Predictably, the people most instrumental to our success at Kendara were a part of the process from the beginning until we sold.
Our lawyer, Scott Dettmer explained all the elements of structuring companies, and more importantly, set up our fund raising process and coached us through it. He advised us to resist talking to the VCs who had sought us out and wanted to have early conversations about what we were doing. Instead he encouraged us to wait until we were solid with what we were doing and our pitch, and then to line up as many meetings with the top tier VCs as we could manage. He set up many of these meetings himself. When we were actually having these conversations. We would meet in the morning and he would tell us both what the VCs would ask, like "how much are you looking for", and "whats your valuation". And how to answer, "$5 million" and "we don't know". The conversations went exactly how he said they would, and I give him much of the credit for our handling them well.
Mike Sheridan was our 5th board, "neutral", board member. Mike was remarkable for being personal friends with us and Jon Feiber of MDV so neutral is not really the right word. Conversations with Mike calmed the giant emotional waves that characterize that experience for me. Most of what I remember of his advice was that it was 'ok', we were doing 'fine', what we were experiencing was 'normal'. We trusted him alot. We knew he wouldn't be afraid to tell us we were screwing up, and that he knew enough about the scene to know. So this was great. I'll always be grateful.
MDV gave us Donna Novitsky as an interim VP of marketing. A number of people passing thru gave us marketing advice, but we didn't know how to assimilate it. Donna, met with us once or twice a week and was able to drive. Our meetings had action items, and since she was coming back, that meant something. She also had access to the MDV address book. When we were going thru our ICard phase many of these marketing meetings resulted in wild requirements like, "we need to talk to AAA, we need to talk to AARP, we need to talk to VISA". Today I hear startups say stuff like that, and I roll my eyes. Then, Donna would say, "ok, I'll take that" and we would get contact info mailed to us in a few days. Really, the revolution of the moment is that we can launch large scale successful businesses without engaging massive companies. If your plan involves selling or partnering with public companies, get a good VC.
When we got funding our VCs helped us by sending us a stream of people who had experience running, growing or selling businesses. Part of this was probably their way of playing the dating game as they had in mind that we would need a CEO. The conversations were often interesting. We spent an hour with Geoffrey Moore where he explained his way of breaking down problems, and in real time we tried to apply his advice to our work. I don't remember any of the other names that came thru. Some were remarkable, and I saw them on the cover of wired, but with all the craziness it was hard process and put into effect the advice of people like this. Basically, once we had money, we were too busy and stressed running to really adjust our course radically.
Prefunding this kind of advice was more useful. Arthur Van Hoff talked with us a bit about what we were doing, and what areas he thought would be big. At the time he was worth about a billion $ on paper, and Pavni and I were struggling a bit to define exactly what we were doing, so his thoughts were valuable. His support also affirmed our credibility with a number of VCs, and probably got us the conversation with Vinod Khosla. Another way of looking at this is we had one major course correction in the years post funding when I presented the iCard idea and Jon Feiber said, "great work, don't do it again". In the four months prefunding we had a fairly major change of direction every month or so. So, we were definitely more open to ideas then.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Define the Designer
AIGA and Adobe have launched an initiative to define the professional characteristics of the designers of 2015 so that we can prepare designers for the skills and roles that will be expected of them.
We need to do this for the software development community.
We need to do this for the software development community.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
About YCombinator
* The title is actually a link to the about ycombinator page. Like all of PG's writing I think it reads extremely well, and describes what I would like to do in India.
Survivability & the 2bhk startup
Paul Graham has a whole essay on how to succeed as a startup.
It's called not dying. How Not to Die.
He mentions their success rate being close to 50% which is astonishing.
His teams are unusually good at not dying. This is perhaps not so surprising since YC companies begin their lives super frugal style with founders living together and working from their apartment. This means that to continue beyond the $20k YC invests, they just need to cover living expenses a little while longer.
A supporting argument may come from 37Signals and Marc Hedlund who write that 3 is the perfect # of people to develop version 1.0.
Not only is keeping the initial team small useful for keeping costs low and not dying, it may be optimal for a variety of reasons.
If this works so well in Boston and San Francisco, how about India ? Whats price parity on the $5k +$5k*(numFounders) ? Who would come, and what level would they be ?
In his article Paul Graham talks about how the ego factor often keeps founders from quitting. Would that be more or less of a factor here ?
Where's the best place Pune . Bangalore ... ?
It's called not dying. How Not to Die.
He mentions their success rate being close to 50% which is astonishing.
His teams are unusually good at not dying. This is perhaps not so surprising since YC companies begin their lives super frugal style with founders living together and working from their apartment. This means that to continue beyond the $20k YC invests, they just need to cover living expenses a little while longer.
A supporting argument may come from 37Signals and Marc Hedlund who write that 3 is the perfect # of people to develop version 1.0.
Not only is keeping the initial team small useful for keeping costs low and not dying, it may be optimal for a variety of reasons.
If this works so well in Boston and San Francisco, how about India ? Whats price parity on the $5k +$5k*(numFounders) ? Who would come, and what level would they be ?
In his article Paul Graham talks about how the ego factor often keeps founders from quitting. Would that be more or less of a factor here ?
Where's the best place Pune . Bangalore ... ?
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Negotiating India
I just spent 6k rps getting the camera on my n93i fixed. The first thing anyone here asks me when I tell them I did something is how much I paid. When I told a friend here he asked me if I went to the shop alone. I did, and he told me not to do that any more.
After 3 years in India I don't think I'm such a doofus at negotiating any more. At the cell phone shop I also bought a charger. At first he said (or I thought he said) 400 rps, and I was like, 'eh, come on baba, what are you saying, 400 for a no name charger ??' To which he said, 'what are you talking about, I said 100' who knows.
The camera guy spent some time with the camera, made a phone call I didn't understand, and then told me some cable was damaged and it would cost 6k to replace and repair. Where as with the charger I knew it shouldn't cost more than 100 rps, with the camera I had no base to compare too, so the quick math I did was simply whether fixing it was worth the money to me - which it was, or whether the discount I might get for comparing prices at other shops was worth spending several hours wandering around ahmedabad to get another price - which it wasn't.
So, 6k down, I have my n93i back with more buttons functioning than before. Some of plastic didn't recover from the surgery so its even more hoopty than before, which sorta fits my beat-up luxury style.
Wow, I don't think I have any pics of the beamer ...
yoga at IIM
I've started doing yoga again.
My practice pretty much stopped when my teacher moved to Australia. At least working with him, and in much of my life, I find that I do well with structure and often have difficulty on my own deciding which postures to do in what order. In the indecision I often start navel gazing and move on to something else.
What changed it was setting up a yoga class to offer to the participants of the iAccelerator. This has always been kind of a fantasy for me. We're off some place beautiful, living in tipi's close to a waterfall with a high speed internet connection coming in. Each morning before spending 6 hours milking the internet for enough currency to keep Nirvana operating we do yoga for an hour as the sun peeks over the distant mountains.
