothetically – could be monetized. We had ExciteAtHome paying $780 million for BlueMountain.com, an online greeting cards company with 11 million monthly visitors and negligible revenues (which was sold to American Greetings after 2 years for just $35 million!). Back then, page-hits on the servers was what each site measured and investors bought into.

Today we are into web2.0 world, and parameters for measuring success of online business have also evolved to 2.0 version. Before the Lehman Brothers folded up their shop, we had valuations of these socionets soaring to astronomical levels – all based on the unique users they can generate. Page-hits have given way to page-views per unique user, and now we talk about more evolved and derived parameters like unique users visiting the site and time spent by each unique user on the website. With the ghosts of Dot Com bust not yet laid to rest, investors and entrepreneurs are much more cautious and are becoming scientific in tracking and measuring the internet traffic. Still every now and then, we keep getting news about socionets with their latest 2.0 apps being chased by good money because of their platform of involved users, although all that they do there is poke each other and take up a challenge of some random quiz. We all know the problems giants like Google are facing when it comes to monetizing a socionet like Orkut.com. Economists have predicted 8 of the last 5 economic meltdowns, and I don’t want to sound like one. I just want to point out to you the issues faced by online businesses today.

User Panel based traffic estimation

I was reminded of these measurement arguments when last weekend I attended an interesting talk organized by Pune OpenCoffee Club. We had owner of a reputed online gaming portal talking about the kind of traffic his games attract. He used comScore extensively to compare himself in the online gaming world and stated that getting into the top 5 of the comScore list of online gaming sites worldwide is the target he has set for himself. (I don’t know whether the list was of page views or unique users these gaming sites are generating). Definitely a great target to chase!

Image representing comScore as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

While comScore does provide an elaborate analysis of the website traffic and is considered a standard worldwide, before we set our business targets based on it, we need to understand the methodology used for this tracking. comScore has a panel of around 2 million internet users worldwide (16,000 in India) and these users install monitoring software from comScore on their computers. This monitoring software is used to determine which websites are being visited by these users, and how much time they are spending on each site. comScore then uses extensive statistical methods to extrapolate these numbers to the behaviour of all the users (not just comScore’s user panel). More details on methodology are here). They have elaborate analysis like time spent by each user, IP tracking, repeating users, incoming and outgoing traffic and many more such details.

But what needs to be noticed is the fact that comScore excludes traffic from cyber-cafes and users under age 15. For India, I am sure that is a sizable mass of internet users. And when it comes to activities like online gaming, I am afraid, absolute numbers shown by comScore might be drastically away from the reality. Cyber cafe still remains an important point of access for Indians and excluding this traffic can result in misleading conclusions. Internet is being taught in schools and at least in cities, school kids are using internet extensively for both studies and entertainment purposes. In such situation, excluding users under age 15 might not always provide the best traffic numbers, especially for activity like online gaming.

Image representing Alexa as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

The other good bet in terms of tracking online traffic is Alexa.com. Alexa again, is a panel research based on the information gathered through a browser toolbar that their panel of users download and install in their browser. However in over more than a decade that I have spent on internet, I have not seen a single browser with Alexa toolbar. Apart from the high-end users of internet, I wonder if an average internet user would actually go to www.alexa.com and download and install their toolbar.

There are some other tracking and measurement services available, but mostly it has been Alexa and comScore who are quoted for such purposes.

One can argue that both comScore and Alexa work based on a random sample and hence same error in reporting would appear across traffic measurement for all sites. Given this, Alexa and comScore can be reliably used to compare two internet destinations or to detect any deviation from normal trend. However for absolute numbers, I guess there is lot more needed to be done.

For developed countries where most of the traffic originates from home, school or offices and very less from cyber cafes, these numbers might work, but for India with its huge cyber cafe traffic, I guess a more extensive tracking system is required. Cyber cafes continue to be important point of access, often the only access point in tier II and III cities. I have seen young school kids flocking these cyber cafes which serve more as gaming parlours; parents creating matrimony profiles of their children with the help of assistant (generally the owner) at the cyber cafe; and young college students playing pranks on their friends through Orkut and also getting their first experience to mature content over internet. comScore is missing this traffic by excluding cyber cafes.

