I converted the content I had prepared into for-web-only slides for your perusal:

The Good

Attending foss.in/2009 felt great for me because I took comfort in the fact that there are still people out there who are passionate about code and passionate about software. That is becoming rarer and rarer off late. I think it’s the “5 year limit” that I have observed in batchmates, most of them don’t want to code any more, and have moved on to so many other fields. While that is okay, the problem is that it has become a fashion to dis IT and software field.

Another factor was that everything is in the cloud and everything is a website these days, so does open source as a process matter anymore? First of all, the applications are not open source and even if we have the code (rare situation), you and I can’t fix the application/website unless you host it yourself.

But the foss.in community made me remember the joy of coding and joy of hacking.

Kudos to Team Foss.in for making the only community event and only IT event that is worth attending. It was fantastic to see how the concept of workouts had just taken off. And everyone’s been saying that all the keynotes have been fantastic.

In case you are wondering, I’m not the only one who was so enthralled by the event, for example:

See Lakshman’s writeup on the same. And so on.

Bottom line? Shut up and hack!

The Bad

Will miss the direction of Atul Chitnis.

What was missing

What I felt was missing is a discussion on the state of the art of software in each field, not just specific PoTDs. And I think this is more of a community perspective rather than the organizers’ perspective — organizers just provide the platform, community provides the content, as Atul keeps reminding us.

For example, consider my pet topic, the state of NoSQL databases – what’s good, what’s not, is it strange or expected that so many of them have come up in the last 1-2 years and all of them are open source (or at least the ones that we hear of). Taking it a step further, how it affects other fields of software. I’ve attempted to ask this before in a session at barcamp on whether webapp frameworks will adapt to NoSQL.

Similarly, what is the future of compilers, will LLVM + clang replace GCC (as @artagnon was speculating)? Will WebKit and V8 take over the world and leave Mozilla + Tracemonkey behind? Why are there so few projects using AGPL? What does it take to get full database dumps out of Wikipedia ? Will open source phones never take off? How does Eucalyptus help have an alternative with EC2? How does appscale help have an alternative to GAE? And so on.

In toto, I think there are three parts to this and I believe only the third part of which is done well already by the community and organizers: (1) what are the different fields and layers of software, (2) what is the state of the art of open source software in those fields, (3) getting people started and involved. I feel that only when we think on these lines, we will achieve Atul’s stated vision of “open source being the mainstream, proprietary software being the special case”*.

Thoughts?

* No flamewars please. I believe that the world will be better off by having all the infrastructure as open source software and having only the business logic / trade secrets as the proprietary part. At each stage of evolution of software, the stack grows higher, and the infrastructure/open source stack can grow higher along with it. For example, Robot Open Source and the Hadoop umbrella.

⇒ Read more at our event coverage at StartupDunia.com.

Update: This has been cross-posted to the official NASSCOM Emerge blog.

To be honest, I don’t go to Barcamp for the sessions per se, it is mainly for the people and this is one of the most relaxed ways to catch up with friends and make new ones. I met a lot of people and had very good conversations.

My own session on webdev frameworks and their relation to newer technologies such as cloud databases had a rocky start because there were lot of first-time Barcampers and were expecting a talk-style session. Luckily, I was saved by 3-4 guys in the audience who got it and we had a lively discussion. The takeaway is that, yes, there are interesting possibilities when we natively integrate our webdev frameworks and cloud databases (via modifying the ORMs) and cloud computing facilities. A few people were interested in my suggestion to carry the conversation forward in some sort of mailing list. So please join the “evolving-webdev” mailing list if you are interested in exploring these technologies.

The other interesting session I attended was on philosophies of yoga by Shashikant Joshi. As expected, he gave a very different take on yoga than what we normally hear. He started off by explaining the meaning of the word ‘yog’ as “state of mind” and what our ancient scriptures say on how to attain bliss and remove sorrow. It was hard for me to not be reminded of GTD philosophy, especially the “mind like water” concept. I felt guilty that there is so much already written by our ancestors that we ignore and wait for people to rediscover it and preach it.

