Hyderabad Technology Blog

Hyderabad BarCamp.. great success today!

Three cheers to the Hyderabad Tech commmunity (and few that came over from Bangalore, Pune & Mumbai). The event was a tremendous success. Was more or less on time. Great attendance. And tremendous participation from everyone. Few adhoc sessions. In all a great event! In true adhoc UnCOnference style! Everyone is hoping to see mreo of this. We will pretty soon annoucne the next BarCamp. Due probably in about 4 months!

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 teh 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 maisl 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. Teh 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 teh 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.

The 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. An dthe 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.

Then.. (am feeling tired. Will post this tomm morning)

posted by Ramesh L. @ 10:46 AM