As it is I'm surrounded by massive walls of solid concrete. Nature is two squirrels, a bunch of mating pidgeons (do they do anything else ?), one small tree and a 40 ft
square lawn I practice on.
Nobody actually comes to class.
But I made a flyer and leave it up saying that class is every morning at 7:30 am. I promoted it heavily the first day, and expecting people to show up, I wrote out a flow that I thought I could remember of mostly standing postures since we don't have any mats and the grass is itchy.
The flow goes:
start with
10 Suryanamaskars - everyday a different one
hold each posture for 7 - 10 breaths (maybe I breath fast)
between each posture do a plank - pushup - downdog sequence
usually do both sides of each posture before going to the next
triangle
side angle
that one where you're on one leg and your arm touches the ground and the other points
up and your back leg is strait up
warrior 2
warrior 1
warrior 3
forward bends - i don't do the downdog sequence between these
legs together strait hold toes
legs together bent knees hands under feet from the back chest against thighs. straiten legs as much as possible while keeping chest on thighs
legs wide hands on ground in middle touch head to ground
legs wide hold toes look up
twists
reverse triangle
reverse side angle (first namaste for 3 breaths, then the whole thing)
reverse one leg down, one up, one hand down, one up .. thing
sit and breathe
kapalbati 30 50 70
kapalbati thing on the held exhale 20 20 20
anolom pralom (thumb and ring finger breathing 12 times)
**
the whole sequence takes about 30 minutes
I've done it every day this week, and I'm feeling rather pleased
with myself.
My practice pretty much stopped when my teacher moved to Australia. At least working with him, and in much of my life, I find that I do well with structure and often have difficulty on my own deciding which postures to do in what order. In the indecision I often start navel gazing and move on to something else.
What changed it was setting up a yoga class to offer to the participants of the iAccelerator. This has always been kind of a fantasy for me. We're off some place beautiful, living in tipi's close to a waterfall with a high speed internet connection coming in. Each morning before spending 6 hours milking the internet for enough currency to keep Nirvana operating we do yoga for an hour as the sun peeks over the distant mountains.
As it is I'm surrounded by massive walls of solid concrete. Nature is two squirrels, a bunch of mating pidgeons (do they do anything else ?), one small tree and a 40 ft
square lawn I practice on.
Nobody actually comes to class.
But I made a flyer and leave it up saying that class is every morning at 7:30 am. I promoted it heavily the first day, and expecting people to show up, I wrote out a flow that I thought I could remember of mostly standing postures since we don't have any mats and the grass is itchy.
The flow goes:
start with
10 Suryanamaskars - everyday a different one
hold each posture for 7 - 10 breaths (maybe I breath fast)
between each posture do a plank - pushup - downdog sequence
usually do both sides of each posture before going to the next
triangle
side angle
that one where you're on one leg and your arm touches the ground and the other points
up and your back leg is strait up
warrior 2
warrior 1
warrior 3
forward bends - i don't do the downdog sequence between these
legs together strait hold toes
legs together bent knees hands under feet from the back chest against thighs. straiten legs as much as possible while keeping chest on thighs
legs wide hands on ground in middle touch head to ground
legs wide hold toes look up
twists
reverse triangle
reverse side angle (first namaste for 3 breaths, then the whole thing)
reverse one leg down, one up, one hand down, one up .. thing
sit and breathe
kapalbati 30 50 70
kapalbati thing on the held exhale 20 20 20
anolom pralom (thumb and ring finger breathing 12 times)
**
the whole sequence takes about 30 minutes
I've done it every day this week, and I'm feeling rather pleased
with myself.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
We're still in the first week of the iAccelerator
and the business workshop is still taking up most
of people's time. But as we get deeper in I'm
increasingly convinced this is a great model for India.
The YCombinator model is geared towards puting small
amounts of money behind first time entrepreneurs who
are willing to live together and work from an apartment
in order to make a startup happen. The 2BHK startup.
One of the biggest complaints with the Indian psyche
when it comes to startups is the lack of perceived value
behind the stock. By puting in minimal money, and leaving
the vast majority (~90%) of the equity with the founders
YC filters on this.
The biggest hurdle we'll need to overcome to apply the
model effectively here is the exit. My impression is that
THE YCombinator generates many early stage exits. - Does
anyone have data for this ?
I just came out of a session done by Chirag Patel - CEO of
Net4Nuts. He gave an impressive talk about how to launch a
company and get customers. His steps for growing a company
amounted to - Start, Survive, Scale, Sell.
He was pessimistic on the potential for early stage exits in
India. His point was that in the US the build vs. buy equation
is influenced by a strong premium placed on time. In India, he
said, time is much less appreciated so he didn't see a big market
for companies like this either in total money or number of
transactions.
This isn't necessarily a deal killer. Their should be
a foreign market for Indian startups with strong engineering teams,
proven track records, and clean paperwork as it reduces risk
for companies wanting to set up engineering teams here.
And because of super low costs 2bhk startups in India should hit
survivability fairly quickly - even if it includes a mix of service
work. And with that there should be time to develop the business
and eventually sell it.
and the business workshop is still taking up most
of people's time. But as we get deeper in I'm
increasingly convinced this is a great model for India.
The YCombinator model is geared towards puting small
amounts of money behind first time entrepreneurs who
are willing to live together and work from an apartment
in order to make a startup happen. The 2BHK startup.
One of the biggest complaints with the Indian psyche
when it comes to startups is the lack of perceived value
behind the stock. By puting in minimal money, and leaving
the vast majority (~90%) of the equity with the founders
YC filters on this.
The biggest hurdle we'll need to overcome to apply the
model effectively here is the exit. My impression is that
THE YCombinator generates many early stage exits. - Does
anyone have data for this ?
I just came out of a session done by Chirag Patel - CEO of
Net4Nuts. He gave an impressive talk about how to launch a
company and get customers. His steps for growing a company
amounted to - Start, Survive, Scale, Sell.
He was pessimistic on the potential for early stage exits in
India. His point was that in the US the build vs. buy equation
is influenced by a strong premium placed on time. In India, he
said, time is much less appreciated so he didn't see a big market
for companies like this either in total money or number of
transactions.
This isn't necessarily a deal killer. Their should be
a foreign market for Indian startups with strong engineering teams,
proven track records, and clean paperwork as it reduces risk
for companies wanting to set up engineering teams here.
And because of super low costs 2bhk startups in India should hit
survivability fairly quickly - even if it includes a mix of service
work. And with that there should be time to develop the business
and eventually sell it.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
iAccelerator
Last night I moved into the dorms up in Ahmedabad. In addition to the iAccelerator participants the winners from Microsoft's Imagine Cup which is an IT contest to solve envionrmental problems. Rockin !
The vibe here is great. We're all staying next to eachother in one of the dorms, and then there's a large office space that we're all working from.