I missed Shree Kumar’s calligraphy session because it was at the same time. Oh well.

Besides that, there was a whole lot of hallway conversations.

Gopal was teaching people how to solve a Rubik’s cube. He has it nailed down to a few algorithms, I can’t even fathom how he had the patience to derive those algorithms. We timed him solving it. The first time he took 1 min 57 seconds to solve it. The second time he took 1 min 36 seconds. Phew.

Then in another freewheeling conversation, we were talking about Zeno’s paradox and all sorts of stuff like that.

All in all, two non-stop days of fun reiterated why Barcamp remains one of my favorite events.

Thanks to all the planners (@ashwin, @daaku, @dkris, @fagunbhavsar, @hnprashanth, @viralsachde and others) who made it happen, and to Yahoo! for sponsoring the venue.

You can read more about what happened via the #bcb8 tag.

If you are interested in this discussion, please click the “I Want to Attend” button on this session’s page at the BarCamp Bangalore website.

If there is not sufficient interest, I will drop this session because there seem to be 88 sessions registered already, I have no idea how so many sessions are going to fit into just 2 days.

For more background material on this topic, see my Website Making Howto wiki page.

“Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready just in time.”

As opposed to only thinking of right now, taking a year to build it and realize it is no longer needed, or more likely, it is no longer the way things are done.

This statement immediately came to my mind when I was reading the announcement of ‘Triple Play’ by Airtel:

Rs. 999 per month which gives 135 channels including 256 kbps broadband speed with unlimited download and a landline connection.

First, you can imagine internet access completely on the television in homes, say in a year or so.

Second, if you combine this with their Online Desktop feature(¹), and you can imagine how people will be accessing computing on their TV just a year down the lane without ever buying a traditional desktop computer. And best of all, users can easily install/uninstall applications (on rental basis) without hassles/worries/dangers of “ruining your computer” since Airtel will be hosting the computing facility.

The question is: If you are a company (whether big or small) in the tech space, do your products and services take this into account?

Similarly, we all know that netbooks are the rage now. Atul predicted that these are stop-gap measures until people realize that they can do the same things with slightly higher-end phones.

Again, ask the same question above.

Technology indeed changes so fast and changes our lifestyle along with it.

Other useful points from the talk:

• It is not the tools you use. It’s how you use them.
• Those who forget history (i.e. learn from others’ mistakes) are doomed to repeat it.
• If product is good, price is right, people will buy it.
• A product is more than just code. A customer wants a solution and a long term relationship with the service provider.
• Today is history. Build for the future so that your product can be ready in time.
• Markets can be created.
• Hint: Assume connectivity. Local storage no longer matters.
• Biggest products are mobile products now. Simple products, not big things.
• Advertising doesn’t pay. Unless you’re Yahoo or Google.
• VC funding is not a viable business model. Unless you’re a VC.

⁽¹⁾ Has this service actually taken off? Who uses it, I wonder.

The idea by Pradeep to have it in the open area outside the cafeteria just after lunch was a brilliant marketing ploy, because people would just walk out of the cafeteria and then they would see all the cycles and then out of curiosity, they would come closer and end up chatting with the cyclists. It was nice to see people hopping on and going for rides just to check out the cycles.

The stars of the show were undoubtedly Vikram and Varun because of their cycling clothes and their advanced bikes which have features such as special shoes that lock into the pedals as well as ability to unhook the wheels for easy transportation.

