Monday May 29, 2006
Hyderabad Bloggers MEET. on June 4 YOU (Hyderabadi bloggers) ARE INVITED..
What: An informal meet of Bloggers from Hyderbad.
Why: To help create a community of the bloggers.
Explore possibilities of collectively (interest-groups++)
doing something constructive
How: Initiate a Hyd blogroll or blog directory. Probably a
hyd-bloggers yahoo group- for blogosphere events/activities
coordination (must be non-spam & minimal traffic).
When: 4:00pm, 4th June.
Where:Cafe coffee day (@Banjara hills/Music World) -
C/o Music World 5&6, (near Banjara Hills Pizza Hut)
Fatima Pasha Layout8-2-672,Road No.1,
Banjara Hills, Hyderabad-34
Agenda: Open. Community building is the focus. Get names & blogs
onto a blogroll & DIR (can use a GPRS pda/phone). Disucss anything
else that gets proposed. Informal.
(2006-05-29 22:09:06.0)
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Tuesday May 23, 2006
Now, onto Enterpirse 2.0 Saw this piece on Enterpirse 2.0 today. Have been kind of curious and tracking the Enterpirse 2.0 term's evolution for some weeks now. First came across it in a post by my friend Rajat on HydTechBlog (The Hyderabad Tech Blog, multi author) . He referred to the article by Andrew McAfee. H esummarize E 2.0 as technologies "that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration".
Like I said earlier, the RIA & RicjUI technologies, and some of the simpler "servcies" approaches of Web2.0, when extended to the enterprise are surely useful. But what I fail to get a handle on is the social aspect. How will communities help Biz Computing?
As Andrew McAfee says in his posts, communities within the enterpirses also can be formed and a fundamentally different approach to organization's functioning may be possible. I have my reservations. I see two problems/limitations: (1) The social networking based "Enterprise 2.0" is not complete infrastructure. Helps only manage knowlede. (2) IN an enterprise, one can get a small group of people to collaborate. But can an entire organization change its mindset?
This still at best helps with Information (informal/non database) management and knowledge sharing. Helps collaboration. To this end, wikis, folksonomy and other social technologies will help. But this is not going to change IT infrastructure. I dont see how this can fundamentally change how organizations work. IN terms of collaboration it helps. We have had email groups.. now Enterprise 2.0 may enable more smarter and more productive approaches for such knowledge sharing and group collaboration exchanges. But this doesnt fundamentally change anything. Can I use wiki's to manage schedules? Yes. I can. Manage project plans and updates in a collaborative wiki. Therotecally, it sure sounds good. But practically speaking.. what if one malicious user deletes or corrupts the data. Sure.. one can go back to wiki history and restore. But only if some detects the corruption!
And where does Enterprise 2.0 fit into core enterprise infrastructure. We have always had document sharing and collaboration/workflow solutions. Teh Enterpirse 2.0 can make this probably better an dmoer particpative. But can I get away from MS Exchange/Lotus to manage the mail groups, calenders, org directory structure? I dont think so. Can use a wikipedia to maintain employee information. That would be suicidal, I guess! Can you imagine the complete HR database available in a collaborative system? Can you imagine the ERP or corp financial systems available in a collaborative environment?
The answer is NO. Sure, E 2.0 will be useful in knowledge management and sharing. Get everyone in the company to particpate. But this will be of limited use beyond knowledge management. I will not see this as the next/current big technology wave. Even in web 2.0, in spite of all its hype, the value is essentially in the TichUI & RIA aspects. The social aspect is a simple fact on the internet. But doesnt present much value to enterpirses that are building operational systems and biz solutions. At least I dont see it yet.. anyone, anyway, to convince me otherwise?
(2006-05-23 13:40:08.0)
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Thursday May 18, 2006
AJAX.. too much noise at JavaOne? A quick scan of JavaOne 2006 shows that AJAX is probably the noise leader. Closely followed by SOA/JBI/Integration. Google is making some noise this week on its toolkit (Dev in Java and run as AJAX). Many other companies are showcasing the AJAX toolkit and IDE capabilities, including Exadel, TIBCO (General Interfaces), JackBe, JustSystems. Why should Opensource be left behind, .. so there is the OpenAJAX alliance and what exactly this initiative is about. And then there is a panel discussion on AJAX, Web2.0 & SOA. And more..
