midventureslaunch

Great minds don’t give excuses and despite the recession, the startups and the entrepreneurs keep their ideas and products coming. If you are in the hunt for great ideas, or great minds or just gather some inspiration, you have to be at midventureslaunch.

This midwest conference is targeted at bringing a lot of startups and provide them with an opportunity to showcase their product in front of venture capitalists and other leaders in the industry. Much in the same lines as any other startup conference, only early startups with less than three years of experience and also $2 million in funding are entertained. There are three different tracks where you can get the attention. You can either compete with other startups or introduce your app for the first time. This sounds like a very good place for a launch, since there are going to be a lot of venture capitalists and also a lot of press.

Teraom will cover more about the companies that will participate in the conference in the coming weeks.

WHAT : Launch Mid Ventures – Startup Conference
WHEN : 28 September 2010
WHERE : Chicago, IL
TICKETS : $50, $25 early bird, $15 students
WEBSITE : http://midventureslaunch.com/startups/

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I happened to attend a talk by Lee Rainie [twitter] in the University of Minnesota on “The Rise of the Networked Individual”. Lee Rainie is one of the master minds behind The Pew Internet & American Life Project and he is a self claimed expert on social media and has done a lot of research on this field.

Here are a few highlights from his speech on April 22, 2010 at UMN.

1. The Golden Age of Amateur Experts both a blessing and a curse.

Participating in social media and creating content is cheap and also easy. Hence there are tons of amateur professionals who publish their thoughts, pictures, videos and other content in the internet and hence the noise becomes higher. This makes it difficult for a consumer of content to identify the best content.
Opportunities: intelligent Feed filters to suppress noise and bring out the best content. Eg. techmeme, techlens

2. Blogs vs social media

Rainie highlights that facebook and other social networks have emerged as one of the most used technologies on the internet, with facebook being a major player in social media and people spend more time with FB than with google search. Microblogging has taken to new heights and the number of people using blogs are coming down.
Applications : A team in facebook has created an application which will create a blog with your FB profile and status updates.

3. The strength of weak ties is bigger than the strength of strong ties

Having read a paper on “Predicting Tie Strength With Social Media” by Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, which highlights the importance of strong ties, this came in as a surprise. The interesting argument was that all strong ties [friends, family, coworkers] were almost at the same level and had the same contacts as you. However the weal ties played an important role in a job search, because they have a different network. Also, Rainie pointed out that the digital friends are either 0 or 1 [friend or not a friend], where as in real world, there are priorities and ranks.
Applications: Create ranking algorithms in friend circles in social media

4. Dashboard

Integrating social media is the call of the day and there is a lot of potential in integration of social networking sites in to a single portal. This also explains the cost of switching to a new network.
Opportunities : With rich APIs, creating a new portal sounds very plausible.

5. Location Aware Systems

Forusquare was one of the most successful companies in 2009 and yahoo, Microsoft [and facebook ?] are all eyes on it with a billion dollar evaluation. Location aware systems have successfully emerged in bringing a positive mindset with recommendations and networking over weighing the privacy concerns.
Opportunities: Replicate foursquare and make it better!

6. Privacy Concerns :

Americans are extremely concerned with privacy but the technology of social media and location aware systems clearly over-weigh the cons. Rainie highlights that the number of users who leave their data on the cloud is on a exponential high and people are less concerned with privacy these days.

Twitter stream of the speech : #rainie [April 22, 2010]

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Proto.in - The Startup Event

Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle and other giants are laying off employees to cut down on costs, not able to bear the heat of the recession. If you have just lost a Job, feel lucky!! If you have the passion to work and a good idea to start with, proto.in might be able to find you a firm platform in the future. Proto.in fifth edition is scheduled this weekend [ 23, 24 January 2009 ] at Bangalore.

Proto.in is a startup event and a bridge between budding entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and mentors. Proto.in has reached a very significant level and is playing a very vital role of putting India in par with silicon valley in the startup category. The main niche of the event focuses on showcasing product companies, and gives you a six minute time for you to showcase your product.

Besides presentations, there will also be keynotes by renowned speakers; Tally Founder, Bharat Goenka is to deliver the opening Keynote for Proto.in on the 23rd. If you do not have an idea at the moment, and you still wish to witness the event, you can get attendee passes.

If you are a venture capitalist and wish to participate and witness the presentations, you can contact the proto team directly.

The event is sponsored by Microsoft, Yahoo, Zoho, Sun Microsystems and Amazon to name a few.

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barcamp chennai bcc2

If you are looking for the latest in technology and the brightest minds, barcamp is a perfect blend, spiced up with its unconference style. Barcamp chennai is scheduled on 18& 19 oct at IIT, Chennai. Technology and coding practices will be the focus this time at barcamp.

Barcamp Chennai was first organized a couple of years back and this is only the second version of the growing tech savvy population in the southern metro and is fast catching up with barcamp bangalore. It will be a two day event (weekend) and technology aficionados will make their presence with their participation in this unconference. Sessions range from Ruby on rails, python, ajax frameworks to blogging, mashups, SEO and web designing. There will also be a coding contest in barcamp chennai.