Although this traffic might not be very huge in terms of absolute numbers, general observation is that these new users of internet (who learn how to use internet in cyber cafes) are more likely to click on ads as online behaviour has not matured to differentiate an online advertisement from a genuine article. I once saw a school kid trying to fill up a life insurance form because the advertisement offered some lucky draw prize on filling the form (Of course he never completed the form for the lack of PAN number :-)). This audience would be of the least interest to all the online advertisers and brands since they hardly convert into any transaction; however these would be the guys who would most likely click on all those online advertisements and hence form important part of the online advertisement industry.

Is there an entrepreneurship opportunity here

I am sure that all hosting servers do have the exact numbers about traffic coming to them, however key is in profiling this traffic and consolidating and analysing this information into useful insights. Quite often websites who try to track and measure their traffic resort to putting javascripts on their pages for this purpose. This adds to page-weight and slows down the site, a significant problem in country like India where high-speed broadband is still a luxury. These efforts give reasonable tracking and measurement of traffic from server side alone. However to prove the worthiness of traffic generated by website, system needs to track the demographic details of this traffic. System should provide information about the age, education profile, income level and other details in which advertisers and investors would be interested. Of course proxy variables need to be used for this tracking along with all the principles of market research and with due care of privacy of the user. Also the system should be encompassing enough to take care of diversity in internet usage as we see in India and in developed western countries and also in non-English speaking countries.

Creating such a tracking and measurement system for India would need investment, and given the current level of online advertisement spends in the country it needs to be analyzed whether this investment is justified.
Do you guys see an entrepreneurship opportunity in this?

About the author – Vibhushan Waghmare

Vibhushan is a co-founder of MQuotient, a Pune-based startup that uses cutting-edge quantitative analytics and mathematical modeling to build software products for marketing analytics, and in general deliver solutions for enterprise marketing challenges. Before co-founding MQuotient, Vibhushan was managing the Search product at Yahoo! India. He is an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and an Electrical Engineer from REC, Nagpur. He has also held positions with Amdocs & Cognizant Technology Solutions. Check out his blog, his linked-in page, or his twitter page for more about him.

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PuneTech Comment Policy

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PuneTech is a for-the-community, by-the-community site, and comments by our readers play an important part of the content. However, to ensure that the discussion always stays healthy, constructive and safe, we occasionally have to delete some of the comments. This note lays out our comments policy to help the community understand what kinds of comments we delete, and why.

PuneTech comment policy – Short version

  if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;

In select cases, we might allow a comment in spite of violating one of the above rules, if it has other redeeming qualities. Also, if we delete a comment, and you really, really want your voice heard, we suggest a workaround that will allow the world to still see the comment.

PuneTech comment policy – Long version

Relevance

Our primary objective is to provide PuneTech readers with focused, relevant articles and discussions. Anything that distracts from this reduces the value of PuneTech for our readers. Hence, any comment that has nothing to do with the article (and trust me, we get a bunch of these), will be deleted (unless we find it very interesting in its own right). If you want a job, please post your resume on naukri.com – don’t post a comment here. If you find yourself compelled to beg for jobs on PuneTech, seriously consider changing careers.

Personal Attacks

We are trying to build a community here, not poison it. Something about the internet makes people more rude than they would be in real life. Please resist the temptation. We love a good argument, we are after all argumentative Indians. But please argue the issues. You might be surprised to discover that it can be done without attacking the character of the other person.

Abusive Language

If it is worth saying, it can be said in polite language. If you have abusive language in a boring comment, we’ll delete it. If you have abusive language in an interesting comment, we will, at our discretion, remove the offending words, or sentences. If you don’t want your comment mangled like this by us, use polite language.