Now.. as I have said few times earlier, I really cannot understand how these technology dynamics work. AJAX really is not anything new. And it is also not something that will fundamentally change softwrae architectures. It is just another technology for rich-UI. Instead of just HTML via JSPS/ASPs, now there is HTML+AJAX along with JSP/ASP/++. Sure.. AJAX does offer more programming power for processing in the browsers. But this is still UI tier of applications. But going by the huge hype this is creating, one gets the feeling that AJAX is a revolutionary new software platform. Which it surely isnt. Not revolutionary. And not new. And not a platform!
Regardless, As a technologist I do appreciate the tech mindshare grab success: sensing these tech shifts and moods, and coming up with a technology that catches a wave, rises with it, creating a new value (even if only just a perception), is surely a neat accomplishment for anyone that manages to do this!
(2006-05-18 03:53:51.0)
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Wednesday May 17, 2006
Pramati at JavaOne- J2EE morphing? For the seventh year in a row, we are at JavaOne.
Some observations (hearsay.. am not there this year :-) )Quite expectedly, the hype in AJAX had carried over quite well to JavaOne as well. And then ofcourse, there is Eclipse. Somehow I alwayus felt Eclispe was very Sun-unfriendly. So nice to see good presence & buzz around Eclipse at JavaOne. As a platform, we cannot afford to get any more fractured.. than we already are. In so doing (by being incohesive) we would only be weakening an otherwise very powerful platform. Both Java & J(2)EE.
J(2)EE itself seems to be rapidly maturing in the market. It is now de-facto platform for applications. So the technology is very strong. But then most of what the industry needs is already in the core platform. Guess the trends now will be in extending teh core platform. Already there are serious incorporation of web servcies and SOA related frameworks and standards. JSF is gaining some traction in the AJAX din. The likes of Hibernate, Struts and Spring seem to be getting into an integral status now (as a default part of any JEE based solution). Need to see how EJB3 will play out here.
Like many others, I do seriously believe the game for J(2)EE is now in expanding the middleware realm. JEE 5.0 itself offers little incremental value (EJB3 is atleast 3 years too late!). So going forward, the game will change. Not sure how effective the JCP will be in defining relevant timely new extensions. In this scenario, there is scope for vendors to offer meaningful extensions, still within the standards space. Like what is happening already in the WS-* space. And to some extent in the related, SOA space. We should be seeing more such extensions to the core J(2)EE servers. Hopefully more realistic and practical extensions now (and not in a closed-in-very-narrow vision like how IIOP was- had IIOP delivered on its promise, SOA would not have gained as much traction as it is now).
Talking about WS-* & SOA, person ally I feel these are just way too complex. Compare this with REST. REST is probably 1-2% of what SOAP does. But this 1-2% functionality is probably what 70-80% of the likely usage of SOAP is and will be! This may be another challenge we will need to face- both infrastructure providers (such as us- Pramati) and the Application/Solution developers. Wherein we will need to deal with simplifying the technologies that are getting ever so complicated.
(2006-05-17 02:27:46.0)
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Monday May 08, 2006
SOA in e-Governance.. in India! Over the weekend got a chance to meet one of the Vice Presidents at NISG (National Institute for Smart Governance), here at Hyderabad. Very interesting discussion. Have been tracking e-gov in India for a while. Easy to do this, when based in Hyderabad- a pioneer state in e-governance here. Fuelled further by the two institutes setup over the past few years here for e-governance.
In spite of my interactions with Center for Good Governance and a few discussions at NISG on the National Gateway project, the meeting with Ashok was still a surprise and a revelation. The depth of the e-gov program is quite impressive. While the National Gateway project is attempting to create a central infrastructure for G2G & B2G interactions, this new project that Ashok is driving is attempting to create a framework for the leaf level applications in the individual departments or sections. And this is riding alongside the central govt. initiative to create 100K rural govt service centers in India. Helping create the initial set of citizen services to be made available in these centers.