We had a lot of fun talking to people and answering many questions from curious Barcampers and turned out to be a successful session. Among the curious people, there was also a reporter from the Bangalore Mirror. It turns out that we ended up in an article in their Sunday edition yesterday:

BANGALORE MIRROR, SEPTEMBER 21, 2008, Page 9 : Rising fuel costs, never-ending traffic jams, have made travelling quite a problem in Bangalore. So it came as no surprise that young techies, who cycle to work, created a stir at Barcamp 7 in IIM last Saturday – Renuka Phadnis

The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore was full of activity last weekend. The auditorium was the venue for an interactive session of Headstart, a group that supports entrepreneurship in the technology sector. In the corridors and break-out spaces of the management school, there were parallel discussion sessions going on of Barcamp 7. But the one group that attracted the most attention here was the one that pedals their way to work. Varun, Vikram and Swaroop, the three directors of Ion Lab, cycle to their workplace.

And when they are stuck in any of Bangalore’s infamous traffic jams, the trio simply lift the bikes and walk out of the jam. Vikram used to cycle to his office in Bosch earlier and is still cycling to his new workplace. He cycles up to 50 km a day and has even pedaled to Mysore. The cycle he uses is a ‘Giant’ that has as an accessory shoes that swivel into the pedals of the cycle.

Varun has been cycling in Bangalore for six months after he got hooked on to it in the US.”A lot of people complain about the traffic but I like it,” he says. Once in a jam, he lifted the cycle and a guy in a car told him, “Dude, I am here stuck in this traffic and you are getting away?” He likes the fact that cycling keeps him fit too.

When you ask Swaroop if he does not find cycling a challenge in Bangalore, he says, -”Cycling isn’t, but driving a car is!” He says it is a lot safer and easier in the city. He has been cycling from Jayanagar to Domlur for the past two years.

… (see the picture for the full article)

Factual errors aside, it is a good article and really encourages non-cyclist skeptics to consider cycling. The other upshot is that the red bicycle you see on the top of the page is mine, so if I ever want to sell it, I just have to say “As featured in the Bangalore Mirror”, heh. And also, this is the first time ‘Ion Lab’ has been mentioned in the press.

Let’s reiterate over the benefits of cycling to work:

1. You do not need a separate time to exercise, because you’re cycling to work. You save one hour everyday.
2. Save on fuel costs, and in turn make the world less reliant on oil fuels.
3. Reach your workplace faster. It’s a myth that cycling is hard and slow and you’ll be late. On an average, I used to motorbike to my (ex-) Yahoo! office in Domlur in 45 minutes, but used to take 30 minutes on cycle.
4. Don’t get stuck in traffic jams. Just lift your cycle and push it along on the sidewalk. (Please do not cycle on the sidewalk, you’ll be annoying pedestrians)
5. A good exercise before you reach your workplace will really pump up the endorphins and put you in a positive mood to get lot of work done throughout the day.
6. And you’ll be a lot healthier!

Convinced yet?

More photos from the event:

Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.

The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.

The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.

The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”

The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”

Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:

1. Gather the right players
2. Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.

He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:

1. Teach the Game
   • When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game – the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
2. Share the macrovision
   • What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
3. Near-term targets.
   • A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
4. Keep score
   • Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
   • In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
   • Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
   • Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
   • Keep changing critical numbers.
   • Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
   • Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
   • Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk – 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
5. Line of sight
   • Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
   • This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
6. Celebrate your victories
   • Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
   • Have a Victory Party
   • The act of recognizing > how you recognize
7. Align everyone’s interests
   • To the victor(s), belong the spoils
   • In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
   • Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
   • How direct is the co-relation?
   • Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
   • American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.

• When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.

Bhavin briefly mentioned about Ricardo Semler and his book Maverick:

Semler went to work for his father’s company, originally called Semler & Company, then a shipbuilding supplier in São Paulo. Semler clashed with his father, Antonio Semler, who supported a traditional autocratic style of management while the younger Semler favoured a decentralised, participatory style. Further, Ricardo favored diversification away from the struggling shipbuilding industry, which his father opposed.