Defamation

PuneTech is a non-commercial website that is run by us on a part-time basis. We make no money from PuneTech. Which means that we have neither the time, nor the money to get involved in legal issues. We cannot afford to retain lawyers to get accurate legal advice. In the absense of that, we have to make a guess based on our understanding of the law. And anything that we think exposes us to legal liability, will be deleted.

Here is our limited understanding of the law:

If something can hurt the reputation of another person or company, legally, we can publish it if and only if it is true.  This is tricky because we need to be sure of the truth before we feel safe. Just because it is on wikipedia, does not make it true. Just because Times of India published it, does not make it necessarily true. And we can be sued even if we are simply relaying info published by someone else.

Even if the damaging statements are contained in a comment made by a third-party commenter (i.e. somebody other than us) we are still obligated to remove the comment. Otherwise PuneTech can be held liable.

So it boils down to this: if we cannot verify the truth of a damaging claim in a comment, we will delete the comment.

Please note, just because it is true, does not necessarily mean that we will allow a comment. The earlier filters of relevance, rudeness, etc. still apply. If we are unsure about the “public good” of a true but damaging statement, we will delete the comment.

Other Objectionable Content

Other reasons why comments might fall afoul of the laws are: obscenity; hurting religious sentiments; promoting violence; against security of the state; or infringing of someone’s right to privacy. In most cases, these will get deleted for violating one of our earlier policies (e.g. irrelevance, personal attack, etc.) . In the rare case that the comment somehow manages to not violate any of the earlier policies, it can still get deleted for being against the law.

Workaround

When we delete one of your comments, we are not really preventing you from expressing yourself. Please feel free to go ahead and post it on your own blog. If for some reason, you are ashamed of putting your own comment on your own blog, go ahead and create a brand new blog on blogger.com just for holding this one comment. It’s easy, it’s free, and anybody can do it. Then post a link in the comments on PuneTech. If it is relevant to the post, we’ll probably allow the link to remain.

Suggestions

If you have any feedback for us, please leave a comment below, or send us an email. The comment is subject to the same policies (ha! ha!) unless we decide to change the policy based on your suggestion. In any case, we promise to read everything, even if we delete it.

Moderation

Comments on PuneTech are moderated. Which means that one of us might have to take a look and approve the comment before it appears on the site. Sometimes, it takes us a while to get around to doing this. Please be patient. Don’t post the comment multiple times. If you are unsure of whether your comment has reached our moderation queue, send us an email.

Further Reading

What I’ve learned from Hacker News by Paul Graham. A good introduction to the issues to be considered when deciding why and how to moderate comments on a site.

Free to blog but accountable you are. The Supreme Court of India weighs in on blogging and online expression. – Dhananjay Nene

Of blogs, bloggers and freedom of expression – Mutiny.in

Bloggers Legal Guide from EFF – Note this applies to US law, but still worth reading, as it does a great job of explaining the issues.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dhananjay Nene, Rohit Srivastwa, Amit Kumar Singh, Unmesh Mayekar, Manas Garg, Rohas Nagpal, and Debasis Nayak for discussions that helped us clarify our thinking and craft this policy. Note: this comment policy does not necessarily reflect the views of these people – it is just that they helped us while we were struggling to figure out what the comment policy should be.

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Why you need to learn Ruby and Rails

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Official Ruby logo
Image via Wikipedia

With increasing visibility for the Ruby programming language, and the passion that people show for Ruby-on-Rails for web development, we felt that we would like to delve a little into what makes Ruby so cool and Rails so hot. Especially, in light of the fact that Ruby Fun Day is happening in Pune on Saturday, we wanted to give our readers a feel for why the should consider attending Ruby Fun Day. With that in mind, we invited Nick Adams of Entrip and SapnaSolutions (both those companies use Ruby-on-Rails as a cornerstone of their offerings), to tell us why Ruby and why Rails.

