Proto: The Next Big Thing

After BarCampChennai: It was one heck of an amazing event. The talk was on web 2.0 and geeks and only interested geeks were there. Lots of entrepreuners too. Atul Chitnis said that BarCampChennai was the best of all in India.

BlogCamp.in: Six months after the smashing success of BarCamp, Chennai came up with an event tagged as India's Biggest Blog Unconference. True to the tag, the event attracted participants from around the globe and as many as 60 volunteers owned various parts of the unconference.

After BlogCamp.in: Two weeks later, the same team met again and thought of a DEMO like event for India and Indian products. After some heavy discussions, the event has been named as PROTO. It should be noted that Palm, Java and many other great products were launched at DEMO. Read the DEMOblog.

PROTO cannot be in unconference mode because it will become a bigger BarCamp. This event is one place where we get venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreuners together so that some of the best brains and ideas in the Indian sphere can get funded. We are aiming for a one-on-one coordination between the entrepreuners and VCs. That is, number of VC companies will be greater than or equal to the number of teams presenting at the event. Ofcourse, there will be a lot of press coverage.

Teams who think they have innovative products will be asked to register at the website that is expected to come up shortly. After that, each team will be reviewed by an expert team from PROTO who have an eye for future trends and the ability to judge products which promise to be the next huge wave. Some teams will be shortlisted for presentation at the event. They will also have the opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting with interested VCs who will gather at the event. The place and time of the event will be announced shortly.

The main reason for coming up with such an event is that, even though there are a huge number of IT companies in India, there is not enough innovation happening on that front. It is like yet another government job where we get a good salary, pension, wife, 2 kids etc. This face of India should change. Entrepreuners should be encouraged. Events like PROTO are a step towards that. As DEMO had set the stage for entrepreuners world-wide, PROTO hopes to be India's defacto platform for staging new products and technologies. With a pretty huge population and talent raising day-by-day, I think innovation shouldn't be a problem. It is all in the mindset of the people.

Interested? Read the discussions we had during our first meeting. Our community tech blog says, "India has the potential to become a technological innovation hotspot. It must be noted that, it won’t be the IT majors who make this happen, but startups". Vijay says, "We are the future of India. Either embrace us, or fear us :)".

PROTO will make a change on the IT face of India.

Dream

It's raining outside... The weather is so lovingly cool that there is nothing to beat this situation. Rains clattering the sun shade above the southern window, the wind chime hung on the curtain rails danced to the slight wind creating the familiar klink-klink sound. I was mesmerized by the beauty of nature.

A quick zing into the recent past... 9 months ago... It was 2.30AM in the morning. Myself and Moyeen were wrapping up the discussion for our project work. We were preparing for a review that was to be held the following day. Very tired, I washed my face and headed to bed. I immediately fell asleep. About 2 hours later, I woke up. I was riding down the dull lighted roads to a small park nearby. It was dark and there were some people doing some early jogging. Birds started chirping too. I didn't know where to wait. Few minutes later, this girl turned up. She was wearing clothes around the orange shade and said an enthusiastic "Good Morning!". Brightened up at the sight of her, we both walked for sometime and settled at one of the park benches.

She turned, brushed her hair aside and stared straight into my eye, the stare that you have to encounter to believe. Our knees were touching slightly. We started talking, smiling, laughing... slowly at first and then discussing 2 million things around the universe. By now, the sun is out. More joggers are up. A small team of grandpas formed a circle a few yards away and were laughing their heart out. All these distractions were immaterial to us. They happened as if it were in another world.

Slowly, my face became slightly wet. I became a bit uncomfortable. More beads of perspiration began to fill my face. They grew so much that, they started flowing. My t-shirt was suddenly so wet. In a fit of discomfort, I yelled and discovered that my mom had poured a glass of water on me to wake me up so that I could get the college bus on time....

Weekend

Hmm... things to do this weekend....