Very interesting. Check out more info on my post at HydTechBlog (http://hydtechblog.blogspot.com)
(2006-05-08 08:27:01.0)
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Sunday May 07, 2006
Heterogenous SOA infrastructure? Or.. single-vendor based enterpirse? First there was EAI. Then came simple Web Servcies. This was followed by the SOA wave (hype). And now as hype recedes guess there is serious adoption beginning to happen in the enterprise servcies space.
Here there are proponents of an enterpirse wide service bus- the rationale being if services takes off in a big way, then a strong services backbone is a must to manage the load. Here platforms like Sonic ESB score very well. And then there is the possibility that an enterpirse can choose any and many services environments- and have an unifying servcies administration and BAM glue such as Actional (again, a Sonic product).
Now these are fundamentally different approaches. The former is a complete self-contained platform, (that may still allow access fromoutside as standard web services via gateways). The latter in not a a platform as such, but more standardized communition layer- with WS standards entirely at play. So essentially any client can invoke any service.
It will be interesting to see which paradigm takes off in the year(s) to come. If the level of service invocations load is not too high, then the latter with its flexibility to have services runtime on any environment so long as there are "standard" web services exposed, with a powerful Management & BAm solution in place will suffice. In enteprirses where the service load may be very high. makes sense to go with a more robust platform such as any good ESB products.
In this landscape, one development that is inevitabel (and already happening) is that exsiting platform players will all try and get into the services space. Surely as by making it easy to access their platform as web servcies- and going a step further and themselves becoming services platform with support for tech like JBI, messaging, BAM and more.
In this context the current J2EE based stack infrastructure is only likely to expand. Just this week there was the formal announcement of JEE 5.0 specs finally released from the JCP. With its deep WS focus, should help get J2EE as a strong contender in the servcies space. (The J2EE stacks is my current obsession. Will be sharing more views on this).
(2006-05-07 08:04:14.0)
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Tuesday May 02, 2006
Web 2.0: (+)Rich UI & RIA (-)Social-web = Enterprise Apps! One very interesting twist in Web2.0 (when I see from my non-emotional technologist view point), is the social angle. Lot is made about the social aspect that includes communities, folksonomy, tagging, wikis and blogs. While these have a major impact on internet and web usage, from an enteprise architecture standpoint there is very little impact. The social/community angle and the RichUI/RIA are two key, but very independant, aspects of Web 2.0.
For the social/community view in an enterprise application, I can think some extreme and esoteric uses: I can extract blogs out and embed them into my web-front enterprise applciations as an alternate to "forums". I can look at wikis and folksonomy for some parts of my site where am willing to risk collaborative information sharing. Can use RSS as a protocol for information updates within my enterprise- as yet another intergation technology. Can provide additional secondary information to my enterpise applciation's users from syndicated sources...
But come to think of it, if one is bulding any enterprise biz applciation, say a CRM system or an Order tracking system, how useful will these be? These apps all provide core backend business functionality. When any of these have an end user fronts (like say online order tracking system for customers), then some amount of Web2.0'ness may help. But not really much. (
Dion Hinchcliffe has a nice depiction of these layers- shown here.)
Web 2.0 can mean different things to different people.
Now the Rich UI and RIA aspect is different. By RIA, again I mean accessing services and resoucres on the web.. and not so much the communities, wikis and folksonomy. (The latter, I strongly feel, is much akin to communism and open-source. They are collaborative in nature. And these are very difficult dynamics to predict.) While the astounding success of wikipedia- with the sheer improbablity at work with all data in wikipedia still intact- is truly amazinbg, can any business risk its biz data with such openness?
This is where the social and community aspects of web 2.0 must be separated from its sheer technology aspects- Rich UI like AJAX, RIA, Services over web via REST & SOAP, protocols such as RSS, tagging technologies. All of the technologies are definitely of use in any enterprise applciation. Be it an internal app or a customer facing app.
I had captured this in my session at the BarCamp Hyderabad.
