Reckoning BCB4

Barcamp Bangalore (version 4.0) concluded yesterday @ IIM Bangalore campus.There was a similarity between both Barcamp Bangalore 4 and Proto.in - both of them were organized very well, but both of them lacked CONTENT.




Especially in BCB4, most of the collectives were just 'Global Gyaan'; and only a very few talks were worth the praise. Some of the speakers were doing a product demo, which I was least interested in.(Guess what, a speaker was demo'ing her .com site and mentioning that clikcing on a link takes one to a diff page...blah...blah...blah). I had to simply walkout from many sessions, especially on day-2. I had expectations from the Usability and Ajax collectives - but both of them disappointed me with again...the 'global gyaan'. I heard the 'web2.0' and 'ajax' atleast a zillion times :(

The ruby collective had some interesting talks , especially the one on deploying the rail apps - it was an in depth coverage of the various aspects of deploying and hosting(came to know that the Apace server has a higher memory footprint than Nginx and also does a thread level processing of requests).

The Biking collective (on Day 1)was simply amazing with some cool bikes in the display(and also to ride).Shree had got his freind's (KP's) bike Petalon which was a clear winner among all the 4 bikes present there. Rohan (& his freind) had got thier Treks which was also good.The session gave lots of gyaan on the cycles, the sitting and driving postures, the kits and some nice accesories. Shree had a GPS receiver and couple of rear lights.

I had more expecations from BCB4 and am sure that the in next Baracamp(BCB5), the collective co-ordinators will take extra "precaution" in terms of content.

Some pics taken during the event (More can be seen here):

Barcamp Bangalore - 4

Venue: IIM Bangalore
Dates : 28/29 July, 2007

Barcamp Bangalore is finally here this weekend :) The coordinators have done a great job of maintaining an absolutely neat wiki (without any spam and arbit info).

Lots of collectives happening at the same time ...with loads of information and interesting sessions...




So if you are in Bangalore , then drop in(after registering, or i am not sure how much the mods will insist on registrations)...anywayz , it should be fun with loads of gyaan.

I will be live blogging during the event, if my lappie works :)

First Date with Flex

Installed the Flex Builder(Public Beta 3) from the CD provided by the Adobe folks during Proto.in. The CD contained the Demo versions of the Flex Builder, Flex Builder plugin for Eclipse and AIR(and some documentations).

Read the accompanying docs for an hour and was all set to play ;)

Quick features and comments :

- The IDE(Flex Builder) was very light on the memory(given the fact that my lappie is a 2gig machine ;))
- The framework is exteremely easy to learn and i was creating small apps within hours, and was impressed with the results.
- When compared to ADF/JSF, i think this framework is beautiful and extremely developer friendly - but do NOTE here that i had used the IDE for messing around; since , the IDE is a demo and costs 399USD for a license, developers who do not have the dough(folks like me)need to check the command line options - i hope to work with the command prompt today and check out the easeness of development.
- I have yet not started playing around with building DB cohesive applications using FLEX, but i do not think there should much problems.

I am looking forward to the full version of Flex by the end of this year and a FREE IDE :D. I need to learn RoR and compare it with Flex and AIR.

Proto.in - my itinerary

Event : Proto.in
Venue : IC & Sr Auditorium , IIT Madras
Dates : July 21/22, 2007

[This post mentions "what-i-did" during the event and some of my comments. It does not explain the events and the participants in its entirety. I hope to post more on the individual presenters(participating companies) and some interesting startups that i stumbled upon]

I had wondered on how this event would benefit startups and for audiences like me, who are just going to be meek spectators and see the companies present and the VCs talk. The event was supposed to span 2 days :
Day 1 -- the first day being the day of speakers (sessions) - Tracks on Business and Technology
Day 2 -- the main event - the companies (startups) presenting their product.


Day-1 (Saturday July 21, 2007)
Managed to reach the venue on time despite the traffic jam near Gandhi Mandapam.

Quickly registered and headed off to the conference room wherein the Business track was scheduled. There was one more conference room with the Technology Track. After the initial introduction and the India Poised video(ToI) ,the talk by Shankar Vembu (Vembu technologies Pvt Ltd) commenced. It was a beautiful talk, and the speaker stressed on 8 points that Startups should abide by when they want to bootstrap without a venture capital ; the first being - "Dont attend these kind of events if you are serious about your startup" - which i found perfectly right , both at the beginning of the event and also on the closing day :)

After this talk , i moved to the Tech track where Rajiv Mangla and Prayank Swaroop (Adobe) were about to speak on "RIA using Flex,AIR and Ajax". I was curious to attend this session and look at some demos and the framework. The talk wasn't much impressive (but am sure that the framework is kewl), some of the demos were nice. I am sure that the Flex consulting marketing is going to very lucrative in India. Sample AIR cds were given at the end - thanks for that - i was planning to get my hands dirty this week before BCB4 - am yet to explore the CD.