Ruby is an interpreted language like Python, Php, Perl, and a whole host of other popular Unix based languages. It was invented in 1992 by a Japanese man. However it only shot to fame in the last few years when the web development world started getting very excited about a new framework called ‘Ruby on Rails’, which arrived in 2005. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’ll look at Ruby in its own right. Then, we’ll take a look at Rails and what’s cool about it.
The first thing you’ll notice about Ruby is it’s beautifully easy syntax:
5.times { print "Hello Pune!" } 
Goodbye to semi colons, variable declaration, etc it makes for readable code while ensuring you don’t spend more time than you need with coding. Ruby is 100% object oriented, in fact, everything in ruby including variables, are objects. That can be a little overwhelming at first, but it begins to make sense as you use a framework like rails and really reveals its true power when you want to change or add to the core ‘String’ class, on the fly. It means, in basic speak, that Ruby is very flexible. But there is more. Ruby has cool features like blocks, iterators, and a wealth of all the expected higher level language features like ‘capitalize’ and ‘reverse’ methods for strings.
Ruby on Rails
Image via Wikipedia

Rails is of course a web development framework. It is important not to see Rails as simply a collection of new classes and methods designed to aid web development. There are two things that I believe are important to understand before you dive into Rails. One is the MVC pattern of design. The MVC pattern of system design separates application logic into distinct parts making development fast, but also scalable and logical. The second is the rails conventions. Although sometimes ambiguous and debated, sticking to the basic rails conventions and understanding how the framework is designed to work will greatly aid collaboration, and futureproofing of your app.

What’s so cool about Rails? I recently interviewed someone who has worked in Java, Php and Rails for web development. I could sense the passion in him to work for a company that specialises in Rails, and didn’t need to explain why. If you have ever built a web application in .net, java, or php, you’ll really appreciate the power of Rails. It’s fast, modular, and working in Ruby is fun because you create clean, readable code. It’s free. Ajax and Web 2.0 style features are easy. Fully unit testing your app is easy. Roll out new ideas in weeks instead of months. Setup is easy, in any environment, but being open source it favours ‘nix based environments like Linux and Mac.
It all sounds great, doesn’t it? I would advise, however, that Rails is best understood by those who have understanding of the web and building database driven web applications already. Rails is a framework built on long standing notions, it’s not a magical new web development language. It makes what exists already, much easier and faster. Understand the Web. Understand Web Applications. Understand MVC. Then learn Rails, and you’ll never look back!

About the Author – Nick Adams

Nick Adams is the co-founder of Entrip, an integrated travel utility that gives a map-based interface to plan your trip, capture your experiences in multimedia, and share them with friends. SapnaSolutions is the Ruby on Rails Development company behind EnTrip. They make Web Apps for clients and develop in house products. He can be reached at nick [at] entrip [dot] com
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Tweet for Pune

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Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

In Barcamp Pune 5, I gave a presentation on why you should be on twitter. I also asked Ranjit Gadgil and Anupam Saraph to give a presentation on the Pune Governance wiki that they have been nurturing for the last 6 months. As a result of these presentations, various twitter related initiatives are getting started with respect to e-governance in Pune. Pravin Nirmal implemented a system where every ward page on the Pune Governance wiki shows the latest tweets related to that ward. (See for example, the bottom of the Aundh Ward page.) Pune Mirror also has a story on other such initiatives.

Last week, Anupam Saraph wrote this post on how everybody should “tweet for Pune”. We are reproducing it here:

Imagine you could SMS to everyone. Imagine you could let everyone know there is a traffic jam at the University circle. Imagine you could send out an invite to the tree-planting drive on the Baner Hill. Imagine you could message the world that admissions open for the educational course you have been waiting for. Imagine you message out reports of malaria in your neighborhood or choose to report births, deaths, suspicious activities, new shops, sale offers, rentals….

Imagine as a government agency you message out water closures. Imagine you message out flood alerts, road closures or diversions, bus, train and air departures or arrivals, waste collection notices, new project announcements, vip visits, dates of elections, urls of actionable sites…

That’s like a twitter of birds- hundreds of messages all at once…No wonder that these public messages sent on the internet are called tweets.