I strongly believe that the opportunity in the enterprise applications is in this non-social aspect of Web2.0. With the Rich UI of AJAX/Lazlo/++, RIA, RSS, REST/SOAP and such, the whole user experience in Enterprise applications can be taken to a new level. A good thing for application architectures. And to this, add the possibility of Web 2.0 with its ubiquitous presence of XML therein, as a front end to the SOA based enterprise backend- the power only multiplies! Serious developers must watch this space. And only use the hobby time to dabble in mahups and social webs. (There is yet to be a serious success in this world in true communism! :-) )
(2006-05-02 13:32:19.0)
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Sunday April 30, 2006
Hyderabad IT grows by 50%! And, Buzzing tech community On the hydtechblog.blogspot.com ..
(2006-04-30 03:11:33.0)
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Saturday April 29, 2006
While Web 2.0 vs. SOA debate is on- BT creates SOA applicance! Ever since Web 2.0 came on with a rage into the fore front of the hype-world, there has been debates about Web 2.0 vs. SOA. While both rely on the internet and profess distributed applications, guess the similarities end there. The former is a user centric technology (if we can call it a technology), and the latter is an enterprise functional backbone. If anything, the two technologies are complimentary. Web 2.0 provides a rich front end to the enterprise service backbone that SOA enables.
Latest in the line of arguments is this piece on SOA vs. Web 2.0 debate. Presenting a view on both sides. So does Dion Hinchcliff in his post on 'When the Web 20 and SOA worlds collide' . He also says that the technologies are complimentary. One brings a social "web" aspect to the access of the internet based resoucres servcies and enterprise functionality. While the other provides the backbone integration of all the enterprise functionality.
Even as the argument rages, with some critics going so far as claiming the SOA is a non usable technology given its huge standards base and fairly steep entry thresholds setup by the various SOA vendors, there are some tangible but intersting developments underway. One such is BT creating an SOA "appliance" . And this is built on Sonic SOA. A very interesting view of the SOA world. Unlike all other contemporary SOA infrastructure, BT is attempting to make SOA available at an appliance level. If XML and XML based enterprise servcies bus really takes off, it is quite possible that the bus functionality could be delegated to the network layer. LIke for instance, the content-based-routing, that is one of the USPs of the pure ESB technology- wehrein an XML document gets routed to a specific service-endpoint based on the content in the document. Now, this is not too different from TCP packets getting "routed". So.. makes sense to build it into the network layer.
Remains to be seen though on how widely XML based interactions will be bult. And how deep do such usages penetrate into the organizational infrastructure and more importantly the developer pshyche!
(2006-04-29 13:26:09.0)
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Tuesday April 11, 2006
Hyderabad Tech Entrepreneurs.. TiE event TiE hyderabad is organizing an interactive session with Ajit Deora, Partner of Lightspeed venture over this weekend. Free. For more details check Rajat's post at HydTech-blog.
Yesterday I met a senior and forward thinking educationalist that runs a leading tech college in Hyderabad. Discussed the same topic about stimulating the students to come up with good software product/other-venture ideas when still in college. The whole eco system is yet to eolve here. Very few examples of startups from within Hyderabad. Though there is a leading example in Pramati, the company started way before the hype, and guess not many understand that Pramati si a classic tech startup with a lot of experience in defining, building, marketing and selling the products- along the way very rich experience in building a company as well! Am sure there are other startups as well.. but there is no forum nor the opportunity to hear about them. As an industry we must change this.
Need to publicize the activities of TiE, and get people with any kind of interest in starting a venture to come to these sessions. Meeting likeminded people provides a much needed encouragement and mroe importantly presents an opportunity to sound the ideas out. To validate the basic idea and its approach to the markets.
In line with this is the Bootstrappers chapter that is now planned for Hyderabad. Suggested by Rajat. Am also pushing hard for it. Requesting TiE to support (and host) this chapter. My sincere hope that we can publicize these initiatives among students and young techies.. and see where this takes us. Who knows.. if these activities pan out and a good support system is built, in no time Hyderabad may be the ideal location for startups. :-)
(2006-04-11 23:11:47.0)
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Monday April 10, 2006
Adios to one great company. Back to another (Pramati)! After 20 great months working on Sonic ESB products and helping build Progress Software India, am now getting back to Pramati.