The vibe here is great. We're all staying next to eachother in one of the dorms, and then there's a large office space that we're all working from.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Friday, May 16, 2008
Idea Camp Pune
At Idea camp Pune
The first talk discussed how to use the web to help the Pune city
government engage the community. http://punetech.com/?s=pmc
***
lots of talk on mentorship and incubation
the last fellow was trying to address the quality of engineering
education by providing some practical engineering programs which
are sponsored and mentored by companies and people working from
industry.
The first talk discussed how to use the web to help the Pune city
government engage the community. http://punetech.com/?s=pmc
***
lots of talk on mentorship and incubation
the last fellow was trying to address the quality of engineering
education by providing some practical engineering programs which
are sponsored and mentored by companies and people working from
industry.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Ahmedabad
Tomorrow I'll meet with the people behind the iAccelerator program at IIM Ahmedabad. Tarun talked to them about mentoring their first batch of startups and managed to talk me in as a mentor as well. In the meantime I'm spending quality time with Jessica and Ruchira of Video Volunteers - of which I recently became a card carrying member of the board. If everything works out I'll spend the majority of the next three months here living on the IIM campus helping internet startups get started and working on the video volunteers internet strategy.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Lamma Island
I'm back in Hong Kong preparing to fly back to India tomorrow. Ulrich introduced me to Jenny and Aaron Farr who have a nice place on Lamma island. Lamma island feels like the famed surf spot that no one should talk about because its so amazing and if everyone knew then it would be big and busy like everywhere else. Its got the laid back beach vibe of a dive down on one of the islands in the Philipines or Thailand. And its a fast 30 minute ferry to Hong Kong Central and maybe an hour and change to the hong kong airport. I don't think there is another place on the planet where you can move from uptempo urban megacenter to downtempo island style so quickly.
**
The shopping trip in Guan Zhao was a qualified success. Apparently the consumer electronics part of the Canton Fair was last week. This week was ceramics, sporting goods, stationary, and furniture. After discovering my mistake we poked around for awhile to get a feel for another world.
Later in the day though Ulrich's assistant Dianne took me to an electronics market that sold mp3 players, mobile phones, and components. In some ways it was more spectacular because it catered to the local wholesale market, went year round and appeared to be constantly busy. There are far more variations in the personal portable electronics than I appreciated.
I picked up a small number of very small mp3 players. Hopefully we can test out the 1mp3pc idea soon. Or maybe I'll start with 1mp3pt - (One mp3 player per teacher)
**
The shopping trip in Guan Zhao was a qualified success. Apparently the consumer electronics part of the Canton Fair was last week. This week was ceramics, sporting goods, stationary, and furniture. After discovering my mistake we poked around for awhile to get a feel for another world.
Later in the day though Ulrich's assistant Dianne took me to an electronics market that sold mp3 players, mobile phones, and components. In some ways it was more spectacular because it catered to the local wholesale market, went year round and appeared to be constantly busy. There are far more variations in the personal portable electronics than I appreciated.
I picked up a small number of very small mp3 players. Hopefully we can test out the 1mp3pc idea soon. Or maybe I'll start with 1mp3pt - (One mp3 player per teacher)
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
china
When I first spent a few weeks in Bangkok and finally managed to get out of the Koh San Rd. traveler district I remember being totally impressed with how modern and upscale the down town was. The skyrail took me from the river thru the city to a giant mall with glass tubes connecting its different towers.
Only shortly before I lived in Calcutta for a number of weeks which looked to me like a plausible semi dystopic vision for the future of a large percentage of the urban population. People swept up the garbage in the mornings and burned it in the streets. On long walks thru town I saw many people shitting on the street. Pollution was dense and the people were more ardently patriotic about their city than I have seen anywhere else. "Calcutta is the heart of India !!!"
Since then Andheri East in Mumbai has risen to compete with Calcutta in my mind for the poster child of the future.
My Skyrail ride in Thailand made me think Bangok was more on the Tokyo path than the Calcutta path.
The big suprise for me about China is that it also seems to be on the Tokyo path of development. The streets in Gwon Zhao are wide and empty. The cars are parallel parked neatly on the side of the roads. They use large Toyota Camrys for the Taxis. An extensive subway system that feels more modern than western airport light rails links the whole city and connects to a high speed train to Hong Kong. The lack of people is the most surprising for me though.
Most of India pulses with humanity. People are everywhere to the point where bumping up against them in movement or travel begins to feel natural. Often when I come home to California its the lack of people that strikes me most. The streets almost have a post catastrophe feel, like some disaster has annihilated the population and only 4 wheel mechanical beasts roam the streets.
China isn't quite that empty. But visible people are shockingly sparse for a country with a 1.4 billion population, and the small sample of it I've seen so far feels much more like Tokyo than Andheri.
Only shortly before I lived in Calcutta for a number of weeks which looked to me like a plausible semi dystopic vision for the future of a large percentage of the urban population. People swept up the garbage in the mornings and burned it in the streets. On long walks thru town I saw many people shitting on the street. Pollution was dense and the people were more ardently patriotic about their city than I have seen anywhere else. "Calcutta is the heart of India !!!"
Since then Andheri East in Mumbai has risen to compete with Calcutta in my mind for the poster child of the future.
My Skyrail ride in Thailand made me think Bangok was more on the Tokyo path than the Calcutta path.
The big suprise for me about China is that it also seems to be on the Tokyo path of development. The streets in Gwon Zhao are wide and empty. The cars are parallel parked neatly on the side of the roads. They use large Toyota Camrys for the Taxis. An extensive subway system that feels more modern than western airport light rails links the whole city and connects to a high speed train to Hong Kong. The lack of people is the most surprising for me though.
Most of India pulses with humanity. People are everywhere to the point where bumping up against them in movement or travel begins to feel natural. Often when I come home to California its the lack of people that strikes me most. The streets almost have a post catastrophe feel, like some disaster has annihilated the population and only 4 wheel mechanical beasts roam the streets.
China isn't quite that empty. But visible people are shockingly sparse for a country with a 1.4 billion population, and the small sample of it I've seen so far feels much more like Tokyo than Andheri.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
1mp3pc
At the innovations2008 conference in Pune, I think I put AngelMentor as my company on the registration form and word got around that I was some kind of VC. A fellow Vikas Rajrishi (priest to the king) pulled me aside and told me he was looking for funding for a soil analysis business he was trying to start near his farm in Narangoan. I let him know I didn't know anything about the soil business but had been looking for an opportunity to explore the country outside Pune. He instantly invited me to his farm and the next day we were driving up there together.
On the road as we talked I let myself dream a little about the possibility for a rural media and technology institute between Pune and Bombay. We would teach all the skills people can use to make money off an internet connection, and all the services someone can with an internet connection can provide to the local rural community. The institute building structures would be built in a low impact manner such that we could vacate the land in some years and leave it better than it had originally been.
Vikas ran the idea by some of his farmer friends who were all positive as there is a trend of the youth leaving the rural areas for the big cities leaving some apprehension in the parents that when they die their ancestral lands may be lost / sold.
He also took me to see the local politician who wanted to see a large well funded IT park come and increase the value of all the land in the area. In some back and forth it was very clear that the thatch IT institute i had in mind and the glass palace IT parks he was looking for were very different. Somehow, this became an either or thing
and the door to Narangoan was closed.