After heated clashes, the son threatened to leave the company. Rather than see this happen, Antonio Semler resigned as CEO and vested majority ownership in his son in 1980 when Ricardo was 21 years old. On his first day as CEO, Ricardo Semler fired sixty percent of all top managers. He began work on a diversification program and to rescue the company.

…

Among many ‘radical’ policies, Semler let his employees set their own hours, design their workplace, choose their own IT, share all information and have no secrets. Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted. Semco has a policy of complete internal financial openness, even teaching factory workers how to read accounts so they can understand the company’s books. Salaries are public information unless the employee requests they not be published. In addition, all employees can set their own salary. In doing so they must consider what they think they can make elsewhere; what others with similar skills and responsibilities make in the company; what friends with similar backgrounds make and how much they need to live on. Semco doesn’t have receptionists, secretaries or personal assistants, regarding them as unnecessary.

Each business unit is small enough so that those involved understand everything that is going on and can influence the outcomes. Starting out as a manufacturing company, Semco allowed it’s workers to set their own production quotas and found that employees would voluntarily work overtime to meet them. Profit sharing is practiced right down to factory floor level, instead of large bonuses only for senior management. Semler eventually retired from all executive positions at age 33.

The next interesting session was Mahesh Murthy on the art of marketing your startup.

• His list of exploits is impressive – an advertising and marketing maverick, O’Gilvy & Mather, revived Channel V from closing down, helped launches of Amazon (Earth’s Biggest Bookstore campaign) and Yahoo! (first commercial version of Yahoo), Co-Founder of Geodesic, CEO/Founder of Pinstorm pay-for-performance SEO/SEM, Managing Partner of Seedfund (Google as investor)
• Make the product insanely great so that first customer recommends it to others.
• If you have a product, and you need to advertise to sell it, you’re doing something wrong.
• Satisfied customer more important than advertising.
• The usual suspects (G, Y, M, A) don’t advertise, do they?
• Pricing – Charge super-premium at the start. Competition worry if it is more expensive, not cheaper. Make it a positioning weapon.
• Price NOT calculated as cost + profit, but it is a differentiation strategy. Make it a premium product. Price is not the way to win, you’ll NEVER win by being cheaper.
• Market at conferences by being a speaker. Be outrageous. You can even trash the competition if you know what you’re talking about.
• Be a thought leader in your market / niche area, even if it is left-handed hockey sticks. Be a global expert. Journalists and audience will talk to you then because you have credibility. ⇒ Be a trend setter.
• Good PR is very important, talk to journalists. Tell them what they want to know, what they want to hear, give them trends, not “I’m great” funda.
• If something is already a trend, it’s the “end”. You have to set the trend. Be 1st, 2nd or 3rd, not the 10th guy.
• If you need money for marketing ⇒ worry sign i.e. More budget ⇒ Smaller brains ⇒ Poorer product
• Market research is crap. It can give what 5 people think, not how to change what those 5 people think. Nobody can predict the future.
• More notes at MediaNama.

The next session was by Kiruba on the topic of business blogging and why startups should blog. People had the same traditional apprehensions that I have heard before. For example, people said they don’t know how to get an audience. Although it is difficult to convince people, my personal view is that it is exactly like marketing your startup – who is going to buy your product? Just like you have to put in effort to gain customers for your product, you have to put in effort to gain an audience for your blog. And the same goes for the product i.e. the content – if the articles are not good, don’t complain that nobody is reading/talking about it. However, I don’t think most people grokked this.

Amit Ranjan (SlideShare) talked about virality. And amazingly, I again missed catching him in a conference, damn. His formula of putting a virality ratio made it more realistic to think about it. Simplistically, if people who are subscribing are referring more people, then the growth is high, otherwise it will reach a plateau.

Sanjay Anandaram’s talk about reconciling entrepreneurs and investors was a big hit with the audience, especially with his wit and dry humor. The most laughs were at the “Open your kimono, let the investor look into your financial details. If the investor likes what he sees, then you are in business.” There were many important points like learning the basics of how term sheets work, etc. Namitha Jagadeesh has a detailed writeup in her livemint blog.