Of course you do not want to have thousands of tweets clogging up your life and that’s why tweeters like @pravinnirmal are enabling location specific tweets on pages at the governance wiki. See the tweets at the bottom of this page on the governance wiki. Give it a try. This way you can see the tweets sent by anyone on a location on a page devoted to that location. You can even go edit that page and add your two-cents worth.

You can also signup on tweeter and choose to follow tweeters like myself, Barack Obama or anyone else! By following a tweeter you can see all the tweets the person sends out. Others interested in your tweets may choose to follow you too.

With the White House tweets, the US senate floor tweets, the US house floor and even the US Supreme Courts on twitter tweeting away, should the rest of the world be behind?

Cities in the US have begun tweeting. Look at: San Marcos, Texas, Greensborocity, North Carolina, Killeen, Texas, Round Rock, Texas, McAllen, Texas, Plano, Texas. The Police in Austin, Texas, are using tweets for law and order advisories, notices and quick reassurances.

Can we have our ward officers, the Pune Police, the Pune RTO, the Pune Collector, the PMC, the PCMC, the Cantonment Boards, the MIDC, the PWD, the telecom companies in Pune, the Income Tax commissionerate, the Service tax commissionerate, the Pune University and even the businesses in Pune tweet?

All this is simple and free. Just sign into Twitter and start listening to the whole world- or talking too! Well not exactly the whole world, but to the whole world signed into twitter. If you are a government agency or a business in Pune you may qualify for some help and customization to get your tweets increasing your impact and effectiveness. Just email cio.pune@gmail.com to request your office to show the way to the rest of India.

About the Author – Anupam Saraph

Anupam Saraph is the CIO of Pune City. What that basically means is that

In January 2008, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and Software Exporter’s Association of Pune (SEAP) announced the appointment of Dr. Anupam Saraph as the “CIO of Pune”. Dr. Saraph’s appointment has been made with the objective of providing expert guidance to various e-governance initiatives that are underway in Pune, to build a vision for Pune to transform into one of the most technologically advanced cities of the future.

Dr. Saraph has a Ph.D. in Informatics from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen University in Netherlands, and is a co-founder of a think-tank and a management consultancy. You can follow him on twitter, his blog, and soon on the under-construction site ciopune.in.

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POCC Meeting Report – SEO, Web Scalability and Olio

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Dhananjay Nene wrote this detailed report on the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting last Saturday, which covered Search Engine Optimization by Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, and Web Scalability by Hashamkha Pathan of SUN. We have reproduced it here with his permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.

Went to the Pune OpenCoffee Club meet yesterday. It was supposed to focus on Search Engine Optimisation, Web Scalability and Sun Startup Essentials Program.

Search Engine Optimisation – Dimakh Sahasrabuddhe, Dimakh Consultants

I really liked this session. It is always refreshing to see a very down to earth speaker explain things broken down in a very simple way (tinge of jealousy at my end ?). While I feel like a ??? ????? (half doctor or amatuer) on this topic since I know only parts of it, I came back with some more insights into the space and some comfort in knowledge that the little I knew wasn’t way off the mark.

Anyways, here’s what Dimakh had to say on the topic :

Make sure you know what keywords you are conducting the SEO. Don’t forget the site name itself in the process. For good SEO, focus on the following issues (listed in a descending priority as per Dimakh, he said Google hasn’t ever published the priorities)

