It seems that Chennai too is fast catching up w/ Mobile Monday spirit. Long back I have wondered where’s Chennai in the Indian mobile monday map. Varun, is spearheading Chennai chapter and MoMo Chennai is at it’s second edition with Forum Nokia sponsoring the event. This is on Feb 16th - a saturday and Not on a Monday. In several MoMos we had this discussion of why not have a Mobile Monday on other weekdays - this is because though many people aspire to make it to MoMo, most get struck by the busy schedules of Monday. I don’t know whether it is a decision based on the fact above. This is the fifth MoMo in india. Wish MoMo Chennai a great success through several interesting sessions, demos and networking !

As a debian lover I should be talking about Debconf. Indeed no ! It’s about DefCon, the world’s largest Hacking Conference. I have always wondered why India doesn’t have something on these lines. As a software nation and world’s software destination India should be in the fore front of such a creative arena.

ClubHack is a humble beginning on the lines of Defcon and a small step to project our software capability on creative lines. When this idea was suggested by Rohit over a cup of coffee it was overwhelmingly accepted. It’s been almost a year and it’s here now on the 9^th of December 2007 in Pune.

Apart from a first of a kind in India, we have outlined a clear objective for ClubHack. That is must provide space for creativity, lateral thinking, and bring the guys to the forefront who wears the BlackHat and resides in darkness. And last but not the least, we will try to give the word hacker, the meaning it deserves.

Just to emphasize, the dilemma of calling a hacker as a person with negative connotation or no continues, we are on the side that a hacker is one who finds a hole or a bug or suggest an improvement in the existing product. The product being anything from a software to telephone to washing machine. Crackers are the malicious creatures whom we always want to get rid off.

It would be more than apt to address a hacker as a creative person. Any software product can be created in one of the n number of ways. And for the hacker it takes a lateral bend of mind unthought-of of by the programmer or sometimes to traverse all the n number of possibilities to find a hole or fine tune according to his needs.

ClubHack is invitation only. This is for several reasons, but on the outline it is for anybody who feels that they have done “something” to any s/w or hardware and has improved or disproved it, game mods etc. If you feel that you have the “credentials” send a short note and we will send you the invitation. Go here to register.

ClubHack is in the making. We are striving hard to make a mark on the international scale. If you want to sponsor the event pls go here. And do spread the word. Ciao !

Even though it’s raining cats and dogs we have destined to have our third edition of BarCamp Pune on 7th July at Persistent Systems . Be there to learn more and know what’s happening at the edge of the technology world. Go here to know what is BarCamp and how it’s changing the conference landscape. To enroll yourself edit the BarCamp wiki.

Lately just got curious on maps & related tagging on how to use it more efficeintly on the web. I am using both Google maps and Windows Live Search on my mobile. More on it later coz that deserves a separate post. A well built map with all directions and distances which can integrate well with the browser will be a killer app.

There are host of map related services from Mapquest to Ask Maps which is gaining popularity now. All in all Mapquest seems to be the leader getting much more traffic than google/yahoo/windows live. The Mapquest interface have got up so well these days with Ajax. But even in the good old days when mapquest used crayon color interface & when Google came up with all the satellite imageries and made a splash, still it cant beat Mapquest just because it is more perfect, more directions. The war between data & ajax have declared that accurate data is the winner. Surprisingly all of them uses data from either Navteq or TeleAtlas or both leaders in GIS imagery. In all of the maps we can see the (C) of Naviteq/TeleAtlas.

As far as India is concerned Mapquest has street level maps for Delhi. but not to the extend of Google or yahoo has for US/UK. Others are yet to catch up w.r.t India. With the ever changing infrastructure of the Indian realty scape it will be a challenging task to come up with accurate information. Mumbai freemap from free map server is just a beginning to create an open database map repository, though much detailed ( see BEST bus depots) needs much tags. Neverthless it’s agreat initiative.

The whole list of all things map is here from wikimedia tools. And herecomes the meta map search - Flash Earth to acccess all maps from one place. It also supports open layers which powers free map server. Happy Mapping.