***
High on the idea of moving outside and teaching for awhile I connected with the people at a vocational school VigyanAshram.com also near to Pune. After coordinating the donation of some wireless networking equipment to them I sent a bit of a shockwave thru my personal life by toying with the idea of moving out there to set up the media and technology institute. That notion fizzled as I came to feel that english is a critical prerequisite for the types of skills I want to teach and the English level of the average rural Maharashtran wasn't sufficient.
Talking with chandita from cometmedia.org she told me about Dr. Kurien with http://clrindia.net/. They've developed a bunch of curriculum for teaching rural and urban poor children and teachers English through workbooks and radio programs. For some time I have been fascinated by the idea of using mp3 players as an educational device, and Dr. Kurien seems to have some of the content that could make it happen. Talking with my friend Ulrich who has an office in China I discovered the Canton fair is happening this week, so I flew over to get a sense of what all options are available in off the shelf mp3 players.
I posted a request for 1gb mp3 players on Alibaba and from the 100 quotes I have gotten every day since it looks like they're about 7 - 8$ each in Bulk. Interestingly, Mp4 players with a screen, video and game capability are 30 - 40$ each.
Im excited about the show.
My hope is to come back with 50 - 200 of them we can pass out to teachers and see how effective they are.
Lets see...
On the road as we talked I let myself dream a little about the possibility for a rural media and technology institute between Pune and Bombay. We would teach all the skills people can use to make money off an internet connection, and all the services someone can with an internet connection can provide to the local rural community. The institute building structures would be built in a low impact manner such that we could vacate the land in some years and leave it better than it had originally been.
Vikas ran the idea by some of his farmer friends who were all positive as there is a trend of the youth leaving the rural areas for the big cities leaving some apprehension in the parents that when they die their ancestral lands may be lost / sold.
He also took me to see the local politician who wanted to see a large well funded IT park come and increase the value of all the land in the area. In some back and forth it was very clear that the thatch IT institute i had in mind and the glass palace IT parks he was looking for were very different. Somehow, this became an either or thing
and the door to Narangoan was closed.
***
High on the idea of moving outside and teaching for awhile I connected with the people at a vocational school VigyanAshram.com also near to Pune. After coordinating the donation of some wireless networking equipment to them I sent a bit of a shockwave thru my personal life by toying with the idea of moving out there to set up the media and technology institute. That notion fizzled as I came to feel that english is a critical prerequisite for the types of skills I want to teach and the English level of the average rural Maharashtran wasn't sufficient.
Talking with chandita from cometmedia.org she told me about Dr. Kurien with http://clrindia.net/. They've developed a bunch of curriculum for teaching rural and urban poor children and teachers English through workbooks and radio programs. For some time I have been fascinated by the idea of using mp3 players as an educational device, and Dr. Kurien seems to have some of the content that could make it happen. Talking with my friend Ulrich who has an office in China I discovered the Canton fair is happening this week, so I flew over to get a sense of what all options are available in off the shelf mp3 players.
I posted a request for 1gb mp3 players on Alibaba and from the 100 quotes I have gotten every day since it looks like they're about 7 - 8$ each in Bulk. Interestingly, Mp4 players with a screen, video and game capability are 30 - 40$ each.
Im excited about the show.
My hope is to come back with 50 - 200 of them we can pass out to teachers and see how effective they are.
Lets see...
Monday, April 14, 2008
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Friday, March 28, 2008
Baramati
Went to BaramatiInitiatives(.com) early this week.
The net of the conference seemed to be that technology is nolonger
the issue with rural connectivity, the issues are all financial and
regulatory. A senior guy at a big network provider in India
was a Colonel and gave us lots of fun stories about how to get things
done with a healthy disreguard for the letter of the law. That seems
to be the way of things - Make things happen quick and big enough to
make your customers a voteing bloc.
The net of the conference seemed to be that technology is nolonger
the issue with rural connectivity, the issues are all financial and
regulatory. A senior guy at a big network provider in India
was a Colonel and gave us lots of fun stories about how to get things
done with a healthy disreguard for the letter of the law. That seems
to be the way of things - Make things happen quick and big enough to
make your customers a voteing bloc.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
OLPC India
Tuesday the friendly folk at Reliance took a small group of us out to Khairat to visit the OLPC pilot school in India. The school has one room, one teacher and the kids are in 1st - 4th grades.
When we first arrived the teacher was giving a lecture on something in Marathi at the black board. Several laptops were in a corner being charged, most were lying on the floor with the kids, a couple were open.
Amit one of the Reliance people clearly knew the teacher and the children well, so when he entered the kids all opened their laptops and started eagerly showing all of us the different things they could do with their computers.
The laptops were passed out in early October of last year. By now everyone was very comphortable with them. They could navigate menus, understood how to click on icons, could click and drag objects across the screen, etc.
At least in the eagerness surrounding showing off their knowledge to the friendly outsiders who came in, their principal purpose in pushing buttons, clicking and dragging seemed to be to make the device do something ie. make noise or do some animation. Towards this end the kids could explore the menu system to great depth, but without any english comprehension of the meaning of the text I don't think they 'understood' the conceptual layout of the system very deeply.
They did understand the top level of icons and which ones would bring up interesting applications.
The laptops were in remarkably good condition. I saw that one key 'i' had ripped off one of the laptops, but that was the only problem I saw, and you could still get the 'i' to type by touching your finger to the contact points.
I don't know what the problem was, but the school server was not operational.
The couple hours there were wonderful. The kids are super enthusiastic and there is a feeling that 'something special' is happening. The teacher was also very nice and encouraging.
While everyone is very excited, its not immediately obvious how to use the laptops to better teach the curriculum educators are accustomed to. I see a need for someone technical to spend time working with the children and the laptops to pioneer ways of actively using them to facilitate learning beyond the conventional methods.
Maybe me :)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
India and America
Super funny popular hindi music video subtitled as a native english speaker understands the words -
Tamil antiwar video -
Tamil antiwar video -
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Varanasi
I just returned from Varanasi. Its my favorite city so far. Calcutta impressed me because so many people I met were spending the large part of their days serving the poor at Mother Theresa's hospital and with other organizations. With Varanasi most people I met were studying music, yoga or Sanskrit and Vedic literature.
The student teacher relationship was much more guru style than the western classrooms I am used to. Students would meet with their guru - teacher for a couple of hours every day, show what they had learned and get advice for how to progress further. The relationships were long term often lasting many years, tho with the student leaving every year to travel or return to the west.
I spoke with my friend Freedom about his experiences. He's a teacher of Vedic astrology in Emeryville, CA. When he first started teaching he gave very individual attention to his students. He found though that it was very time consuming, and that if the students were not dedicated - the time was lost. While mentoring in this fashion he found that he often repeated much of the same information in helping them establish a foundation in the art. After some time he refined this material into a lesson plan which he could use to teach a class to a larger group of people, and later turned some of it into a book .