Then i again shifted to the Business Track wherein Rohit Agarwal(TechTribe) was supposed to talk on PR - again a _no-nullshit _ talk which i liked. After this, time for some networking [ time for tea:) ] and meeting some aspiring enthusiasts and interesting startups.

Later moved on to the talk by Alok Mittal(Canaan Partners) , and later moved to the Tech track where Sanjay Swami(myChek) had to elucidate on 'Opportunities in the Mobile Space". I being a noodlehead in the mobile industry, this was a nice talk to listen to. Sanjay spoke 0n some alluring spaces in the Mobile segment which had the potential to grow and some more gyaan.

The best of the talks was that by Atul Chitnis(VP - Geodesic and a FOSS evangelist). Atul spoke on how startups should take up free and Open-source as their platform for their businesses to succeed. His claims were supported by very valid arguments and it was an excellent talk. I did not feel the 30mins whisk away. I wish if this talk could last for a few 15mins more so that startups could have benefited more.

Then, Ganesh Rengaswamy(Greylock Partners and CoFounder of TravelGuru) spoke on the challenges and the opportunities in the Internet space. It was a very informal talk with very formal and good content. I liked the way Ganesh carried himself all throughout the talk - it was again a _no-bullshit_ talk :) . He did not use a powerpoint presentation and managed to engage the audience with good content.


Day-2 (Sunday July 22, 2007)
It was supposed to be the MAIN EVENT. The startups were supposed to present their company and the product (demo , if possible) in a short duration of 6 minutes. Almost all the presenters felt that 6 minutes was too short a time for presenting a product; but i totally second the organizers for choosing the 6-minte deadline, as i feel that i a product can easily be dissected in less than 6 minutes - with all its merits and demerits identified. One of the presenters commented that "it takes atleast 7 minutes for an orgasm and 6 minutes is too less".

A comprehensive analysis of the companies will be done in the forthcoming posts.

iPhone - The omnipresent

All the blogs contain a post on iPhone, and hence its incumbent on me to post a blog on the same too :D me is not gonna review it - not gonna fave it - not gonna criticize it ..
instead... Check out some destructive videos :




The last one is not an actual iPhone ;)

Videos

I watch videos [ read 'Youtube'(v) ] for approx 8-10+ hours a week. But today i wanted to check the features available in the video sharing sites. I am a great fan of Youtube and 99% of my video-watching-exercise happens over the same :D .

nwayz.. I was planning to observe the Top rated videos in Youtube and Google and understand the basic mood of the people and also the way they rate videos. But before I could proceed with my 'complex interpretations' of the videos and its interpretations, i was startled to see the list of the Top Videos in Google.

The Top videos in Google are ONLY porn(bold/undelined). Check out the screenshots of the Top videos from Google and Youtube.

Goat Vs PC # 1

Original Picture here

King for a minute

Click here to see the full size picture [ Created using stripcreator.com - nice one - thanks Kiruba ]

TWTW - The Week That Was

Lots of things happened - met some interesting people - lots of gyaan - saw some amazing movies - Youtube'd a lot - read a lot.

One such interesting video was this.
Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg at the D5 interviews Eric Schmidt. [The best thing that has happened to me in the last 2 years is that i hardly see TV these days, instead i Youtube for the gyaan and the entertainment .. nwayz...] I had read an interview of Eric in HBR (Harvard Business Review) when he was with Novell. The interview was rather boring and it was all CEO/manager talk with no insights into what Novell had to offer to the ongoing technological advancements.But this interview (with Walt) was different. Eric has grown (Google factor???) !

In the interview, Walt brings up a very pertinent Q in the world of advertising -- The way the Ads are presented has not changed over the past couple of years. Google continues to display the ads in the same style that it used to do it say 3-4 years ago. There has been no significant innovation in Ad-Presentation.Though Eric does not give a satisfactory answer to this, but am sure Larry and Sergei (& hopefully other Google developers ) are seriously thinking about this. Am sure M$ would like to take this as an opportunity to launch their innovation in this field of targeted ads and try to step ahead(a leap also) in terms of its ads-presentation to the end users.

Eric clearly demarcates many times in the interview that Google is an enabler of the content but not a content generator.Eric also hints at some interesting apps that we can expect in the near future (Palm/Symbian/M$ - move aside ...Google is on its way in the mobile space).

The D5 series in Youtube simply rocks (also check out the Steve Jobs / Bill gates interview @ D5)

Early Rising

Some days are just too good - beyond any levels of description - no verbiage - no photos - A bright new day - soaring adrenaline - no evil - the feeling to win the world - fresh cologne - a beautiful drive along the valleys - my Aston Martin DB9 - the shimmering sun - the roaring river along the road , striking the rocks - the cardamom tea - The Indian Flag flying high - spotting the mynah - beautiful and innocent smiles of the village girls - the gompas - mild prayers - a Beautiful Mind - Life is Beautiful.