Category Archives: barcamphyderabad

Barcamp Hyderabad 6 – Postmortem

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This one was definitely was the most underblogged and under publicized barcamps of Hyderabad – and also the only camp where the demos and the talks are placed really wide apart! [think 2-3 weeks] ;D

The event which happened on Friday was a real eyeopener – we really came to know about solid IT product companies from Hyderabad which have been existing since the 90s and still going strong – SDG technologies, Pramati, In10s and many others.

My initial apprehensions that the Barcamp theme/tag was being hijacked by HYSEA were indeed proven true – but in a very pleasant way – the talks were much superior, the structure absent and content really praiseworthy. All in all an event that HYSEA needs to be praised for.

About the event

It was nice coming back to the class room that has been part of 3 years of my student life in IIIT, my alma mater. The event started off with Brigadier Hari Kumar initiating the proceedings. Then Anil Jampala, President HYSEA gave a brief introduction and a few good words about the ‘Business for Non-Business Professionals [BNBP]‘ course that he taught in IIIT few years ago, one of the best courses I took at IIIT and to which I would rightly attribute quite some of my entrepreneurial bearings. Hopefully HYSEA can reintroduce the superb course at IIIT as part of the curriculum.
And then we had the talks by co-founders/entrepreneurs/very senior folks of the product companies of Hyderabad

  • Ramanathan from Cordys – their journeys, the things to look out for and the dos and donts
  • Ramesh from Progress tracing the rich IT product company legacy in Hyderabad, some known-and-really-doing-good-work companies, and some really-not-well-known-but-doing-good-work companies. And of course the punch at the end of the talk was the map visualizing the Cyber Valley – the map of product companies – establised, public, startups – all charted on the map of Hyderabad – lovely idea.
  • Suheim Sheikh from SDG Software having a very humorous and blow by blow account of how they developed their software as a project and then product – and how they did not think globally and overestimating their competitors – how they almost got killed in the crossfire of the Indian Stock Exchange crash of the 90s. How they started from a single room, then to rooms, to a floor and the building… And the point they were a product company in Hyderabad since 1993!
  • Sandeep, an MBA and founder of Fineng, [prolly the only MBA in the evening that day] whose take was more analytical and the structured decision making process that goes into making the decision of taking the leap – the factors to consider, 7-8 years long journey, and the point that once you are able to stay as long as that you are bound to be successful. Much focus was also there on the location of the company in Bombay as compared to say Hyderabad or Bangalore – which I can very well say aye to. Though Hyderabad/Bangalore/Chennai are the tech centers of India, the real pockets of cash are in Delhi and Bombay. Of course, the low rates of attrition are an added advantage.

A quick mini question hour led to most asked questions haunting a entpreneur wannabe? When is it a good time to start? And if MBA added any value to you being an entrepreneur? Mahesh Murthy from pinstorm had the answers ‘Now’ and ‘MBA teaches you how to be an employee for an entrepreneur but not being an entrepeneur’ respectively. I’ll leave you to ponder over the anwers :D