Friday, January 25, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Plastic Bottle Island
This guy has a website - Spiral Islanders. It definitely gets my mind spinning.
i found this on the makeithappen.com blog
i found this on the makeithappen.com blog
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Saturday, December 08, 2007
ClubHack.com
Camping on the free wifi at ClubHack here in Pune.
The note in the registration booklet warns
"This is public internet at a hacker's conference, use at your own risk"
Some random notes so far :
Apparently the current market rate for a valid stolen mastercard / visa credit card number is about $2.
Malware kits have grown in popularity and effectiveness thanks in part to a market for compromised machines (zombies) to relay spam or execute DOS attacks. MPack is actually commercial software.
The business is good enough to pay for marketing. According to this speaker's analysis paid search results are 3x more likely to be malware sites.
The note in the registration booklet warns
"This is public internet at a hacker's conference, use at your own risk"
Some random notes so far :
Apparently the current market rate for a valid stolen mastercard / visa credit card number is about $2.
Malware kits have grown in popularity and effectiveness thanks in part to a market for compromised machines (zombies) to relay spam or execute DOS attacks. MPack is actually commercial software.
The business is good enough to pay for marketing. According to this speaker's analysis paid search results are 3x more likely to be malware sites.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Voice Mail in India
I don't understand this.
Its clearly not a technical issue.
Why is voice mail not a part of
communication culture in India ?
Its clearly not a technical issue.
Why is voice mail not a part of
communication culture in India ?
Fun, Sun, and Distributed Software Development
RedSwoosh moved their engineering team to Thailand for a couple weeks and received alot of good press for their working vacation on the beach.
It's a great example of the possibilities for the nomadic cyber hacker culture my friend Ulrich has been promoting
When I arrived in India, I spent 6 months searching for a location that balanced my ambition to create an Internet Start-up Factory with a desire for a fun healthy life style. My search ended when I landed in Koregoan Park, Pune. Its a resort area, but also has a vital tech scene, and is known as a university town within India.
Since then I have been a part of a number of global software development projects and feel strongly that to make global development more healthy its good to get everyone involved spending as much time as possible hanging out together. So, for western companies there is a real economic incentive to be working with remote engineering teams located some place nice. It makes it much more likely the western part of the team will be willing to spend significant time working directly with their Indian counterparts creating the team spirit and cohesiveness necessary for a healthy engineering organization.
With the outsourced engineering projects I've seen go bad, the failure has come from an 'us and them' type attitude between the US and Indian development teams where the two sides talk generically about the other side as a whole rather than about the individual issues with specific people. This would be alot less antagonistic if everyone involved had spent several weeks working together from a beach shack in Goa.
It's a great example of the possibilities for the nomadic cyber hacker culture my friend Ulrich has been promoting
When I arrived in India, I spent 6 months searching for a location that balanced my ambition to create an Internet Start-up Factory with a desire for a fun healthy life style. My search ended when I landed in Koregoan Park, Pune. Its a resort area, but also has a vital tech scene, and is known as a university town within India.
Since then I have been a part of a number of global software development projects and feel strongly that to make global development more healthy its good to get everyone involved spending as much time as possible hanging out together. So, for western companies there is a real economic incentive to be working with remote engineering teams located some place nice. It makes it much more likely the western part of the team will be willing to spend significant time working directly with their Indian counterparts creating the team spirit and cohesiveness necessary for a healthy engineering organization.
With the outsourced engineering projects I've seen go bad, the failure has come from an 'us and them' type attitude between the US and Indian development teams where the two sides talk generically about the other side as a whole rather than about the individual issues with specific people. This would be alot less antagonistic if everyone involved had spent several weeks working together from a beach shack in Goa.
wifi love in berkely
This morning I did a quick search for a 'walk in clinic berkeley' and found the free clinic on Durrant. Figuring there wouldn't be much of a line at 10am I headed there with just the address written on my arm.
Walking up Durrant what I expected to be an obvious health clinic just didn't materialize. Standing in front of the prespeterian church at 2348 Durrant I lamented my poor planning in not writing down a phone number when I was home online.
After standing for a while wondering where there might be a cyber cafe I remembered that my phone has wifi access. I popped it open and searched for open wifi networks, and with just alittle walking I got online and found the websites and phone numbers I was looking for.
God bless the Internet.
Walking up Durrant what I expected to be an obvious health clinic just didn't materialize. Standing in front of the prespeterian church at 2348 Durrant I lamented my poor planning in not writing down a phone number when I was home online.
After standing for a while wondering where there might be a cyber cafe I remembered that my phone has wifi access. I popped it open and searched for open wifi networks, and with just alittle walking I got online and found the websites and phone numbers I was looking for.
God bless the Internet.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Rome
I love the world.
I'm staying in a cheap hostel in Rome after working with Fabio up in Rimini for the past week. I got off the train and some girl with a laminated badge and a clipboard asked if I needed a place to stay. I am so used to ignoring hawkers in India that I walked past her before I did the math and figured out that I absolutely needed a place to stay and I had no clue how to go about finding one. (short of logging onto the internet) Standing on the platform she called a couple of hostels until she found one in the center of town with a bed for 18 euro / night. She pointed to the place on a map she gave me, smiled, said have a nice day and walked away.
Rockin.
So, now I'm sitting at a small desk in this room on the 6th floor overlooking a small intersection in downtown Rome. After walking around the ruins for awhile and taking a short nap I opened up my laptop to write a trip report. At the same time I turned speaker on my phone to play music. After playing Bhajans for awhile it clicked into 'Be My Lover'. The older Italian lady running this place came into ask in broken English what the song was she would look for it on the internet. I wrote the title down for her and 5 minutes later I heard it playing loudly from her office. For kicks I checked to see if there was wifi available. All the initial access points were locked, but after some time another free access point came online which I'm on now.
The only downside to my techno fabulous day is my Nokia N93i. After 3 weeks in the shop they gave me a 'refurbished phone'. This is after two previous attempts of about a week each where they responded to my problem of a broken mic for the video camera by flashing the firmware to rid the phone of any viruses that might be causing the problem. My original phone also had this annoying habit of randomly shutting off sometimes.
The mic on the new phone works fine and it hasn't shut off on my yet, but its got its own drama. One of the buttons I used to set options on the camera doesn't work, and more importantly at the moment, the connection to the pc cable I use to upload pics and videos doesn't work reliably. So, while I've been shooting lots of pics and videos this past week, they're stuck for the moment on my phones rapidly filling up memory card. :(
I'm staying in a cheap hostel in Rome after working with Fabio up in Rimini for the past week. I got off the train and some girl with a laminated badge and a clipboard asked if I needed a place to stay. I am so used to ignoring hawkers in India that I walked past her before I did the math and figured out that I absolutely needed a place to stay and I had no clue how to go about finding one. (short of logging onto the internet) Standing on the platform she called a couple of hostels until she found one in the center of town with a bed for 18 euro / night. She pointed to the place on a map she gave me, smiled, said have a nice day and walked away.
