Waves

…for BarCampBangalore 4th edition :D. I’m taking part in the Ruby and the Startups collective.

I attended a few sessions on the Internet collective. But they were pretty boring.

The session by the co-founder of Sloka Telecom, one of the selected companies of the Proto.in first edition, gave an awesome pep talk on how he built his own startup. They are 3 years into it and doing a pretty good job. He made the whole thing look so easy that, the next thing that you want to do after getting back home is to form a startup 😀

Another guy from PicSquare (sorry, I forgot his name) also shared his experience. I’m with the ruby collective now. Will keep you updated on this.

Very much looking forward to the Startup collective that is going to continue tomorrow morning.
Oh! yah.. met some pretty cool people, including Freeman, who is organizing SkillsCamp in Pune.

Having a nice time! 😀

Update: The ruby collective was damn interesting yesterday. The crowd seems more interested in the internet, mobile and startup space. So, hopefully day 2 will be packed of such sessions.

Following the success of proto.in version 1, The Knowledge Foundation team is gearing up for the second edition called “proto.in Summer Edition”. The time ahead is damn exciting. You can get more information from the proto.in website. If you had attended the first edition proto.in and you have feedback to give, please mail us at admin@proto.in.

Sponsorship kit, media kit and other necessary items are on their way. They should be out in a couple of weeks. Preparations have started way ahead this time… Let wait and watch about how this event turns out to be.

Yay! the last week was easily one of the most exciting weeks for me. Three days at Hyderabad, for Sun Tech Days, was 3 days well spent. Met a lot of cool people from Sun and more importantly, Moyeen and myself provided some tips to some Hyderabad based college students who wanted to do their final semester projects on their own; using java and ofcourse netbeans.

Here are some cool things that happened at the conference:
1. There was a netbeans contest stall on day 1. Moyeen and myself participated and completed the given tasks right on time. We won the contest with full score 😀
2. On the second day, right after the keynote and before the java jacket give away, we were called on stage (audience > 4000) and given a small kit that contained an ultra cool netbeans t-shirt, netbeans ide field guide, some dukes (duke is the mascot for java) and some sun bucks that were supposed to be exchanged at the stalls for more goodies.
3. Day 3 had me unexpectedly flying without wings :-). I’m a fan of Geertjan’s blog since a long time and yup! I met him and had a short chat.
4. He got my tech blog URL, visited there and made a post on converting this two minute web browser into an app that is integrated into the netbeans platform 🙂
5. Finally, met some of my own college juniors… was shocked to see a girl in the gang though 😀 cos’ most of the times its an all-guys show. Kudos to the girl who has shown interest in technology.

Wikicamp was an astounding success :D. It went on very well. I loved the way Jimmy Wales moved around with the crowd. Considering the popularity he has, its surprising that he is so unassuming and was always willing to join the fun, which ended up being many of us showcased in this article by The Hindu. I wasted no time in networking with the attendees, which at the end of the day proved very valuable. Photos of wikicamp.

Thus, comes to end, an excellent week. Have fun !

Yes!!! The Knowledge Foundation team that was behind the success BarCampChennai, Blogcamp and proto.in is now organising India’s first Wikicamp 😀 and you know what, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia is attending the event.

When: Feb 25, 2007
Where: Tidel Park, Chennai
More Info: http://www.wikicamp.in/

Thanks to the BarCamp phenomenon. It has transformed Chennai into THE happening place for technology.

It’s happening again 🙂 BarCamp Chennai was an out-standing success. The same crew is now organising BlogCamp – India’s biggest blogging ‘un‘conference, set to happen in Chennai 🙂

The meeting at woodland’s drive inn was truly fun.

Check out more details at the Blog Camp wiki. There are some more exciting details that’s not to be revealed right now 😉

Hello guys, BarCamp Chennai was 1 amazing event that shook me awake. Though i dabble in most of the technologies (and thats the reason why the student champs call me Java), the presentations were all at a very different plane that we mostly tend to miss. There were many presentations on usability (Adel, Muthu, Amit from Uzanto etc…). There were presentations on PodCasting by Sujatha and Sriram (cofounders of PodBazaar). Since they are based in USA, the PodCasting presentation was done over skype. We played the slides here and heard their voice over skype :). And the best thing is that, it wasn’t tested here before. It all happened perfectly.

Since this was primarily a Web 2.0 ‘un’conference, bosky‘s slides were a bit different. He built it on ajax and ran it over a browser; quite different from the usual stuff; cool dude :D. The sessions on VoiceSnap by Ganesh Padmanabhan, Search Engine Optimization by Ganesh of rupya, Making money using blogs by Amit Agarwal were particularly excellent. Vijay Anand was very optimistic of making the future of Indians brighter with his Project Infranet. The session on NPL was good. Suman, who is the brain behind NPL, told that (over lunch) programmers face the common difficulty of understanding other’s coding. His NPL tends to solve it.

Tracbac is a nifty Web 2.0 product that allows us to collaborate designs based on gifs, jpegs and swf files, over the internet. Its still in beta, so you have to sign up for an invite to try it. This tool will be useful for students on collaborating symposium poster designs and flash enabled websites that we build during the symposium. Atul Chitnis was @ BarCamp. I almost got lost on his session, and understood the point from vijay’s blog.

Mobile computing is an entirely different mamoth. You require a different mindset to get used to the lifestyle of using mobile devices to aid you in your everyday life. You can’t expect applications to behave the way that they do in your PC. But overall, they are capable of changing, or making your life better, if you are willing to give it a try.

Part of the reason of being lost was because i was setting up my project demo on rupya’s HOT!! laptop. Myself and moyeen did a presentation on our final year project (mSync). Ganesh (not the rupya version), recorded it and has uploaded it to youtube. Watch it here. Shyam became ecstasic when we said during our presentation that we used YahooPops! to retrieve email from yahoo. Btw, Shyam is one of the lead developers of YahooPops and i will be troubling him from today. I was looking for a person to explain the structure and flow of YahooPops source code and there can be none who is better than Shyam :D. My project has been blogged here, here, here, another here, yet another here etc… Amit Ranjan has a very energetic post on BarCamp. It is a MUST read.

Beyond everything else, Narain and Vijay Anand inspired me beyond compare on some ideas. They have done it unknowingly and i hug them for sharing that knowledge with me. It happened on day 2 of the barcamp, very early, before the presentations, when we were hunting for laptops on which we could test our demos. Ganesh of Rupya came to the rescue and we used his laptop for our presentations. A huge hug to you buddy 😀

Overall, BarCamp Chennai left an ever-lasting memory because of the way it was conducted. I made friends quickly, which usually doesn’t happen at normal commercial conferences, and those people were only more happy to share their knowledge. He he, i also shared my 2 cents :). Lots of them have done live blogging on the event. You can find them at the bottom of the BarCamp Chennai wiki. Wish i had a laptop. I also wish more such events are conducted on a regular basis.

Photos
You can find a lot of photos on Day 1 and Day 2 of the barcamp at ChennaiBlog and Flickr.

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hello all,

Since most people these days are IT professionals or in related fields, you must have surely heard of the term FOO-BAR. In relation to this “BAR”, there is a BarCamp that is going to happen in our city on April 8th and 9th.

Basically, its an unconference wherein every participant has to give presentations and take part in organising the event.

To know more about what BarCamp actually is, check this http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/an_open_source_conference_barcamp

To know more about the chennai event, see this wiki http://www.barcamp.org/barcampchennai

To know what an unconference is, check this http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/03/05/what-is-an-unconference/

I’m attending this and this promises to be a lot of fun and a good learning experience..a very unformal event.

Do check the urls…Bye!