  • Jay Pullur, founder of Pramati took over the dias. His speech was mainly about what, how and when an entrepreneur ‘becomes’. His take was that it was a personal choice and there are no simple answers there – but what was important was the point that an entrepreneur is a self starter, one who takes intiatives and then its about preparing yourself for the opportunity that will present itself in the future whenever it does appear. Its never too late. The talk ended with – Being at the right place and the right time is important, but its more important to being the right person. Or as Einstein says – Genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. Or that more universal – Luck favors the prepared mind.
  • Sastry from In10s [intense] technologies – started with two other friends – had a timeframe of 1-2 years with the expectation that he would quit at the end of his predecided time and the other two would stick with the company. As time would have it, he is still persevering after the company after 10 years. This talk was built around the many mistakes they did during their journey – going IPO really early for just 7.2 crores at the peaking of the IPO season before the bust (without thinking about the consequences – loss of control, regulation), buying realty with the money, moving to a new office. Ended with the 4Ps – Passion, Purpose, People, Perseverance.
  • Mahesh Murthy from PinStorm. I first heard him in his talk in Proto.in, the first season and so his background was nothing new. Some of the best words in the talk – ‘Stop comparing yourself with your friends who are doing jobs – higher salary, new car, new house – thats a rat race  then you are not cut out to be an entrepreneur‘,  ‘If during the 10 years your friend is earning more than you, in the 11th year you will be his boss!‘, ‘Create a brand for your company/product‘, ‘Pricing is a very important strategy for marketing – there is no way a lower pricing will help cut your competition. Only higher prices implies a better quality product than your bigger, richer competitors‘.
  • Hemir Doshi, IDG Ventures. Mostly VC-styled talk, common pitfalls that startups have, what they look for, the interesting companies they’ve invested in.
  • Sateesh Andra, Partner DFJ ventures. An entrepreneur turned VC – he talked about his journey – how at one point they exited a company at the right time by resisting the temptation to exit early, and how the next time, they rejected an offer and then had to sell the company later for peanuts.
  • Ashar Farhan, serial entrepreneur. Quickly running through the web2.0 poster boys of start-small, build early, release often philosophy companies – wikipedia that has 1 and a half fulltime employees, del.icio.us that ran off the laptop of the founder when yahoo had come to make the buy. His were a great set of tips for founders of this generation.

I had to leave early so missed the announcement about the IIIT Innovation Lab. Sun donated four servers for the lab with no strings attached. Progress would be working closely to help the students build the ideas through and MoU. Great to see the initiatives rapidly building the tempo for a great set of companies in the future.  How sometimes I wish that we were here a few years later :D

All in all, a great event, thanks in no small part to IIIT, HYSEA and most importantly Ramesh for tying this all up together.

Ramesh has a much more detailed and a blow by blow account of this event. His blog post served as the memory aid for my blog post ;D

Barcamp Hyderabad2: Postmortem + DeadBlogging

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Barcamp happened on the 15th July Saturday in Microsoft Campus. The numbers looked sparse to me initially but then when the final results were out, it came up to 150+ , which is huge, to say simply of it. Live blogging was missing again, but I did capture quite a bit of notes; and so here it goes for you people. So instead of LiveBlogging what you will find here is DeadBlogging interspersed with my postmortem notes and thoughts.

The initial talk was by Ramesh Loganathan, but I could only attend the later half of it, courtesy waiting at the reception desk to sign up people. Any case the last few things I could capture. Basically the talk was about GPS in India and the opportunities available.

* Ericsson has come up with a Standard Mobile Server

* EDR is in the GSM phone but you cannot get the latitude longitude locations. Ramesh’s team had earlier worked on a location based application but since the lat and long were not available, the product had to be scrapped

Atul Chitnis / Geodesic / 11:32 am – 12:10 pm / http://www.atulchitnis.net

Atuls presentation was minimalist zen(mostly seen in steve jobs presentations) type presentation with the typewriter font (lessig style). It was done in Fedora Core 4 PC; which makes it partially politically incorrect.

The main theme of the presentation was about how the PCs are not really mainstream.

* Computers are a misnomer in the present world. A very if not no part of the computer time is used for computing by the users.
* PC Users are a minotity. Most people dont use a PC. They neither have the means, nor the infrastructure, its financially infeasible, and mainly because people DONT WANT TO.
* ‘Form factor’ of the PC
* All mobile devices must be ‘Sized to be carried’. iPod, Walkman, Mobile
* You dont go to them, they do with you.
* We wait for the PC to boot up. And then do what the notebook wants us to do with it, not what we want to.
* The obvious analogy comes to land line phone <-> cell phone.
* Big screens are not exactly a need of the people. When it finally comes to viewing, perspective comes into play. A huge grand father clock 20 feet away is as effective as your wrist watch.
* Look at iPod, its a single function device where all we need is a start, stop, pause, skip next, skip front buttons. All are buttons are expendible.
* But mobile devices are too small to use
* Keyboard is only for PC. Not for all applications. Only 5% of time is used in typing. There needs to be a change in application
* browser on palm – is unusable by users
* the information that needs to appear is the ones that are important to the user and that is visible to them
* ‘Not all’ information. Only ‘design’ information
* Desired information is to be showed
* Goals of Mobile
- stay informed
- to reach and to re reach
- as a phone
- media player
- anytime
- anywhere