1. Write 2 blog posts. 1 tech and 1 non-tech. There are some posts pending along the netbeans side and 1 regarding the temple tour.
2. Take some pet projects from the dream stage to the design stage.
3. Complete the editing of the video-cast of Krishnaraj that I shot some time back. He is a wonderful keyboard player.
4. Visit the connemera library.

I have become a part of BotHack, one of the coolest tech blogs around. And oh! I have some relatives to visit. Heck, I seem to be the only dork who hasn't seen vettaiaadu vilayadu. Anyone free?

Beggr

Take a look at that and die laughing!! Web 2.0 can't get better/worse than this.

BlogCamp - Day 2

Ah! amazing! is the only word I can say of today's sessions. Karthik 'spammer' Kannan started the day on "Branding via Blogs". Next on line was the best photographer, Sharad Haksar. His excellent session was on "Professional Photography". Sharad shared his experiences in a very lucid manner. You had to be here for the session!

Sujatha from PodBazaar was live on skype at 10.30 AM. She talked about Podcasting in general and how podcasting is a great platform for promoting oneself, giving tutorials, voice advertisements, corporate alignment etc. She was also talking about free softwares, especially audacity. Infact, they are coming up with a series of podcasts on audacity so that beginners on podcasting would benefit from it.

Sunil Gavaskar, alias Sunny alias Little Master :) arrived well ahead of time. He was waiting for the podcasting session to finish and started off with lots and lots of cameras clicking at him. He finished his session and also answered a couple of questions from the chat channel that is open for 'blogcamp'ers. Hey, he even posed for a photo with us on request.

Day 2 is seriously great!

Update on BlogCamp

I soon shifted back to the first floor mini auditorium. A small tech crowd formed there and bosky was in full flow with "Ajaxifying your Blogs". He even showed us some really cool demos that he had developed using ajax. Check his blog. Continuing on this topic, we had another guy named Karthik. He is a long time web user turned web designing hobbyist. He showcased his skills as he unravelled his story about the way he developed his own blogging software that runs on his site. It gave a lot of inspiration for the many of us who complain of not having time to do other small things that we are passionate about.

Ford announced an iPod contest and hey, we are running live blogging, photo blogging, video blogging and podcasting contests too! Join the fun. Moving down, the sessions scheduled today were over. We have hired a bus and we are moving to the beach house in another 30 minutes. Yay!!

Catch you soon...

BlogCamp Live!

Blogcamp is going on great :). We are almost on the end of a very energetic day 1. We had different workshops on track 2 and sessions on track 1. Track 2 was more of an unconference style. GAPP started track 2 with a preview of wordpress.org and wordpress.com, with Prasanna continuing on Beta Blogger. I did a quick 20 minute session on wordpress hacks.

Kausik, Kiruba and Ram Viswanathan continued the afternoon session with a beautiful workshop on podcasting. This session started off on a conference style. The audience couldn't hold it long and soon started pitching in. Kausik was almost ragged towards the end of the session. Varun then started off with mobile blogging and now Bosky is on with "Ajaxifying your blog". Amit Agarwal is on an interactive session at track 1. He is talking about "Professional Blogging".

We are about 150+ strong bloggers, techies, podcasters, video blogers etc. etc. all at one place, having superb fun, sharing knowledge and experience. By the way, did I tell you about the 10 dedicated computers for live blogging? hey, we are also webcasting the event live! Head on to blogcamp.in and see it. My session would be up on my tech blog and on bothack shortly. More on the event coming soon......

I'm alive!

Hi guys, I went on a cool South Indian tour of some of the greatest temples. Will talk about them in the coming posts and also about how they positively affected me.

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Just that, this little thing popped up. I think Yahoo! should acquire Wordpress. That would complete the circle of a bookmarking tool, a social networking site, a photo sharing utility and a blog tool. What do you say?