Rockin.
So, now I'm sitting at a small desk in this room on the 6th floor overlooking a small intersection in downtown Rome. After walking around the ruins for awhile and taking a short nap I opened up my laptop to write a trip report. At the same time I turned speaker on my phone to play music. After playing Bhajans for awhile it clicked into 'Be My Lover'. The older Italian lady running this place came into ask in broken English what the song was she would look for it on the internet. I wrote the title down for her and 5 minutes later I heard it playing loudly from her office. For kicks I checked to see if there was wifi available. All the initial access points were locked, but after some time another free access point came online which I'm on now.
The only downside to my techno fabulous day is my Nokia N93i. After 3 weeks in the shop they gave me a 'refurbished phone'. This is after two previous attempts of about a week each where they responded to my problem of a broken mic for the video camera by flashing the firmware to rid the phone of any viruses that might be causing the problem. My original phone also had this annoying habit of randomly shutting off sometimes.
The mic on the new phone works fine and it hasn't shut off on my yet, but its got its own drama. One of the buttons I used to set options on the camera doesn't work, and more importantly at the moment, the connection to the pc cable I use to upload pics and videos doesn't work reliably. So, while I've been shooting lots of pics and videos this past week, they're stuck for the moment on my phones rapidly filling up memory card. :(
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Traffic & Link Analysis
I have been looking into different mechanisms for tracking website traffic, popularity, analytics and whatnot. I signed up for Google Analytics and those stats have been great. Additionally I'm looking at Compete.com, Alexa & Quantcast. Reading a post on Traffick today I learned about google's Webmaster Tools which gives provides info about how a site scores on a variety of search queries. Here's how my blog does :
Top search queries Average top position
1. edu 2.0 7
2. permaculture credit union 10
3. resurrection lily 10
4. arriane 6
5. laura drewett video 3
6. freeman thailand 2
7. etrade global trading 7
8. laura drewett 10
9. freeman video 20
10. kiva freeman 1
11. freemans audio 4
12. freeman school mumbai 5
13. where's the internet 6
14. freeman you tube 8
15. where's disneyland 8
16. freeman foto 1
17. wheres the internet 5
18. freeman's video 9
19. pop freeman 9
20. viagra store 43
Im not sure how I landed the 8th position for 'where's disneyland'
The viagra store is evidence of a particularly bad case of comment
spam I took care of some time ago.
Top search queries Average top position
1. edu 2.0 7
2. permaculture credit union 10
3. resurrection lily 10
4. arriane 6
5. laura drewett video 3
6. freeman thailand 2
7. etrade global trading 7
8. laura drewett 10
9. freeman video 20
10. kiva freeman 1
11. freemans audio 4
12. freeman school mumbai 5
13. where's the internet 6
14. freeman you tube 8
15. where's disneyland 8
16. freeman foto 1
17. wheres the internet 5
18. freeman's video 9
19. pop freeman 9
20. viagra store 43
Im not sure how I landed the 8th position for 'where's disneyland'
The viagra store is evidence of a particularly bad case of comment
spam I took care of some time ago.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
BigDog Instructional Design
SkillsCamp gave me the chance to see a variety of approaches to teaching technical material and experiment with my own. This has increased my appreciation of good teachers and opened my eyes to the field of instructional design.
At EIndia last month I met Douglas Bell, an instructional designer with EDC. Last night I called him to ask for advice on how to create compelling educational materials.
Here are some notes from that call :
Develop explicit learning objectives
Be 'needs' based
Avoid creating material that is just an orientation
Create tasks with which people will develop skills by accomplishing the tasks
Be clear - 'at the end of this module students can do x, y, z'
Learning objectives should be objective and observable
Assessment so students can get feedback of whether they're on the right track
Iterate, watch closely to see how students are responding to the material and modify the material accordingly - you probably won't get it the first time.
PRACTICE
Action based, avoid passive lectures
Look at what other people are doing, online universities, etc
google: big dog instructional design
for a site that has good information on instructional design. Maybe this
At EIndia last month I met Douglas Bell, an instructional designer with EDC. Last night I called him to ask for advice on how to create compelling educational materials.
Here are some notes from that call :
Develop explicit learning objectives
Be 'needs' based
Avoid creating material that is just an orientation
Create tasks with which people will develop skills by accomplishing the tasks
Be clear - 'at the end of this module students can do x, y, z'
Learning objectives should be objective and observable
Assessment so students can get feedback of whether they're on the right track
Iterate, watch closely to see how students are responding to the material and modify the material accordingly - you probably won't get it the first time.
PRACTICE
Action based, avoid passive lectures
Look at what other people are doing, online universities, etc
google: big dog instructional design
for a site that has good information on instructional design. Maybe this
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Kendara
Archive.org rocks. Anyone curious can look at the website for the startup I did after leaving Sun back in 1999. Check it out.
Digital Bridge Camp
Since Sunday I've been here in Devlali - close to Nasik - at the Digital Bridge Camp. The purpose of the camp has been to connect people working in non-profits with technology which can make their jobs easier.
During my two sessions so far I walked people thru using and setting up a wiki on pbwiki.com and creating a blog on blogger.com.
Right now Noel Hidalgo is demonstrating a number of tech tools and resources non-profits can take advantage of including
- the different kits Tactical Tech offers nonprofits
- NTen has webinars for showing people how to migrate to Linux or, GIS or using Google Adwords.
- dotorganize study on technology available for social change organizations.
- personal democracy formum also provides research reports on technology in politics.
- mobileactive.org directory and strategy resources for uses of mobile technolgoy in activism.
- greenmediatoolshed.org
- globalvoicesonline.org
- dotsub.com website for helping subtitle videos
- internet archive
After tea we're going to introduce googlegroups, civicspace, mailman and a variety of other mailing list software and free content management solutions
Yesterday, Sapna Shahani who worked at the Berkeley Community Media Center before moving back to India talked about her plans to set up a community media center in Mumbai.
Prof. Nagarjuna also gave a talk on the SELF Platform which he's been developing at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. He also introduced Wikipedia and gave an impassioned speech on wiki culture or the culture of openness.
During my two sessions so far I walked people thru using and setting up a wiki on pbwiki.com and creating a blog on blogger.com.
Right now Noel Hidalgo is demonstrating a number of tech tools and resources non-profits can take advantage of including
- the different kits Tactical Tech offers nonprofits
- NTen has webinars for showing people how to migrate to Linux or, GIS or using Google Adwords.
- dotorganize study on technology available for social change organizations.
- personal democracy formum also provides research reports on technology in politics.
- mobileactive.org directory and strategy resources for uses of mobile technolgoy in activism.
- greenmediatoolshed.org
- globalvoicesonline.org
- dotsub.com website for helping subtitle videos
- internet archive
After tea we're going to introduce googlegroups, civicspace, mailman and a variety of other mailing list software and free content management solutions
Yesterday, Sapna Shahani who worked at the Berkeley Community Media Center before moving back to India talked about her plans to set up a community media center in Mumbai.