Shashank Ghosh, a film maker, talked about how creative people are like startups – they have to focus on convincing the producer (VC) about the story (product) and that it will be a hit (profit). He was very humorous and showcased a trailer of the upcoming “Quick Gun Murugan” movie, which seems like a promising movie. Shah Rukh Khan’s role-playing in ‘Om Shanti Om’ of a South Indian cowboy hero saying “Rascal, Mind It” was a teaser about this movie.

Day 2 was the demo sessions.

The blogosphere has covered this topic in detail, especially this post at the VC Circle. My favorite demos/startup products were Lipikaar – an impressive easy way to write native language, Soliton doing error detection in factory products, Storrz social shopping portal, one-stop shop recruitment portals created by tiriyo and thehiringtool, the intelligent OOH displays by NextBiT Computing and the mobile banking by Eko. More details at the WATBlog. Very impressive ideas and execution! People should stop the talk that India is just a IT services country, there are some serious kick-ass products being done here.

The most important part of any conference is not what happens inside the halls, but what happens out in the corridors. And proto.in proved itself to be a remarkable gathering because of the amount of non-stop networking that happened. At the end of the two days, I was totally deprived of energy and had a big stack of business cards in my hand. Surprisingly, people were more open to talk to each other here than at unconferences like BarCamp, etc.

It was a fantastic couple of days, and it was totally worth the flight tickets to Delhi.

Kudos and thanks to all the organizers for hosting such a fantastic event, right from Vijay Anand and Kiruba and the rest of The Knowledge Foundation who are the pillars behind proto.in, to Sudhir and Divya who compéred the show, and all the volunteers behind the scenes.

I had taken some notes during the day. As I was expanding it into a blog post, I realized I was just adding filler words which was a waste of bits, so here it is as-is:

• Ashish Gupta, Helion VC on “Concept to Success : Milestones for startups”
  • India is a startup (positive way of looking at things)
    • High energy
    • Lots of growth
    • Small absolute number (relatively)
    • Little infrastructure or process
    • Lack of talent
    • Lots of optimism
    • Need to innovate to survive
    • ⇒ Once in a lifetime opportunity
  • Significant change in dynamics (negative way of looking at it)
    • Whatever can be made efficient will be done so.
      • We can in turn get bangalored and some other country will benefit.
    • Creative folks will thrive.
    • ⇒ We have no choice.
  • Hardest evolutionary steps
    • Those that requires behavior change
      • For example, starting to think “Become cash flow positive”
      • Next level CEO, process, tech, business model, etc.
  • Put in place metrics to measure everything – will help identify whether one has already hit an inflection point.
  • Rules of thumb
    1. Focus on customer/issue
    2. Focus on continuous improvement
    3. Intellectual honesty
    4. Results matter – only for MEASURING (measure progress on a larger scale)
    • ⇒ Same rules for person, family, company