Kids Again

Kids have this natural ability to be so innocent. Two kids came to my house yesterday. The elder one was a nine year old boy and the younger one was a three year old girl. The boy wanted to play spiderman on my computer. I loaded the game and he started playing. He became engrossed to the extent that he didn't know what was happening around him. Sensing that he was missing, she came looking for him. Seeing the computer monitor, she shrieked SPIDERMAN!!, her tiny hands pointing to the monitor.

Immediately, she moved to the other side of the table and started moving the mouse away from him. She was also pressing the return key. He got irritated and told her that if she came to his left side, she would also play... Lol!! As she was slowly moving, he hid the working mouse, took a broken one nearby and placed it to his left side. Seeing another mouse, she was super excited and started moving it.

As much as he was playing and making the characters on screen move, she thought she was playing and made faces to the boy.. ha ha ha!! she was also pressing some keys too. She played like that for sometime. Then, it was time to move :-)

Ban on Cola

Hi!! day-before-yesterday, City Express, a daily supplement for The New Indian Express carried an article on whether colas should be banned due to their high pesticide content. It also asked the readers to send their responses to cityexpress@epmltd.com. I sent mine too. Here it is,

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Banning colas won't have such a widespread effect because of the levels of penetration they have had in the society. Go to party, any small gathering, pizza corner or pizza hut, you are bound to find many 2 litre bottles bottles of coke, fanta and similar fizzy drinks. Pizza Corner always has 1 offer or another round the year. Avail that offer and you get a bottomless glass of coke free. What's more, while they serve the pizzas, they ask whether we want coke or water.

This type of penetration can be broken only by constant awareness programmes. Let pizza corner offer coke, but then let them hang medium sized awareness boards inside, which illustrates the ill effects of coke. As a first level, most of the habits of youth are formed during the schooling or college period. Therefore, the colleges and schools should refrain from using colas and serve fresh juices instead. For example, my college has a small canteen and they never sell any kind of bottled drinks, not even Slice. They sell only fruit juices and that too fresh fruit juices at very affordable rates. Seeing this for the last 4 years has made me look at the good effects of fresh juices rather than bottled drinks.

Charity and everything else beings at home. Therefore, at the second level, parents and relatives should never encourage children to drink coke, instead buy them tender coconuts or fresh fruit drinks. Home is the place where the parents can impose bans on cola and induce fruit drinks. This issue is similar to the crackers during deepavali time. Just by imposing a ban on not bursting crackers before 6am, not a single soul stopped doing so. When small children are told about the ill effects of crackers, they stop bursting them and think of more useful ways to spend time and money. The same should happen with coke also.

We cannot change anything immediately by imposing a ban. Good people will continue to be good and bad people will continue to find new ways of getting the banned thing in. It is only by constant awareness can coke be banished from the society. Only time will tell how long it will take. Till then we must show our perseverance on the awareness programmes.
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It got published yesterday :), on page 4 of City Express under the title, "Ban won't help, let's create an awareness".

Anna University Homepage

Wow!!! look at that! Anna University, one of the foremost universities in India has a RedHat test page.

Here's the screenshot.

BlogCamp.In Update

Lot of things, yes! quite a lot of things have been happening now on the front of BlogCamp. Myself and Moyeen have designed the website for BlogCamp.In, with Hitesh giving inputs on the overall design of the page. I did the design and layout. Moyeen took care of the ajax part. Based on the homepage for blogcamp.in, I created a wordpress template for the blog so that we have a consistent look over the website as a whole. The site is now open. Ofcourse there are many things missing; like many URLs are broken except http://blogcamp.in and http://blogcamp.in/blog.

It has been an amazing experience learning the working of wordpress. Hey, did I tell you that I'm the mini webmaster? Yes, I'm managing http://blogcamp.in. If anything on the site doesn't function as expected, I get an email or a phone call and I just love it. The wiki is getting ready now. It will be up tonight (most probably). You can check it at http://blogcamp.in/wiki.

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Did a video cast in the evening with a 73 year old lady, who also happens to be my cousin's grandma. Will upload it to youtube soon. It is in tamil.

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Got the equipment for doing a podcast with Kennedi G. Have to test it and schedule the podcast :D.