  • Content : It is important to make sure your content is in tune with the desired topics and keywords. Make sure the keywords (and sometimes even the phrases) you want to optimise for are covered in the content. Google does look at the keyword density in the content and that can influence your site rankings.
  • Domain : It is preferable to have the important word or two about your site in the domain itself. eg. You may consider having a site domain as sushrut-icecream-parlour.com instead of sushrut.com (I am not sure if he would’ve preferred the hyphens there – just applying my own thoughts here).
  • Filename : Make sure your filenames (ie. those in the URL) actually reflect the content.
  • Tags : Ensure that the tags (meta?) reflect the content appropriately
  • Alt Tags : Use the alt tags to enrich the information available to the search engine to better understand the images or hyperlinks. Keep them short but give enough info to the search engine eg. in a link to a file called enquiry.html, have the alt tag mention “Enquiry for Motors”.
  • Internal Links : Make sure it is easy for the spider to traverse through your site using the various links. Sometimes you may want to provide an alternative navigation mechanism if the default mechanism is not easily understood by a search engine (I assume he was referring to things like a Flash based navigation)
  • External Links : I really couldn’t understand what he implied here (probably because I got a little lost into thinking when I should’ve been listening), but some could help fill out the stuff in the comments below.

Finally Dimakh mentioned Seo Root and Google Rankings as sites to visit for further learnings. On the whole a very helpful session. One more karma point Pune Open Coffee Club earned in my books.

Web Scalability by Sun Microsystems :

(I missed the first couple of mins, hence didn’t catch the presenter names). (The presenter was Hashamkha Pathan from Sun. -Navin) The presentation focused on a toolkit designed for prototyping various technical and architectural issues around web 2.0 applications called Olio. Its a very nice and capable tool which in the words of the web site can be used for the following activities :

  • Understand how to use various web2.0 technologies such as AJAX, memcached, mogileFS etc. in the creation of your own application. Use the code in the application to understand the subtle complexities involved and how to get around issues with these technologies.
  • Evaluate the differences in the three implementations: php, ruby and java to understand which might best work for your situation.
  • Within each implementation, evaluate different infrastructure technologies by changing the servers used (e.g: apache vs lighttpd, mysql vs postgre, ruby vs Jruby etc.)
  • Drive load against the application to evaluate the performance and scalability of the chosen platform.
  • Experiment with different algorithms (e.g. memcache locking, a different DB access API) by replacing portions of code in the application.

An excellent piece of content that was poorly targeted imho. Sun has an extended amount of experience dealing with enterprise architects, and this was a really wonderful presentation which most enterprise architects would’ve understood easily. This particular community of people often need to do their homework very well, and usually are allowed a fair amount of time and money to do their homework, and in many cases also have access to a body of people who are also equally capable in working out various issues related to architecture.

I really think this is a useful tool which can be used by startups but that they shall need to spend the time to understand the tool and what it could do for them. However it is not a point and shoot kind of a tool. Based on the questions I could very easily understand that most persons very quickly ended up assuming that the tool could do much more than what the tool authors ever intended, and then felt disappointed. This was really a situation of positioning gone awry and I think Sun will need some more effort in positioning the presentation in its early stages to prevent disappointment later.

Finally as in a question I did ask quite explicitly, the reason why it makes sense for Sun to invest in and open source such a tool, is that this tool really forces you to do your homework well in the first place. If you were to do your homework well in the first place and focus on performance and scalability early on, the tool usage would tell you to either focus on Java or more infrastructure to handle high load or low read percentage scenarios. These are very reasonable and sensible outputs of the tool. What olio does not tell you is the set of tradeoffs which are outside its scope, impact of the various choices of languages and toolkits on spead of release, agility, robustness and maintainability – that is something that the startup architect will need to come to some decision independently.

Finally sun talked about its Startup Essentials Program which offered various promotional incentives to startups. Very useful incentives, though I would advise people to evaluate if usage of such incentives introduces a small degree of lockin onto open solaris (I like opensolaris – just would ensure that I would use it in a manner that doesn’t introduce too much lock in), and also the post production cost implications including support. There were a fair degree of questions through the session, and I think as an audience it makes sense to pause and take the matter offline if the proceedings continue to be stuck at a stage after two or three questions.

Update: A presentation similar to the one presented can be found on Olio site at Olio Presentation

In parting

All in all a very useful session, and a left me with the desire to attend more sessions subsequently. Thanks POCC and all the organisers.

About the Author – Dhananjay Nene

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile. He blogs about software engineering and programming languages at /var/log/mind, and other more general topics at /home/dhananjay.

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