• Application Marketing panel discussion
  • Dr. Y L R Moorthi – IIMB professor of marketing (the moderator)
    • ‘Technology has the shelf life of a banana’
    • Wacky ideas (product) + Marketing (messaging) – the 2 challenges
  • Paul Murphy, Director of Innovation, Microsoft India
    • Taking ideas to market is key
    • Time vs Cost in marketing
    • Leverage as many platforms as possible
  • Bharath Chinamanthur,Director – Retail Systems, Amazon India Development Center
    • Great customer experience, wide merchandise, low cost – simple basics that Amazon has adhered to
    • Free shipping in lieu of marketing program
    • Affiliate program
    • ‘Zara’ – a Spanish retailer, No. 64 in the Inter-Brand survey → fast moving (short availability) high-fashion available in regular malls. Their innovation is the supply-chain and the marketing since the fashion is designed by others.
  • Suresh Vedula, Head – Business Mobility, Nokia India
    • Having a good product, be honest about your product’s capabilities, build a customer base.
    • All these are required for startups as well. Brand will be built over time via word of mouth, etc. If you have a product that’s a dud, things like marketing and brand don’t matter.
    • Nokia Basics
      1. Product innovation
      2. Reach, especially in a country like India
      3. Supply chain management
    • When everything fails, common sense succeeds
  • Y L R Moorthi
    • Marketing tactic – from 9 am to 1 pm say ‘cello’ instead of ‘hello’ and if you’re the one they call up, you get a gift → costs nothing but overnight they built brand recognition in Tamil Nadu
    • Its essential to think such wacky ideas, only startups can do that.
  • Paul Murphy
    • Partner ecosystem important
    • 1) Crawl 2) Walk 3) Run
    • Success is a terrible teacher. Failure is a better one.
  • Summary by Y R L Moorthi
    • Start with the market, not the product
    • “I’m expensive now because I learned so much” – a guy who has had 3 failures who was a hot hire
    • Wacky ideas
      • Anantra, no office, save lot of money
    • How to get Reach is important, various strategies being used
      • “Oh My News” Korean newspaper/blog
      • CambrianHouse.com – crowdsourcing ideas
    • Basically, ideate and monetize.

• Startup stalls
  • The ones I was most impressed with was Mobisy – they have already done a Adobe AIR for Mobile! You can write applications in HTML/JavaScript and deploy as an app on a number of platforms like Symbian, etc. provides native facilities like SMS, phone book, location.
    • Their pluggd.in interview gives a good overview
  • MyDuniya – just SMS for sharing Files, messaging Groups, etc.
  • There were more startups in mobile payment (ngpay, obopay, mchek), services such as payroll outsourcing and company incorporation help, big companies like Akamai and Amazon that provide technology services for startups, etc.
  • The group stalls for Bangalore OCC and KickStart.in were packed.
  • Satish found QuillPad very good: “It needs guts/passion to say a ‘NO’ when approached by google to acquire!”

• There was also a ‘Meet the VCs’ session going on in parallel.

  • R K Misra, Change India movement
  • Talking about his story – 3 ventures, all successful, lived in USA and Japan but had the desire to retire at 40 and have a public life. Working with the government in a private-public partnership to improve things in India
  • Rural is poor because only 18% GDP comes from agriculture and has to support 600 million people compared to 60% of Indian GDP in 1950 which supported 200 million people
  • Subsidies are not the route but he was glad the loan waiver was done even though economists disagree
  • Why should everyone in rural areas become a farmer? They cannot come to urban areas because they can’t afford housing and there will be more Dharavis.
    • Some initiative here. Visit his website for details.
  • Average income in village family is 2000 rupees per month!
  • The initiatives will benefit even the politician because they can hoardings of their names. Everybody wins!
    • In all this, he is the catalyst.
  • Change India movement
  • What age should I start? Sunday comes in every age.
  • Nobody voted. We think we are too sophisticated for politics.
  • 25% of the population i.e. the middle class doesn’t vote. That’s why the politicians don’t care about them!
  • 1) Individual 2) Social 3) National responsibilities. Entrepreneurship is about the first two, what about the third?
  • Not rocket science, it is doable
  • Help politicians in their ambitions and help them do good work such as in Orissa, etc.
  • Someone blamed PMs from North India for backwardness, R K Misra said we should not make such statements unless we have proof and also he wants one India and does not want to debate such statements. “So what are you going to do?” is his question. You should engage North Indians and help them to improve.
  • You cannot take wheat/potato from Karnataka to Andhra Pradesh! Because of APMC act.
  • Food scarcity is the best thing to happen in India because nobody wants to get into agriculture and this will help improve things
  • Costco and Walmart are already doing rationing of wheat in USA!
  • rk@changeindia.in
  • Corruption
    • Electoral reforms is important such as corporate donations to political parties should be public. But everybody benefits by it not being stringent – the middlemen ‘moneybags’, the politicians, the corporates, except the common man.
    • This country is like Europe – local aspirations (regional parties) and national pride (national parties).
    • It is very complex, we cannot have a 2-party system even though it’s nice to talk about such things.
  • Water, food, national pride – are the critical issues going forward.
  • Nobody asked about entrepreneurship, this shows that politics is more important than entrepreneurship but please first make your money in entrepreneurship!
  • Impressive speaker, especially his clarity in thought
  • Further reading
    • He is the Times of India Lead India winner
    • What is Change India?
    • About Rajendra Misra