I disagree with Atuls talk per se; but I look at the problem differently. The problem is not as much with computers as it is with their design. The whole interface that is provided to the computer are the monitor, keyboard and mouse. And hence ‘any’ applications UI is centered around this same interfaces available. Of these only the keyboard and mouse are capable of taking feedback. Whats needed primarily is a rethink of this design and interfacing of computers. iPod is a great single function device, but again a single function device is not a solution to the design problem. PC is now a consolidation of many single function devices which can again intercommunicate with each other. The mobile too is not at all a solution to any of my problems. Mobility is a great advantage here; but once the battery runs out; the use is debatable. Again, for recharging i need to carry the device specific charger equipment. On the other hand for a pc, the plug points are available everywhere! Im not yet convinced that my experience is the same on big screen and on a small pocket media player. Having seen a movie in imax and then on a small screen, i disagree. I think its time to look at bettering the human computer interaction experience than that of saying the pcs are themselves obsolete.

Farhan / spokn /12:15pm – 12:50pm / farhan AT spokn DOT com

* All our communication on mobile is bursty in nature
* The mobile comes in the flow of your work
* Taken from a personal example, having a bad interface can literally kill you
* UIs on mobile phones are extremely important
* Have to be extremely robust
* Spokn have create a new LTP (Light Telephone Protocol) which has no dynamic allocations
* Number of PCs are 350 million
* Vodafone had its 500 billion written off in loss
* Compare the PSTN World & IP World where the PSTN world is a walled garden
* Telcos need to open the networks to IPs
* Hutch has invested 60B in picking up 3G licenses and the speed you get is 128 kbps
* 5B in Wifi – 10 Mbps
* Right now the color phone is now a ‘hygiene factor’
* Number series can be neither GSM or Landline network; we can have a LTP number also
* All 36 nets of Hutch are in bad shape
* — From audience, Single point access to GPRS by subscription. Voice Roaming is by Telcos. At this point, the discussion diverted into the fractured network of the WiFi network –
* — Rajan added that the main difference Farhan was pointing was regarding the Open Closed system. This is where Fon, the new company was aiming to remove this fracture and to create a seamless wifi network –
* About Spokn, it provides a platform to create your own subnetworks.
* It is through javascript; own ui using spokn
* Based on the LTP stack. Can go through NATs. Does not need TCP, uses UDP. Entirely OS. Speaks codec. Used GSM
* Does not switch calls
* Uses UDP port punching [?], can work behind NATs, does not have rendezvous, uses relay peers
* VOIP works over GPRS connection
* Calling costs as much as email costs you!!!

Sigbjorn Vik / Opera / 12:50 pm – 1:15 pm / my.opera.com/Sigbjorn/

* Presentation available on http://people.opera.com/sigbjorn/barcamphyderabad2
* Opera on Mobile
* Opera Mini – Java installed on mobile
* Any device supported! Not only a pc, nintendo…
* Design principles – Graceful degradation
* could not down a lot

Dr Vishal Garg / IIIT / 1:20 pm – 1:40pm

The presentation was a demo of their project of using a mobile phone as a remote controller. They were using the power line for transmitting the messages. Using the X10 protocol.

* Mobile phone as universal remote control
* In general for a remote the Media of communication : RF / IR / Power Line / Dedicted wire
* Why mobile as a urc? Widespread, possibility of independent settings, proecessing power, memory, display, ringer, secure ID, portable, has IR, Wifi, Bluetooth, has buttons

– Break for lunch –
My lunch session was the highlight of my day mainly because of the flow of information we had. I dont have any guys name and didnt note any of them down :( [Please if any of you guys read this, please send me mail regarding the same]. [update from Puneeth] The discussion group consisted of Anil from Bosch, Damodhar from Dolphine Computers, Puneeth, Jaihind Reddy and Marx. The main idea was if we can make the entrepreneurship a systematic process[Anil's idea]. It was actually great seeing the amount of thought that went into it. Other than that it was also personal talk where we felt these days its the young guys thats taking the leap into entrepreneurship because the risk goes up as you get older. The discussion was interspersed with a lot of personal anectodes from all in the group and it was interesting to see that each and everyone of is either an entrepreneur or an aspiring one. Thanks guys.