It started off as an initiative within Pramati. Helping Sonic build the ESB App Dev Product. Sonic, and its parent company Progress Software, liked what they saw happening and decided to setup an India products development center, last April. Was a Great experience starting the Sonic Tools development activities from scratch, and going onto to build the initial teams at Progress Software India (the parent company of Sonic), providing technology leadership and guidance to help create an environment that is more than just a software development center. Great challenge building and delivering value (this is toughest when creating IP!) from a remote team, and setting up approaches to ensure a smooth functioning cross-continental dynamics, and delivery capabilities After a near 20 person year (dev) effort a great set of tools is about to hit the market. Very gratifying. A great team. A great effort. A great experience.
Now, with the first release of the new IDE product due in a few days, and a nice environment created at Progress India, I am going off chasing my other aspirations. Aspirations that may seem little insane to the sane mind. But then that?s me. :-)
Am getting back to Pramati as VP-Middleware Technologies. Responsible for the Middleware products and Middleware technology services. Will continue to engage in the Infrastructure software products space. And actively participate/drive any technology activities in Hyderabad (very close to my heart). And ofcourse, continue to teach at IIIT.
My new bearings: [email protected] (or [email protected]). (Blog remains the same- http://jroller.com/page/rameshl)
(2006-04-10 13:21:32.0)
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JBoss Inc wins (Redhat aquires). Who loses? This is impressive. $350m! That Redhat is to aquire (or as Marc puts it, "Merge" ) JBoss.
350m with a 140m in cash, is a very sweet deal.
Needs to be seen what the value for Redhat will be. Esp given the fears from the current bundling or OS-preference that it may be enjoying with other mainstream JEE vendors.Have already seen some rumblings on the implications. Going by the recent thumbrule of 4x revenues, JBOss must be netting 75m in revenue. By going with JBoss, Redhat may be cannibalizing some if its revenues- that may be accruing from other JEE server sales. Now given that linux is popular platform for most JEE vendors, remains to be seen what the fallout is. Ofcourse.. not to say that Redhat wouldnt have considered all these. But still..!
Would the JEE vendors now prefer otehr platforms? Would Redhat make sure that JBoss is pitched as a low-end option and not to interfere with likely BEA/WS prospects on Redhat? Would thsi be credible? If not, this loss is likely to erode the additional 75m gained from JBOss sales. Now, if the 4x is to hold, assuming there is an erosion of atleast 50m revenue (very very speculative! :-)), then JBoss revenue now must be 125m. Could this be?
One other angle is not sure how much inroads JBoss has in the Windows space. If this is significant, this also likley to take a hit, as WIndows customers may be little skeptical in buying an app server from a LKinux major!?
Should see the reaction from other vendors.
Thru all this, what happens to the JBoss users? Esp the true "open source" users, that have been using the product because it is "open source". And if JBoss got a high valuation because of these very large number of users (mostly, those that use it as open-source, and do not buy support), then shouldnt these users deserve something from the 350m pie? Seems reasonable to me. :-)
(2006-04-10 12:07:09.0)
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Sunday April 09, 2006
Boostrappers.. for Hyderabad tech ventures Got referred to this nice Businessweek Article by my friend Rajat. Very interesting. The article features a technepreneur that is trying to do things rather unconventionally- Bijoy Goswami. A very enlightening comment, though in retrospect it does som\und very practical & realistic, was this: "most networking is geared toward winning the venture capital lottery, it's easy to forget that fewer than 1,000 of the half-million businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture capital".
How true! WHile am not an entrepreneur myslef, have been very close to the founders and the company's ups & downs at Pramati. After raising two rounds of funding, and still grappling with the idiosyncracies of the global tech markets (and the teething troubels of tech startups in India).. now Pramati is on a strong recovery and growth path with purely internal resources. This is true money going in.. and not "easy money" as some would call teh VC money.