• CEO Conclave
  • Panel
    1. Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Infosys
    2. Dr. Vivek Mansingh, Country Manager, Dell India R&D
    3. Praveen Vishakantaiah, President, Intel India
    4. Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India
  • They should have also invited actual entrepreneurs who are recent successes, not only people from big companies, where is Sridhar Vembu from Zoho?
  • “Co-creation”, “innovation”, “disruption”, “inflection point”, too many buzzwords
  • “Know your customer” – well, call him, I’ll talk to him/her right now! I’m skeptical on this piece of advice, there is no well-defined customer, just people who might benefit from your product and they can be anybody anywhere
  • 400 Tier-1 and 2 cities in India vs just 180 in China
  • Praveen says funding not as difficult, if you stand out, it will happen
  • I wish I could beam the IBM “Stop Talking. Start Doing.” ads with my cellphone to the roof:
    • Innovation Man
    • Buzzword Bingo
    • Innovation Station
  • Why take on cliched stories like Google, why not someone like Mobissimo?
  • Sharad Sharma is doing a good job of being the moderator
  • Discussion on adoption of IT by SMB across industries
    • I personally think this is a chicken-and-egg problem, without killer applications, why would they adopt?
  • Everybody talks about mobile. Where are the killer applications? I see JiGrahak, ngpay, obopay, mchek all solving payment problems, but is that the only thing? What else? If there’s nothing else, why are all the VCs proclaiming 250 million dollars each for only mobile ventures?
  • CEO is the chief change officer and should be focused on the company’s differentiation
  • Payment methods like prepaid cards for mobile will fuel the SaaS strategy to penetrate SMBs that have not adopted IT yet
  • Leaders who can take the company to the next level is important
  • Imagination is what is required. Innovation is cheap, talent is scattered.
  • Radical change is tough to handle
  • Leadership takes over when logic stops.
  • Vivek spoke well, lot of common sense, trying to instill the can-do attitude in the audience
  • I think the reason that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley is because of the culture of experimentation and the culture that “failure is okay”. That’s what needs to be developed in India.
  • The first half of this session was boring, but the latter half turned out to be good.

• My personal takeaway : Reinforcement of basics
  • Ideas
  • User experience
  • Team – matching frequency and passion
  • Execution
  • Risk-taking
  • Business models
  • Time to market
  • Distribution, partners, tie-ups, leveraging platforms
  • Networking
  • Mentorship
  • Branding
  • Willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed i.e. wear many hats
  • Emotional strength to bide over the highs and lows
  • Know your role and shut your hole (‘Monster House’ advice)
  • Ability to recognize good contacts and hire good people
  • Be happy with small successes but get fired up for big ones
  • Learn to read the data
  • Make customer lock-in but always respect your customer

Overall, I think it was a good event, at least it was better than my expectations. There were some things they could’ve done better as I’ve already mentioned, especially bringing in people who are out there doing it today and succeeding instead of big company people. I wished to see people with their scars, not only people who are old and seasoned!

At the end of the day, I felt a little jaded. I guess what we need are more success stories and discussion on their stories. Yes, there are startups which are doing great such as Sloka Telecom, they are the kind of people who should be highlighted, rather than regurgitating buzzwords and spiel.