This edition of BarCampPune was Great and kept us on rolling from morning till late into the night coz of the networking dinner. One more memorabilia . The event had it’s own course, to be frank - as it zipped from two session to three, upholding the unconference theme. As I was roaming? I missed most sessions.
The presentation of Rahul Thathoo from Stanford on advt. in Web 2.0 was a different tryout. Atul co-ordinated it very well, synchronizing both voice thru mobile & video thru You Tube. There were a host of presentations most on Web 2.0, mobile, Dev, etc. The Symbiosis volunteers were the one who made our life much easy and let us concentrate on things most important. Thanks guys & gals, truly the enthusiasm & energy you showed ( at times running, dashing) is great and I swear it’s tough to find guys like you. Hope to see you all once again in the same tempo very soon.

From our side, due thanks to Vols,Symbiosis, TCS for sponsorship and above all to the attendees who made the BarCamp a Greaaaaaaat success. Tha camp Wiki is here and more of the Pics here.

Rakesh ?

Brajeshwar has made a cool shot of the dinner venue -> SIMS Swimming pool

This guy says it is his “My Space” . cool dude !

Half of Pune 7. Clocking wisely it is Jatinder, Rohit, Anand, Kiran. Missing are Dibya, Atul & me.

Here we are, me and Dibya in the food court.

Symbi Vols in action !

It’s tech buzz time once again. BarCampPune – 2 is on the cards and scheduled for Dec 16 & 17 for Dec 16 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR). This time we have got much more add-ons. Together with the geeks’ speech there are also proposals aloft to rope in VCs and Start-up CEOs. We hope this will all help the entrepreneurial ecosystem to grow with the spirit of the BarCamps’. BarCampPune-2 has decided to go well into the night with a Networking dinner too.

TCS is sponsoring the full event. Off late TCS has taken quite a good step forward in nurturing these kind of events viz BarCamps, MobileMondays etc. It’s a great initiative and hats off for a Corporate like TCS to support for unconferences. It will go a long way in stirring the spirit of technology, business and innovation.

The BarCampPune wiki is up and running. So be there to see lots of action and do spread the word around.

You Tube has been bought by Google for a colossal 1.65 b dollars. Apart from the numbers which is astonishing, what really matters is the power of innovation. You Tube has seen an unseen(?) opportunity in the Web 2.0 space. Just two guys and a college grad have created a company worth $1.65b. The story dates back to the days when the trio started discussing some topics on web 2.0 and it was Jawed Karim who has given the idea of video sharing. Jawed’s contribution was minimum and he reconciled into his studies at Stanford. Surprisingly he was in payPal team too, when eBay acquired it for 1.5b$.

Then Chad Hurley and Steven Chen took the mantle and build what is You Tube today. The rest of the story can be read here in NY Times.

Regarding the innovation view – It took You Tube to reach the dream numbers just 18 months and 3 guys. Compare it with any services concern say Infosys, it took almost 23 years and 25,634 employees to reach revenues of just over 1b$ in 2004. (This comparison is just for the numbers and the social change & empowerment infy has brought in is not taken into account here. Also Google has acquired You Tube at a rate 1000 times of it’s current revenues) So an innovative idea with a great market potential is what will make a big difference.

All’s well, that ends well. Not at all. Just shift the scene to India. If the same idea has come been implemented here in India – Can it encompass the whole world in such a short time? Or is there a chance that it will be acquired for such a price? The answer is No and a proven No. This is where the power of funding comes into play.

Some time ago, in some conference the same question was asked by a speaker and he gave the answer as ‘no’. I was apprehensive of his conclusion. Why can’t an Indian start up strike it rich? For a while it engulfed my thought. And I didn’t even think that a real parallel can happen this soon. This is the story of ourmedia.org – a 4x better community centered sharing site with audio, video & text uploads. It was up and running before 9 months You Tube hit the net streets. And well You Tube came into the scene, indeed into every scene from its own site, to other web sites, blogs and every where. So why didn’t ourmedia take off. Gaurav, has made a good deal of Analysis on his blog.

A $1.6 billion lost oppurtunity?

