Green IT

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Perhaps, we thought the rules were different in cyberspace. All those free webapps, mail and storage are generating huge amounts of data and gigantic computational needs. To serve this demand, huge power guzzlers (read data centers) are springing up by the day. So, while we sit in our offices thinking that the code we write hardly makes a dent to the ecology - vast amounts of carbon is being eaten up for computation and data storage. I hardy gave these things a thought - before reading this insightful article. That's the first post on Shyamal and Sanjeev's new blog on 'Green IT'. While we can do little to reduce our dependence on this cyberworld and prevent a lot of junk data from being created, we can still look for engineering solutions to keep the problem in check. Looking forward to such solutions from Sanjeev and Shyamal.

Pune BarCamp 5

I attended my first Pune Barcamp (and my first barcamp too) this Saturday at SISCR. Basically a barcamp is an ad hoc gathering of people interesting a particular topic; but without a pre-determined formal agenda. Instead, the agenda gets decided on the day of the event, in an ad hoc manner, democratically by all the barcampers. For more read this.

There were talks and discussions on many interesting topics. The fact that it is democratic and volunteered allowed many unconventional topics like 'Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit', 'Pune e-governance and civic activism', 'e-learning', 'Save Pune traffic' and 'Why should you twitter?' to be taken up. Ofcourse, there were purely interesting tech topics like wireless security, mobile application development, Google Analytics too. And then you don't have to sit in a boring lecture, could just walk out :). However, at the barcamp there wasn't much of an incentive to walk-out. Straight, to-the-point talks kept you interested and you had a choice of talks to attend. In addition, it was a keep opportunity for networking and having a few good discussions. All-in-all a good package. Looking forward to attending more barcamps.

Note: Cross post from my tech blog. You can find the original here.

Pune Tech

Since coming back to Pune, I have been trying to get a hang of the tech scene in Pune. From the campus recruitments at IITB, my view is that Pune has a good tech ecology developing. We have had some startups working on exciting products coming to the campus. This just seems to be the right time to be in Pune.

Last week, I attended the monthly meet of the Pune Open Coffee Club (POCC). POCC is a group which seeks to promote startups, provide a platform for people with ideas to meet, seek advice, get in touch with VC, etc. and be noticed. Last week's meet was a good experience. There was a panel discussion on bootstrapping of startups with Anand Soman, Tarun Malaviya, and Shridhar Shukla and a showcase of a new startup in Pune. You can find a liveblog of the proceedings here.

A very useful resource to keep track of the tech scene in Pune is punetech.com. On the wiki, you can find links to various companies based in Pune and interest groups like the Pune Google Technology Users group. There is also a calendar, which lists all the tech events scheduled in and around Pune. All this is ofcourse community edited, so its for us techies in Pune to build on this initiative.

P.S. This is a cross post from my tech blog, which has been revived again for the nth (3rd infact) time.