With all these events like Startup City, Startup Disco, and even an entire Indian magazine dedicated to entrepreneurship happening, I wonder if entrepreneurship is overhyped in India?

Had an impromptu discussion on development on Nokia Phones with Ashwin and another person who worked in Nokia. Surprised to hear that it costs so much!

Then, attended a session on “Pattern Labs” who are trying to create a better knowledge base for GAP, a conglomerate of NGOs for sustainable development. What they’re trying to achieve was quite admirable and definitely needed, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand what they’re trying to do in this Pattern Labs and what kind of software they’re trying to develop.

This was followed by a 5-10 min discussion on Web 2.0 for K-12 education, it was interesting to note that there were few success stories where kids used a wiki to collaboratively write a poem using the “diamond pattern” they teach in school and were benefited by this approach.

Then Rajiv Poddar initiated a discussion on the legal status of VoIP in India and why there should be a correction. Basically, VoIP calls cannot reach a PSTN/PLMN i.e. landline or mobile phones in India. Why? Because it will hurt VSNL’s revenues. An equally relevant issue is that VSNL is the only gateway in India trying to control all traffic for no real reason. But why is VoIP important? Because it makes phone calls damn inexpensive and there are many innovations that can be done around it – right from system integration to enabling live voice discussions for a website, all at a low cost.

Rajiv equated this situation to the telephony space – the government was afraid that BSNL won’t make money, but once the space was opened, everyone now knows the story of the rapid growth of telephony and communication in India, after all India is the fastest growing market. It did more good than harm.

Previously I had known that there are some legal issues with VoIP but had never ventured to learn about it until I happened to walk into this session. A group called Voice of VoIP was created on the spot to take the discussion forward and see if something can be done about it.

Then I went into a session on Scoping, Closures and Objects in Javascript. The speaker Venkatesh Choppella was a professor at IIIT, Trivandrum and held a Ph.D in computer languages. I was mighty impressed that there are such lecturers out there! Interestingly, he teaches JavaScript as the first language for some of his classes at his university. I learned a bit about JavaScript and language theory.

Then, Vinayak Hegde had an interesting session on High performance websites. Again, the crowd had a lively discussion on tips and tricks right from something called “CSS sprites” to using YSlow, Minify, Expires Headers, ETags, and so on.

And in between all this, I met many people. In fact, when we were mingling, few of us decided to go to the Coffee Day outlet in the next building to get something cold. It was such a sultry weather. And there we found, Shourya and another college student (Jayanth?) playing guitars and singing Def Leppard songs!

There were some amazingly funny and insightful discussions going on as well, many of which I can’t write here, but I’ll especially remember Kushal Das’ stories. I never thought someone had the guts to pull off giving an Intel 865 motherboard to his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day! And they even have fights over GCC. Wow, that’s like a geek’s dream, right? Anyway, I wish him all the best, hope they’re together for a long time and more.

The day ended with a feedback session on the good, bad and ugly of Barcamp. Most people had suggestions and cribs but they said they got used to it once they understood the idea of how Barcamps work – it’s meant to be not organized and scheduled properly. Things should happen on-the-fly. And again, people asked for video archives of the sessions because they missed many due to the parallel tracks. Simple answer – get a video camera and record. If 4-5 people can volunteer, the problem is solved. The real problem is not enough people willing to do these things. Barcamp works only when everyone pitches in, whether you are initiating a session, volunteering or at least putting your name on the wiki.

There were more discussions, but in the end people agreed that the current format is great and nothing needs to be changed for number 7.

Bottom line: Adjust maadi. Don’t make it a “conference”!

There are only a few things that can get me high – running, passionate techie discussions, meeting new people, and interesting and insightful conversations. I had a good dose of all of these in two days, so BCB6 was simply well-spent time for me. And it looks like many other campers feel the same way as well.

P.S. If you want to be updated on when’s the next barcamp, just follow the mailing list and the website.