Well, that's it for now :) Bye!!

Security Breach at PMs House

The situation is pretty simple. Three people entered the Prime Minister's residence at about 8.45 PM tonight without any documents or appointment what-so-ever. They were until gate 2 and were then turned back. A pretty serious issue in terms of the security concerned.

Now is a ripe time to blame the media. NDTV reports that their reporters had chased down the car to get an interview of the breachers. I had been seeing the news channel for about 45 minutes now and every 5 minutes, the interview is being played. Watching it was funny though. And showing the interview for every 5 minutes was like castrating those 3 young people who came upto the reception.

According to me, the 3 people are not to be blamed. As far as I saw, the media never interviewed any security personnel who let the car in. Leave off the interview, they never even showed us their god damned face. This shows clearly that the media is perfect in character assasination. They never told why the security personnel let them in. Interviewing the 3 people is only part of the story. They should have interviewed the security personnel too. More so, the security personnel should be punished for letting in a car without checking.

This security lapse clearly shows the reason behind the attack on the Indian Parliament.

Google Experiments UI

Sometime back, Sudar told about Google experimenting its UI designs. I think it's my turn today, as I had this new UI during the display of search results. I grabbed a screen shot and about an hour later, the redesign vanished. I had read at lots of sites that Google's simplistic design of the Google homepage wasn't enough to showcase their products, the result being not all their products are as popular as the search engine.

Here is the screen shot of the new layout. Look at the menu on the left. There is no menu above the search text box, which usually consists of web, images etc.

First Podcast Interview

Hello friends!! within next week, I would be doing a podcast interview with Kennedi of Team A. Kennedi is a full time astrologer residing in Chennai. He was one of the participants of the Vlogger Tinker Meetup and he was part of team A. He is a very active blogger too. You can check his blog at http://www.askenni.com/ where he talks about astrology, spirituality etc. Notably, he is an expert in face reading, tarot cards, energy reading, horoscope reading, vaastu & fenshui.

I'm doing this podcast because it will be a small worthwhile experience for the both of us who are amateurs in this. So, if you have got any questions that you may want to ask astrologers, you are most welcome. Post your question in the comments section and I will be very glad to consider them.


Bye!!

Vlogger Tinker Meetup was AMAZING!!!

Yesterday was yet another sunday spent usefully :D. We met at Kiruba's wife's office to get our hands dirty on video blogging. And hey, it's an amazing platform once you learn the basic nuts and bolts.

Team A's Video.

What did we do?
Well, we split ourselves into teams of 3 and 6 teams in all. There were about 6 digital cameras that could record video. One team went out into the open to shoot their video. Another team started from the bottom of the staircase and headed up, doing the "Walk the Stair" show. This something-exciting-so-I-have-to-try-it feeling is not new to me. We decided our team will do the video at the terrace. We went up, shot the video, did "Walk the Terrace" and finally recorded for about 2 minutes.

Then we all came back and imported all the videos to PowerDirector. One team found out that their digicam didn't have the capability to record voice. All of us sneered at them and ultimately, their video was the best, because it had a youtube director in it ;-) They dubbed the audio. Excited to the core, we imported our's soon and set about editing it. Found that instead of focussing on ourselves, we had shot all the banians and jettis hung for drying up under the sun. Nevertheless, it was fun because this was our first hand experience. We reduced the size of the video from 60 mb to 16 mb to finally 6 mb.

Two teams came up with proper videos. One is uploaded to YouTube. It came out very well and had that professional touch. Another video was an interview type one. I do not know whether it's been uploaded. Will let you know on that.

After this, we had a small session on podcasting. The technology is same. All we need to know is, how to combine two or more items to produce a third useful one. Look at the Blogcamp.in blog.

Softwares/Hardwares Used:
We used PowerDirector, vlog it, snag it, audacity, windows movie maker and hardwares such as a digital camera capable of recording videos or handy-cam and microphone. Install required drivers from the cd/dvd given by the manufacturer.