Prof. Nagarjuna also gave a talk on the SELF Platform which he's been developing at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. He also introduced Wikipedia and gave an impassioned speech on wiki culture or the culture of openness.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Venture Capitalist Development Programme
I just got accepted to the Wadhwani Venture Capitalist Development Programme
I'm super excited. My friend Sheel Mohnot's friend Ashish Badjatia went to it last year and recommended it highly on his blog.
I'm super excited. My friend Sheel Mohnot's friend Ashish Badjatia went to it last year and recommended it highly on his blog.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Rapid Execution vs. Capacity Building
In the time I've been here in India I've met a number of people working at or running service companies. The most common engagement models for these companies I have seen are:
- fixed bid projects
- fixed price per developer (no transparency)
- cost plus (full transparency, hiring company can negotiate directly with the employees, the service company takes an HR fee for doing the search, plus a monthly facilities fee, plus some margin)
Of these I generally push for the cost plus model for the obvious benefits transparency brings, and the employees in India feel more like first class citizens in the companies they are ultimately working for. It also tends to be expensive as dealing with less expensive / more junior developers requires time, sensitivity and hand holding, all of which are hard to do across 11 time zones and 12,000 miles.
With fixed bid projects, often much of the work is done by junior engineers hidden behind someone who communicates well and interfaces to the client. There can be time & cost benefits to this, but because the process is opaque, the back end to these types of operations tends to shuffle a bit, which can make consistency problematic.
Amitabh Jain runs a small software service company that approaches this differently. Oriented around building teams for his clients, he initially hires junior developers and then mentors them as a group in the technologies and processes of the client. It takes some time for the teams to become productive, and Amitabh reflects this in an escalating payment structure which starts at a few hundred dollars / month / engineer and grows each month such that after a year the client is paying market rates.
I like this model because it reflects the current conditions of the labor pool,
it gives Amitabh the chance to add significant value by mentoring the individuals and teams involved, and the hiring companies benefit from having cohesive teams at a lower cost and with less risk than if they tried to hire more senior people individually directly. The downside is time, its definitely more about capacity building than executing a project quickly.
- fixed bid projects
- fixed price per developer (no transparency)
- cost plus (full transparency, hiring company can negotiate directly with the employees, the service company takes an HR fee for doing the search, plus a monthly facilities fee, plus some margin)
Of these I generally push for the cost plus model for the obvious benefits transparency brings, and the employees in India feel more like first class citizens in the companies they are ultimately working for. It also tends to be expensive as dealing with less expensive / more junior developers requires time, sensitivity and hand holding, all of which are hard to do across 11 time zones and 12,000 miles.
With fixed bid projects, often much of the work is done by junior engineers hidden behind someone who communicates well and interfaces to the client. There can be time & cost benefits to this, but because the process is opaque, the back end to these types of operations tends to shuffle a bit, which can make consistency problematic.
Amitabh Jain runs a small software service company that approaches this differently. Oriented around building teams for his clients, he initially hires junior developers and then mentors them as a group in the technologies and processes of the client. It takes some time for the teams to become productive, and Amitabh reflects this in an escalating payment structure which starts at a few hundred dollars / month / engineer and grows each month such that after a year the client is paying market rates.
I like this model because it reflects the current conditions of the labor pool,
it gives Amitabh the chance to add significant value by mentoring the individuals and teams involved, and the hiring companies benefit from having cohesive teams at a lower cost and with less risk than if they tried to hire more senior people individually directly. The downside is time, its definitely more about capacity building than executing a project quickly.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Teaching Programming MIT & IITb
I am researching ideas on how to prepare students with the skills and work ethic necessary to be effective programmers.
Philip Greenspun has some interesting
thoughts on What's wrong with the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum and has published a course on Software Engineering for Internet Applications to address some of these issues. He encourages other comp. sci. educators to provide this course as well and provides them with teaching resources.
This is the assignment list Professor Om P. Damani put together for his Foundation Lab course at IIT Bombay. I really like the assignments, but I'm kind of blown away by how much work they are and how little time is given to complete them. A good friend of mine went to IIT and said this was standard and mentioned that this class was one of three a student would be taking in a semester all with similar work loads.
Another aspect of Damani's class I find interesting is that there doesn't appear to be any programming instruction ie. descriptions of arrays, functions, classes, objects etc .. There wouldn't be time. A student needs to pick up a new language and create a large project with it in the time it would take an MCA academy to get to looping.
Philip Greenspun has some interesting
thoughts on What's wrong with the standard undergraduate computer science curriculum and has published a course on Software Engineering for Internet Applications to address some of these issues. He encourages other comp. sci. educators to provide this course as well and provides them with teaching resources.
This is the assignment list Professor Om P. Damani put together for his Foundation Lab course at IIT Bombay. I really like the assignments, but I'm kind of blown away by how much work they are and how little time is given to complete them. A good friend of mine went to IIT and said this was standard and mentioned that this class was one of three a student would be taking in a semester all with similar work loads.
Another aspect of Damani's class I find interesting is that there doesn't appear to be any programming instruction ie. descriptions of arrays, functions, classes, objects etc .. There wouldn't be time. A student needs to pick up a new language and create a large project with it in the time it would take an MCA academy to get to looping.
Tipping in India
In America tipping waiters and delivery people is automatic. There may be a few edge cases as you get closer to fast food, but not very many.
The ambiguity runs the complete spectrum here. Many Indians I eat with don't tip at all or leave a token couple of coins even on fairly expensive meals. Others - especially if they have spent significant time in the states - leave the western 10 - 15%.
The weirdness is further intensified for the broad range of prices involved. Like we have a chaiwalla who comes by my place twice a day and pours each of us a small cup of chai for 3 rupees each. I'm not involved in the financial transaction, but I'm sure there's no tip involved.
In contrast the pizza I just ate for dinner was 160 rps. Somehow I felt funny tipping the pizza delivery guy when the chaiwalla guy came and poured us all cups of chai for less than I would have tipped for the pizza, so I dissed him.
But whereas the chaiwalla has probably never gotten a tip from anyone, I have tipped the delivery guy before, so there was anticipation there which wasn't met. I feel guilty about that.
The ambiguity runs the complete spectrum here. Many Indians I eat with don't tip at all or leave a token couple of coins even on fairly expensive meals. Others - especially if they have spent significant time in the states - leave the western 10 - 15%.
The weirdness is further intensified for the broad range of prices involved. Like we have a chaiwalla who comes by my place twice a day and pours each of us a small cup of chai for 3 rupees each. I'm not involved in the financial transaction, but I'm sure there's no tip involved.
In contrast the pizza I just ate for dinner was 160 rps. Somehow I felt funny tipping the pizza delivery guy when the chaiwalla guy came and poured us all cups of chai for less than I would have tipped for the pizza, so I dissed him.
But whereas the chaiwalla has probably never gotten a tip from anyone, I have tipped the delivery guy before, so there was anticipation there which wasn't met. I feel guilty about that.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
facebook bandwagon
I am officially on the Facebook bandwagon.