I have always felt the opportunity for the Indian tech industry is in IP creation and starting product ventures. INitially I was hoping that the IT biggies like Infosys & Wipro would do some toa ctively promote this. But that is not happening. With my interaction with students, more so IIIT-H where am a Faculty (adjunct) member, I now believethat this is a seriosu oportunity we have. If students can be encouraged to take any ideas they have into a serious venture, it will be a great accelrator. The risk that theyw ould take early on in their careers is near nil. Anything they do in the first few years of thie careers will surely add to their overall profile and marketeability to the job market. So all they will need to forego is the comfy life with good salaries. If they can manage some minimal "substinance" funding to take care of rent & food, they can chase their ideas. Worst case, after a few years get back to industry. But they would be that much richer with the experience- that am sure will come in handy in their next venture (and am sure every failed venture only fuels the hunger for more! :-) )
Now, I woul dbe very gladto help out in any way possible. Surely, cannot help out with the entrepreneural guts, as I have never been one. But I do udnerstand teh sofwtare product industry very very well. Thi sis where I can help vet ideas and help with any teething issues in getting thew sofwtare defined & built. Have already done this for a few and will be gladto do this for anyone (that is willing to indulge me :-) ).
It will be very nice to see a startup craze & frenzy build up in Hyderabad. The pedegogue in me will be thrilled if this craze were to build from within the students.
In this context, the Bootstrappers network is a very apt thing here. If we can get leading colleges in Hyderabad and around (such as NIT-Warangal) to take this up, it might be a good forum to trigger the initial buzz. I will try and get TiE-Hyderabad also to promote this. Just yesterday, at the BarCamp, TiE annoucned that they are starting a monthly Coffee-club meetngs to help precisely this kind of initial ideas for a venture. Serve as a sounding board for initial nascent ideas and provide any kind of support needed to get the good ideas to take off.
The worst that can happen is that a good viable product/venture idea doesnt take off for the want of precedents or information or assurrances on being in the right track.
(2006-04-09 04:49:59.0)
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Saturday April 08, 2006
Great show today.. cheers to Hyderabad BarCamp!! We were all very very surprised at the response to the event today. Until afew days ago we were expecting 50-75 people. Said pushing it.. maybe 100. But the day started witha steady stream of participants. From 2pm itself. By 3pm we had over 150 people in the room. And still coming in.
The goodies at the registration tables were HOT :-). BarCamp T-Shirts from Cordys, nice note books+caps+pens from Progress and candies from Mindscape. By 3pm we had a feel for the number of attendees and placed the order for snacks and dinner (Cordys, Kern-comm & Advetta sponsored teh snacks & drinks. Pramati sponsored the dinner). With most logistics under control, we were ready to roll.
At 3:10 we got going. A brief anecdotal introduction to the event and how it came about- right outside that hall at IIIT some weeks back. And then onto teh first session..
I gave an introduction to the Web 2.0 space. Good discussions. Questions. Was very heartening to see lively interaction (that actually got only better as the afternoon rolled!)
Then we had teh joint session between us & Chennai. But unfortunately, the video betrayed us. For some reason (possibly low bandwidth.. or high load at skype) it just didnt work. So the sesison started off just local to hyderabad. Jay (CEO-Pramati) shared some thoughts and stimuli on product/entrepreneural opportunities in the Web 2.0 space. It was not a "sermon" as teh title suggests. It was more to stimulate. Random observations on how the internet developed and how we could look for opportunities in any emerging space. With a few just born entrepreneurs (and hopefully many that are nurturing the thought to become one) in the room, it was a nice session. Lot of questions poured in. One example that Jay used in his talk came to eb referred to many amny time sthru teh remaining 4 hours. He said in terms of usabiilty in the web apps, demands could be varied and many. He said when his dad started using mails, he said he would have liked it if the mails were organized by pictures (for folders) with the photo of each of his three kids. And all mails coming in shoul dget auto sorted & filed. And any photos sent in mails shd be shown first. A simple, but real, usecase. He suedthi s to highlight the creativity needed to identify various usability demands. Which would be critical in teh sccess of any rich UI in Web 2.0 solutions.
Rajan followed this with a crisp MTV style slide set on Economics of Web 2.0. The defining idea was that with communities on the net now, the commerce possibilities are 2 to the power n, rather than n-square that is possible with just n discrete users that function in a point-to-point fashion. The latter was Web 2.0, and 2-power-n is Web 2.0. Interesting view.