Happy video blogging, podcasting :)

Banana Mash

Hi!! friends, today is Sunday and I'm in a very good mood. As told in the last post, I will give you the recipe for the banana mash. It's a very simple and a very tasty dish that can be prepared without any special kitchenware.

Ok... let us proceed and get our hands wet :-)

Minimum requirements: Half dozen ripe bananas, jaggery.

1. For every banana, take 2 tea spoons of jaggery. Therefore, for half dozen banana, you would have around 150 to 200 grams of jaggery.
2. Now, after peeling off the bananas, break (not cut them) them into 2 halves.
3. Put the bananas in a bowl and mix them with the jaggery. Mix them with your hand (like you mix rice with sambar) and mash them together.
4. Add half cup of cold milk and 5 tea spoons of honey.
5. Sprinkle some raisins, finely cut cashews and don't forget the diamond kalkandu for that kadak-modak effect.

Extensions:
1. Take 2 ripe mangoes and peel off the skin using the regular vegetable skin remover.
2. Cut the fruit and mix them with banana. Add some more jaggery too.
3. Add raisins, cashews, diamond kalakandu, milk and honey etc.
4. Add any other fruit you want. Seedless dates is a good option.

The banana-cum-mango mash is now ready. Tastes good with roti, chapathi and poori. Make sure that you have banana or mango for this preparation.

Slurp!!! the taste is too goooood :D I can't to wait to finish it off.

A Trip to VGP

Whoa!! Its an exciting time today :D 6 of my cousins came down to my house yesterday. This excited my mom too. It was some kind of holiday for all of us and that too yesterday being a sunday, there was nothing to put down our enthusiasm. Suddenly, we decided to go to VGP golden beach.

VGP may not be the best amusement park in town and honestly, I don't know how or why we wanted to go there. My mom is a great cook :D and piping hot masala dosas were waiting for us. Masala dosas make us thirsty. So, I made some thick ice-cold mango milk shake to wash the dosas down the throat. We left our home at around 10 AM making our mom happy :D We were making so much noise that the roof would have come down.

After a quick ride down the ECR, we reached VGP at around 11.30 and it was all fun because all of us were meeting each other after a long time. Had great time teasing each other, splashing water, riding the boring rides and making fun of the stalls. Took some nice snaps on my k300i. Honestly, the camera on k300i is too good. The picture clarity was well worth it and took lots of snaps.

Left VGP at about 6.30 PM and reached home by 8. This time, all my aunts had come down to my place :D and a nice spread was getting prepared. Veg fried rice, poori, aalu masala and banana, mango mash along with jaggary (will tell you the recipe in another post) and my favourite well-decorated curd rice. Ravenous, we sat down and attacked all the dishes at full speed and ate for 1 full hour :D The nice day came to a glorious end.

Hoping to meet them soon!

Modern Karna

Once upon a time, a great human named Karna was present on this earth. He is most popularly known as the "dhana vallal" (one who donates selflessly). He has never uttered the word "no" in his lifetime and gave away a large part of his wealth to the people who were in need. More so, he went to the extent of giving his kavasa-kundala to Lord Krishna during the historic Mahabaratha war.

What is the relation of Karna with this post? Well, I have a school friend named Nagarajan who did some really good things that made me come up with this. Specifically, 2 things that almost touched me was,
1. He spent a full 14 hours with me during the distress period and kept checking on me every alternate day; one of the prime reasons why the tension, around that time, fell off me like the nine pins.
2. He is an Information Technology graduate. 10 GB of space means a lot to any IT geek/non-geek because when you get more space, you pump in more software and fill up the disk. This guy gave away his 10 GB hard disk to another of my friends without the latter asking him.

That is awesome spirit. Hey Naga, it is people like you who make the world a better place to live in. Thanks for all the support da :D

Blog Camp

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

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

Check out more details at the Blog Camp wiki. There are some more exciting details that's not to be revealed right now ;-)