Youtube got bought over by Google for a whopping $1.6 Billion (no links here - its all over the place!). Going by how popular the site has become, it was only a matter of time before one of the big guys bought it out. Congrats to them! Our company, Tekriti, started off building one of the earliest video sharing sites back in Feb-March 2005 for our first client. Ourmedia.org was launched in March 2005. YouTube came along almost 9 months later. Ourmedia had a host of video and media experts on its panel of advisors and it had (and has) a team of volunteer editors to wean out copyright content. YouTube on the other hand has the policy of letting copyright content remain online until the copyright owner objects. Ourmedia allows users to download the original high quality video while YouTube only allows online viewing of very low res. flash versions. So for a site that started with a 9 month lead, it feels like Ourmedia was a missed oppurtunity. Of course, to be clear, Ourmedia is a non-profit and making billions of dollars wasnt even the aim and it still gets significant traffic and has over 100,000 videos hosted. But the kind of popularity that Ourmedia should have seen never came along. At a personal level, it helped us get our company started and gave us the initial credibility any startup needs. So Ourmedia remains very special to me.

Get all of his analysis here. It’s a great piece of write up for every entrepreneur in the Web 2.0 space or other.

Why so? The same and even, much more brilliant idea like You Tube which we have always wondered. Truly indigenous and truly innovative. I suppose, what our concerns’ lack is funding at the right time and at the right stage. Ourmedia was not funded to move as a juggernaut in the Web 2.0 area which is truly required in this sphere. Clones always appear in no time, if they spot a potential. And replication by a well funded company or even a behemoth will take the idea and splash it all all over the world in a fraction of time. MSs’ Zune to iPod is an example.

So for the 1.6 b $ opportunity lost?- the answer is funding. Yes there are some issues with ourmedia as Gaurav has outlined but it all must have vaporized with funds and little honing. India does generate much more powerful Web 2.0 ideas but the implementation is the key. And for implementation early stage funds and a little mentoring is all what is needed. It’s true that VCs can’t fund guys with just ideas on paper but- when it’s on the ground and happening ? And why when in Valley seed and early stage funds propel potential ideas it doesn’t happen in India?. Lot of questions and few answers. Hope VC community will realize this soon and then All’s well and will end well.

       Google’s codesearch is really a killer app on the net. http://www.google.com/codesearch. Just type the required code and can even be directly copy pasted from IDE’s, gives several example codes in search format similar to web search. It’s great in another sense too, that the search has pulled up results even inside zip/rar files. The multi color highlight is a gud feature to zero in on the required item more quickly. And the other side of the story is interesting - Computer World reports that Hacker’s has found it very useful.

This is my first time to momo Bangalore edition. I was well before the said time. This is because in every event I go, I clearly felt that I am not able to meet atleast a quarter of the people who drops in. So thought of dividing the networking into two sessions - before and after the event.

There was a last minute speaker change- and guess who - Sanjay Swamy from mchek. Swamy had a talk on Mobile VAS 2.0 . Oh Yeah- The 2.0 phenomenon has grabbed VAS too. What’s changing this VAS sphere to 2.0 I am not able to get. Swami had an interesting point that programming for low end mobiles including ULHCs can be done if we have higher footprint in the SIM card.

But that all depends on the operator coz he it’s his forte & he is the one going to supply the SIM. Again cementing the walls of ‘walled garden’ ? Also existing SIM cards has to be upgraded for this, plus you cant download or install any apps - only what the operator can give. Developers ???
Btw, hope that the 1 GB SIM card which will be commercially available from Msystems by this year end will do a disruptive change in this sphere.

The last day had two keynotes by Peter Mukherjea of Star TV and Sanjeev Kumar of Portal Player. His views were on contents that are omnipresent and the concept of “media fatigue” because of numerous media. Sanjeev narrated his entrepreneurial journey and how well will Murphy’s law play in this arena. The one law on “It always takes longer” is sure a point of concern.

The other tracks were on Sports and retail. I was at retail only for a few minutes. Some one in the panel shocked the audience on the fact 40% of medicine available in India is fake. I want to delve deep into this fake/ spurious areas. If we can come with some innovative solutions thru technology and contribute a little mite it will be of great help to the people.

All over the evening and into the night it was great networking. Lot of people with great enthusiasm and energy. All the way TiE-ISB was fun and fruitful.