Post Lunch
Post lunch, we had a video screening of Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Art of the Start’ talk. Most of the audience loitering in the lobby immediately sitting in the conference room. That was brilliant idea by Rajat and Rajan to get the barcampers back into the talks.

Sriram Krishnan / Microsoft / 3.00pm – 3:20pm
* Web 2.0, Devices and MS
* On best practises and things to watch out for
* Web 2.0 has brought out a change in website where each website is a service. [SOA]
* Anyone can consume the data
* ProgrammableWeb.com to get a list of all Open APIs existing and the Mashups
* SOAP: NTLM architecture, Federation – NOT lightweight
* Put your own server in the middle. REST based APIs
* As a reply from the audience if it is time to move to binary protocols, the answer was to use Zipped xml protocols, instead of binary protocols
* The main point was also about making the protocol less chatty. Put a server in the middle between the website and your mobile phone :)

After this we split up into two parallel sessions, I missed the talks of Rajan :( on Mobile 2.0 and the talk about the building the small business apps platform.

Anyways the two talks I attended were by Naresh and Mohit

Naresh / IIIT / 3:20pm – 3:50 pm / pSearch

The talk was basically about the search on mobiles based on location. So if you a hungry coder in Kavuri Hills near HiTech City and you key in ‘hyderabadi biryani’, you will get the most appropriate results based on your location. So mostly you will get the HiTech Biryani Center or Silicon Dhaba as your top results whereas your Bahaar or a Bawarchi or a Paradise would come later :D

The local city locations database is build by these folks and the location code is extracted from the mobile service operator and the results which are extracted from the serach provider like google/yahoo and the results are provided by combining with our city location database.

You can get more information about this project at http://mobilesearch.nokia.com

Mohit / Entrepreneur / 3:50 pm – 4:00 pm / Bootstrapping your own enterprise

Mohits talk was basically about the bootstrapping the selves and a lot of tips and observations on entrepreneurship having been entrepreneur himself.

* Created a network called bootstrap hyderabad
* TiE is for VC connections. Bootstrap is for entrepreneurs to help bootstrap themselves
* Students have a lots of ideas, but most of the time they are clueless on how to proceed
* The time to market should be really less. Efficiency and good speed are very important
* Explanation on valley of death, ideation.
* There is no rule about which road to take. Its all about your individual choice and individual risk propensity
* Take care about your debt/equity ratio
* Start early. So you can have the time to prove yourself. Even if you fail, time is on your side and you can start again
* If “Be your own boss” is your reason for being an entrepreneur, think again. Your devil boss will appear like a sissy in front of your toughest customers
* Be Nice. Be moral. Be Ethical
* SCRUM approach: Demo. Sell. Build approach
* Liquidity is important. If possible get your clients to pay for the prototype or for a part of the product.
Talks I missed

1. Ramesh’s Talk
2. Rajans’ Talk
3. PDA for Pharma
4. Last final Brainstorming + Panel Discussion

Things I wished I did
1. Gave a presentation. My unfulfilled wish in Barcamp Hyderabad too :(

BlogBlast: Announcing Date for Barcamp Hyderabad 2

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The topic is quite exciting one this time ' Mobile Apps & Infrastructure, in the Next Gen Internet'

When : 15th July, 2006. Mark your calendar.

Where: JNTU,Kukatpally, Microsoft Campus, Gachibowli, Hyderabad. Will upload the map soon. Just about 4 kms from the Hi-Tech City.

What can you do? Please spread the word for us. For all additional details visit barcamp official page.

Link to one of us and feel free to copy paste what we have already written on barcamp hyderabad 2:

Rajan's Post

Post on Hyderabad Tech Blog

Ramesh's Post

Mohit's Post

Barcamp Hyderabad 2: Planning Kickoff

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In this age of sequels & prequels and movies, (its the summer of the sequels, aint it?), things are already apace for Barcamp Hyderabad 2. This time the theme is on Mobile Space, Opportunities and Entreprenuers. Without much ado, the details are already posted here

Its exciting times we are living in right now!