Sharad (who came down from Pune) spoke abut the emerging space of Tangible UI and its paralels with Web 2.0. TH eexamples and videos of some research project sin tangible UI was just cool. I erally liked the Sony project on UI-Tablets. The tablets are each a 5x5 cm panel. That is to be placed on any on eof the cells on a display area. And each of these tablets could be a well defined information set or user interface. The tablets could have touch screens, or actuall tangible-UI-sensors. And tehse tablets can interact withe ach other. SO I place one tablet that can show photos, and another tablet that has a job-dial interface- and the latter could be used to shufffle thru thephotos in the former. And they discover each other on the fly. Take one tablet out and get some other tablet in, then the behaviour of the whole environment changes. Thsi was neat. And so were the other research videos he had. (Not surprising that it was good.. Sharad is accomplished in software UI (did great stuff at Pramati, and is now in SAS) an dnow teaches regularly at NID.
We then ahd an announcement from TiE (http://tiehyderabad.org)- on some initiatives TiE is undertaking to promote entrepreneurs. TiE is one of the sponsors for the BarCamp. And willl be associated with future events as well.
We then broke for tea and snacks.
Post tea, we started with a debate on an idea that Dr.Vishal Garg (IIIT) had on open-journals. To counter the huge prices charged by teh etchnical journals. Have an alternate models where the tech research papers are available for free/low cost, and the reserachers also have a simple mechanism to publish reserach work. A nice idea. BUt big issue will be to build a crediblity around such an initiative. BEst done by the leading academic institutiosn like IITs, IIIT-Hyderabad & IISc. I have a feelingthis idea will move further.
Prof.Kamal shared some thoughts on a low cost distributed personal computing solution- that sues idle resources and makes available a virtual "personal computer". An offshoot from the normal grid computing concepts. Just that now, there is a virtual front to this backend computing grid. And the idea is not about creating a huge computing resource from a large number of low powered units (as is in grids), but rather make availabel alrge nuber of lower power "personal comnputers" from a few large computers in the backend. Kind of like the VM concept in IBM mainframes. He said he already has some student work happening to build some parts of this solution. Interesting.
This was followed by an information packed talk by Pavitar & Rajiv from Pramati. On XForms. Enough material for a longer duration tutorial on thsi topic. (In my new role, back at aPramati now, will push for this. :-) )
Then followed a talk by Anand from Cordys. With my udnerstanding of the Cordysproduct suite, I could get a feel for the scope and content of the talk. It was about XForms. And an XForm designer that was built as part of the Cordys ESB app designer suite. Most people in the audience were thoroughly confused as to exactly what was being discussed.
Kiran from Progress gace an overview of how Eclipse platfrom was bringing AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies into its fold. This was followed by a talk by Sumeet from Yahoo on new APIs from yahoo. Showed how easy it is to use these APIs and build interactive sites. Lastly, there was an interesting talk on a buding entrepreneur. This was exceeded the time limits. But eary on we (the planning team) had agreed that we will not limit the Q&A; sessions or any discussions. And his talk ended up being impromptu. He had come prepared on a biz model around open source. But instead, spoke more about how he started off and hsi experiences tehse past few months as an Entrepreneur. IN his own words- "Inside the mind of a shit scared Entrepreneur".
We then wrrapped up with a recap by Rajan. Specifically, reminders to one of the secondary objectives from thsi barcamp- to create a tech forum and community in Hyderabad. A more interactive lively community. Different from the usual tutorial/workshop/seminar/training based community. A community where there is buzz and excitement around technology. And new developments. Where thoughts could be stimulated. And new ideas seeded or sounded out. To this end we started three initiatives- 1) Hyderabad Tech Blog. 2)Hyderabad Bloggers blogroll. & 3) Actively engaage with TiE to promote new ideas and entrepreneurship among techies.
(2006-04-08 13:42:02.0)
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Friday April 07, 2006
BarCamp Hyderabad- All Set for tomorrow! 200 registrations! We are all set for the Barcamp at Hyderabad tomorrow. 200+ registrations! Great interest. Hoping for a lively interactive session tomorrow. Check out more at- http://hydtechblog.blogspot.com/
(2006-04-07 14:56:20.0)
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