Today I got my first Facebook application working
in its very rudimentary 'Hello World' state,
but I have to say I'm feeling good about the
experience so far. Here's a great post with lots
of sample code to look at when developing your own.
sample code for facebook
Today I got my first Facebook application working
in its very rudimentary 'Hello World' state,
but I have to say I'm feeling good about the
experience so far. Here's a great post with lots
of sample code to look at when developing your own.
sample code for facebook
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Open Source Education May Solve Talent Crunch
SkillsCamp in the news !!
http://epaper.livemint.com/
P eople from Pune's tech unconference community gathered at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research on 18 August for the first edition of SkillsCamp, a BarCamp style gathering of geeks with a focus on giving technical training to the hightech community.
A number of ideas came together in the SkillsCamp concept. At BarCampPune3, on 7 July, I gave a talk on opensource education and pointed to a variety of examples such as MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu and the Digital Studyhall Project http://dsh.cs.washington.edu, in which videos of expert teachers are freely distributed to the global community. I believe this model of open source education is the only scalable solution to the talent crunch facing the technology sector in India, as evidenced by the much talked about exodus of Riya.com from India because of the difficulty and expense of finding quality senior software developers.
Following that talk, a number of the Pune BarCamp organizers offered to help, so SkillsCamp was born in an effort to galvanize the Indian technology community to create quality open source courseware helpful to people working in the IT industry.
About 70 people attended the first SkillsCamp and held sessions on a variety of topics ranging from Google Gears to AJAX to using screen readers to make Linux accessible to the blind. There were about 10 sessions total. SkillsCamp was sponsored by Codewalla.com and SkillsCorps.com. SkillsCorps also recorded video and screencasts for most sessions, which will be freely available on its website.
Freeman Murray has worked in the high-tech industry in California and India for the past 12 years, including a stint at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the Java group. Currently, Freeman is starting a company in Pune, SkillsCorps.com.
http://epaper.livemint.com/
P eople from Pune's tech unconference community gathered at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research on 18 August for the first edition of SkillsCamp, a BarCamp style gathering of geeks with a focus on giving technical training to the hightech community.
A number of ideas came together in the SkillsCamp concept. At BarCampPune3, on 7 July, I gave a talk on opensource education and pointed to a variety of examples such as MIT Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu and the Digital Studyhall Project http://dsh.cs.washington.edu, in which videos of expert teachers are freely distributed to the global community. I believe this model of open source education is the only scalable solution to the talent crunch facing the technology sector in India, as evidenced by the much talked about exodus of Riya.com from India because of the difficulty and expense of finding quality senior software developers.
Following that talk, a number of the Pune BarCamp organizers offered to help, so SkillsCamp was born in an effort to galvanize the Indian technology community to create quality open source courseware helpful to people working in the IT industry.
About 70 people attended the first SkillsCamp and held sessions on a variety of topics ranging from Google Gears to AJAX to using screen readers to make Linux accessible to the blind. There were about 10 sessions total. SkillsCamp was sponsored by Codewalla.com and SkillsCorps.com. SkillsCorps also recorded video and screencasts for most sessions, which will be freely available on its website.
Freeman Murray has worked in the high-tech industry in California and India for the past 12 years, including a stint at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the Java group. Currently, Freeman is starting a company in Pune, SkillsCorps.com.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Digital Bridge Camp
DigitalBridgeCamp is a variation on the BarCamp unconference in which people from the tech sector and the development sector come together to understand what this marriage between IT and Development is all about.
Like a good first date it will be held in the majestic hill station of Devlali at the Leslie Sawhney Center. The accommodation is comfortable (each unit consists of 2 rooms, 4 beds and an attached toilet and bathroom) and the surroundings are pretty. (FYI – the centre is run by a retired army Brigadier who will remind you that it is not a hotel and meal times go by the bell!)
We expect sessions to be on technical subjects such as how non-profits can take advantage of FOSS and internet applications to help make their organizations more effective and cost effecient, as well as sessions on the work of a variety of NGOs, especially those which are attempting to apply IT to help solve the problems of the 'Digital Divide' that exists with the urban and rural poor.
In addition to the presentation sessions we would also like to take some time to have workshops in which we work through some questions like what should courseware look like that ngo IT workers should go thru to effectively use IT in their jobs, and if we can get the right people around the table we might be able to bang out courseware for school & telecentre computer operators as well.
Towards the end of the camp we would love it if some of the non-profit people present were able to articulate some of their IT needs such that the tech people could help them set up blogs, wiki's, and other tools that might be of service to the non-profit organizations.
Remember, at a BarCamp, everybody participates! That means the attendees are the presenters and the audience. If you aren't going to present, you can organize a discussion or publish notes from a talk. We really want you to find a way to contribute, so here's a handy HowToContribute guide.
http://barcamp.org/DigitalBridgeCamp
Like a good first date it will be held in the majestic hill station of Devlali at the Leslie Sawhney Center. The accommodation is comfortable (each unit consists of 2 rooms, 4 beds and an attached toilet and bathroom) and the surroundings are pretty. (FYI – the centre is run by a retired army Brigadier who will remind you that it is not a hotel and meal times go by the bell!)
We expect sessions to be on technical subjects such as how non-profits can take advantage of FOSS and internet applications to help make their organizations more effective and cost effecient, as well as sessions on the work of a variety of NGOs, especially those which are attempting to apply IT to help solve the problems of the 'Digital Divide' that exists with the urban and rural poor.
In addition to the presentation sessions we would also like to take some time to have workshops in which we work through some questions like what should courseware look like that ngo IT workers should go thru to effectively use IT in their jobs, and if we can get the right people around the table we might be able to bang out courseware for school & telecentre computer operators as well.
Towards the end of the camp we would love it if some of the non-profit people present were able to articulate some of their IT needs such that the tech people could help them set up blogs, wiki's, and other tools that might be of service to the non-profit organizations.
Remember, at a BarCamp, everybody participates! That means the attendees are the presenters and the audience. If you aren't going to present, you can organize a discussion or publish notes from a talk. We really want you to find a way to contribute, so here's a handy HowToContribute guide.
http://barcamp.org/DigitalBridgeCamp
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Democracy Now
Sometime back I subscribed to the Democracy Now newsletter. At this point I feel it is the best source regular news and commentary surrounding global events that I have come across.
Two recent articles in particular made me appreciate the intelligence and insight of their guests.
Nir Rosen gave a better / more believable description of the Iraqi state than I have seen.
what you’ll see is basically Mogadishu in Iraq: various warlords controlling small neighborhoods. And those who are by major resources, such as oil installations, obviously will be foreign-sponsored warlords who will be able to cut deals with us, the Chinese. But Iraq is destroyed full article here
Today Scott Horton talked about Karl Rove's involvement with using the Justice Department to prosecute Democratic officials
Karl had spoken to the Department of Justice, and they didn't have to worry about Don Siegelman anymore. He was going to be taken care of.
full article here
I highly recommend subscribing to Democracy Now !
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