EVENT : Barcamp chennai 2 (what is barcamp?)

VENUE : IIT Chennai, INDIA

DATE : 18 & 19, October (sat and sun)

STYLE : Unconference

ENTRY : free

barcamp chennai, IIT madras

For more details, visit the barcamp Chennai website. You may have to register yourself (Just list yourself in the wiki) for a free entry. People with the spirit of barcamp can participate. If you are interested in knowing more about this event, reach me or visit the wiki for more details.

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barcamp bangalore 7 (bcb7)

Location : Bangalore (INDIA), IIM-B
Date       : 13sep, 14 sep 2008

While most people are prejudiced that barcamps are for techies and the ajax and the java crowd, the trend is changing a lot. The sessions are no longer classified upon technologies (ajax, python and ruby), but it is more professionally organized into Technology, business, social and arts. This classification has brought inside barcamp a great platform for those non techie folks to participate and collaborate ideas with the tech savvy geeks.

Do i have to be a techie to participate in Barcamp?

Not any more! As the classification is more sensible (read previous paragraph) , it places technology as just a tool to implement the ideas. You can always listen to ideas from other people or even suggest some of your own. Moreover, it is a unconference. If you do not like a session, you can always walk away to a session that interests you better. I have compiled a list of a few interesting sessions that i attended, and also heard about. It is not possible to attend all sessions at barcamp, because most sessions occur in parallel. You may realize that most of the sessions below do not involve any technology.

Next Generation Networking

This session talked about the 4G networks and related hardware, and the preparations going on for the development for the same. A very interesting session. It primarily focused on the SSX3000. In a end user perspective, it is all about high speed broadband on your mobiles. Imagine 100MBPS on your mobile. Waiting for 4G.

Google Open Social & Shindig – OpenSocial Container

With the number of social networks captivating people, growing everyday, open social proves a great way to get logged on to each network with the open social ID. These two sessions on open social gave an insight of developing social networks that can make use of open social. The second session also gave a detailed study of the two frameworks available and how to transform a new network to work on open social. They also claimed its very secure (read next session )

Breaking Google Open Social Applications

Parasuraman, a security expert and researcher has found a few apps lagging behind in security. He used one of the biggest social networks ever – orkut – to inject scripts and fake users into giving their google passwords in a newly devised style of phishing page. Clearly one of the best sessions of barcamp bangalore, and adding to this, he had a live demo!

Firefox indic localization

Mozilla was one of the sponsors for bcb, but i never found a mozilla employee nor a banner. There were however a few developers and plethora of enthusiasts of firefox. This session dealt with customizing firefox 3 in more indian languages. There was also one another session on browser war. Chrome is not yet there, firefox still rules.

Python 3000

This session talked a lot about the changes in the python programming language. It was more for geeks and i would have appreciated if the speaker had dealt the session in a different perspective, since most of the folks in the session had neither seen python 2.x as well as python 3.0

RSI – What a Pain in the Wrist

Intimidating stuff for all those geeks. Guillaume Marceau has a lot of details about how typing in wrong positions and weird time spans can injure your wrist. He also came up with a lot of solutions including a curved keyboard and speech synthesizer software.

Commercial Photography: Soul Selling

Mahesh Shantaram is a freelance photographer. He held a couple of talks on selecting cameras and how to do some basic and ethical editing using GIMP or photoshop. Mahesh is a wild life photographer, and he showcased a lot of his good work and helped curious listeners to enhance their skills in photography.

iReboot – Experience your dream job

This was one of my personal favorites, and i was excited to hear the innovative idea. Ireboot lets you reboot your career by giving you a unique chance to work in your dream job, hands on for a couple of days. For instance, you could do designing advertisement hoardings, or work for a media for a couple of days. This can help you visualize the pros and cons of your dream job, or even appreciate your current job better.

Out of ordinary : CYCLING TO WORK

This was one session that caught the attention of all the eyes in barcamp. There were a lot of enthusiasts who took it a joy to drive to office everyday by a bicycle. Of course, these cycles were high tech and could cost you more than a bike. The talk comprised of the advantages and green environment, and also the few disadvantages.

Make money blogging

I presented this session on how to make money from blogging using sponsored content, the advantages and the disadvantages of the same.

PARAGLIDING

I missed this session, i suffer from acrophobia. But i included this session to give people an idea of the multifariousness of the sessions at barcamp.

You may find the list of all sessions in bcb7. BARCAMP 8 preparations are already underway, and it is a great platform to advertise your service /product /website, or even get feedback. There are a lot of entrepreneurs and geeks hanging aroung every where. You also get free lunch and a free tshirt (as in free beer). DId i say registration was free?

Enthralled by bcb7 ? Sounds like you missed something ? Participate in barcamp bangalore 8 and make a difference. (bcb8 – barcamp is a open community upshot)

Would appreciate digg love!!

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