Come to think of it, will we have a prequel to barcamp hyd? barcamp hyderabad -1.0? :)

Postmortem’ing’ BarCampHyderabad

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A very very very very very long postmortem

The info about the sessions have already been blogged about here, here, here, here, here, here and here I've decided to stay away from that summary style and write a postmortem of it from my perspective : things that went absolutely right, some ok and some skewed and some totally bunks :) Of course, fun shall be had too!

barcamp_logo.jpg logo_fancy_wood.jpg

Lessons and the good & bad & the ugly

  • The count was at 200 on April 8th morn. We had a rough rule of thumb that at the most only 50% would attend the barcamp and most of our calculations[the ones for grub] were made based on that; and thankfully we were proved wrong. It was really heartening to see close to 180 participants turn up for the camp which takes us to the conclusion: Since barcamp is by voluntary participation only, the 50% hueristic mostly wont work. Expect maximum turnout, 100% or even more due to some last minute participation unless of course the participant numbers are capped as were done by BarcampChennai and BarcampBangalore.
  • Hyderabad geek community exists! I doubted its existence till the clock struck 3 on saturday and after that all of the doubts vanished. Its geeks are not a myth and do exist and they rock! So many points raised during the talks of all speakers, ramesh, jay, prof. kamal, prof. vishal does prove this thing. Hence, proved. Case in point, sumeet had to literally rush through his html presentation coz all of the time was eaten up by us campers. Anand from Cordys too had to rush through his'. Same reason cited.
  • Having goodies at such an unconference is a very very good idea. My idea of an ideal goody is a T-Shirt. Give a geek a T and he is your brand ambassador for life[lifespan of the T at the very least]. A good T, preferably white with a small logo of your company is your company's best bet for a offline viral marketing strategy. And of course, caps, pens are a good idea too. My preference for goodies:
    • T Shirt
    • Pen(s)
    • Fancy (plastic)cover, spiral-bound notebooks :D
    • Wallets
    • Caps [not very preferred imho, makes you look like a dork, what with already the social stigma of being a geek. However, caps in summer is a good idea]
  • Good food + Drinks/Liquids is very very important. And having a break for every 2 hours is also important to unzap yourself. And a good coffee break doubles up as a great schmoozing opportunity
  • Finalize on your location as soon as possible; because that will in general decide the other logistics of the event – wifi connection, chairs, grub. Our first task on our list of to-do for the barcamp was getting the place for organizing it. And its amazing how easily we approached the IIIT faculty/admin for the space and they readily agreed. All it needed was just one mail. Its things like these that make IIIT da place to be right here, right now.
  • Wikis really work and so do blogs. All our planning for barcamp was through the wiki. And the blog and mail blasts helped perk up the interest in the event. Since a barcamp is limited by its budgets, go free/opensource and leverage every possible opportunity available
    • We initially started our own wiki, barcamphyderabad.pbwiki.com. Later we realised that we werent getting as many hits as we expected. So we placed the wiki in barcamp.org and then viola! things changed pretty fast. The reason: The barcamp wiki was already tracking the list of barcamps and already has the visibility and not leveraging that advantage wont do us any good.
    • Blog furiously about it. Let your blog readers know that there is a barcamp. Because geeks are rare and the ones interested in a particular topic are rarer; use methods which will fall in the eyes of these geeks. Use tags and thou shalt be noticed through del.icio.us, technocrati.
    • Emails and mailing lists are a great way to limit the noise and get things done.
  • Flame wars are fun. Midway in the presentations we had questions being raisedby M$ guys abot security & live.com and their evangelising atlas which were pretty much trounced by all the other open-source 'fanatics' :D Evangelisation of its product by a company whose image is tarnished and claims suspect in front of a geek meritocracy is dangerous. And of course not to speak of the wars of Y! and Cordys. he he…
  • Female geeks is not an urban legend. They exist, atleast 6 of them for sure, as was proved in the barcamp!
  • And then we had some demos by folks of Pramati, Cordys,and Y! . While there was a real danger of all the camp turning to be a presentatons on XForms,Y! saved the day by the presentation on Y! UI libraries.Cordys had a very aggressive style of presentation and which had only two reactions: either total dislike or total love. That is what should be the reaction of your customers towards your company/products: love or hate but not the zone of mediocrity. If you are in the middle you are dead.
  • Planning for foods, grubs is a very very tricky thing. We solved it quite easily: for snacks it was tea/coffee + samosas/kachoris & pizzas + chilled cold drinks for dinner. I believe junk food is geek food. Having this light dinner worked really well, for one there was no need to have an elaborate buffet organized. However, that removed for us the chance to move around and schmooze. Its a tradeoff. Make your choice.
  • Having a single track made it very easy for us to give the presentations in a very organized manner. Two tracks would have been chaos theory in action.
  • One idea that we wished should have worked was the joint session between hyd and chennai barcamps. No amount of dry runs on skype with audio/video could prepare us for the eventual failure of it on the d-day. Bandwidth problems and skype server errors really didnt help us in solving the issues. A joint session would have really raised the bar and made the world a bit more flatter [a very obvious reference to The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, one of the two must reads recommended by jay pullur, the other being Micro-ISV].
  • Having a great on-location organizers, in our case on-campus coordinator+organizer(s) : SMR & Tarun Jain is a very big help. It really saves the time for others to shuttle to and fro. And they get things done faster & much more effectively than any off-campus organizers. Leaveit to the chaos to optimise the best solution for you.
  • The initial team is very important to get the idea off the ground and building up the momentum. Having Ramesh with his loads of experience, contacts and energy can easily make up for the absence of a big team. Rajan, a true blue blood geek and technoprenuer can really give that geek perspective to it. Rajat, the HR guy & entrepreneur can bring in that zeal to the camp. As again, smr & tarun made all the things on campus easily possible.
  • My own set of complaints and rants against BarcampHyderabad
    • Should have been longer. Only 5 hours is never sufficient for a great barcamp. But again, the summer made it tough to stay wideawake for more than that.
    • A good dinner session after the camp must have been planned.
    • Too many barcamps are concentraing on Web 2.0. Not that its non-existent, but almost everyone is just hopping into the bandwagon; as if the hype is sweeping us all. Why were there no non-web2.0 presentations like the one we had at the last: "inside the mind of a shit-scared entrepreneur" – travails of the entrepreneur of dimdim
    • Why the hell was the AC not on full blast, on the back rows? Lakes of sweat was found in the back seats. A couple of deaths have been reported too, due to the obvious drowning and lack of swimming skills and absence of life-jackets.
    • Your barcamp is as good as the participation. We needed more presentations and more participation. Considering that there were 172 ppl, 10 presentations and about max of the same 20 (+/- 5) ppl putting in questions; do your math, calculate the S:R ratios… So that is definitely not barcampish. There was only one adhoc barcamp talk from Prabodh from Oracle. :(
    • Somewhere I felt we were not really looking at how to apply web2.0 to Indian context, not many Indians are net savvy and not many do ecommerce. A good solution might have been good. Prof. Vishal Garg's open journal was a good idea to start with.
    • The last product evagelising sessions were polarised: Y! and Cordys on opposite sides. Of course m$ gave up the gauntlet midway. Brrrrrrr…

We should have more barcamps. Next time I want to give a presentation and get trounced.

its getting hot, happening & interesting

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barcamp registrations are hitting at 172. they will mostly hit 200 by morning tomorrow. will definitely tell us whats it that getting so many folks interested: good talks, the goodies, the grub, the schmooze opportunity or just the kick of being among the geeks.

and frankly i didnt know hyderabad had such a huge geek community. and p.s. we definitely could adjust with more female geeks. the ratio is just too heavily skewed :(  

catch the action at barcamp.org/BarCampHyderabad

postmortems to follow soon and mostly will make up for a very interesting dicussion & case study. while barcamp chennai and barcamp bangalore had capped off at 100 and 110 respectively, we have them open; so the event logistics will definitely in our and their case for interesting study.