Book Review: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal

I’ve been following Rashmi’s blog for a year or so and although I don’t entirely agree with her style of blogging or the interpretations she draws, I’ve still kept at it. I read about her debut book and looking at the subject matter (Story of 25 IIMA alumni who started their own ventures) couldn’t wait to get my hands on one. That wasn’t so easy as it isn’t so readily available in all bookstores, except crossword.

Very obviously, the title is stolen from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford. Rashmi is gracious enough to acknowledge that in the preface but I feel the book deserved a more imaginative and thoughtful title.

The book tells about 25 IIM Ahmedabad graduates who at some point of time in their life started their own companies. The collection of entrepreneurs is diverse and covers various industries (IT, Retail, Finance, Consulting, Agriculture etc), IIMA batches (Class of 1970 to Class of 2004) and people who started out at different stages of their careers (Straight out of IIM or after 26 years in a company!). It shows a diverse view of the entrepreneurial dream and succeeds in painting across a broad canvas.

Another positive is that the companies founded by these grads are very much alive and active in today’s economy and are playing a major role in shaping the Indian growth story. A few examples are Subhiksha, Makemytrip.com, Naukri.com, India Infoline, Mphasis etc. I found it interesting to learn about how these companies were born and how they handled previous economic crises to get to where they are today.

But where this book falls a little short is the depth to which each company and entrepreneur is analyzed. Most of the profiles sound very similar and there is a lot of glossing over. Sometimes it seems Rashmi is awestruck by these bigwigs and doesn’t probe deep enough. For the 2000-2001 bust, the author just writes “we really had a hard time but stuck it out” for all the profiles.

Given the speed with which IIM/IIT books are lapped up by the public, this one is also set to be a runaway hit and I’m sure it’ll inspire a lot many young college grads and students to consider the alternate path. It’s a great read if you are into startups or even otherwise. Grab one at your nearest Crossword Store, it’s 3rd on the Bestsellers list there!

Some details about the book are:

Title: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

Author: Rashmi Bansal

Publisher: CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad

Price: Rs 125

Bhavish

Technorati Tags: Book Review,Startups,India

The Knight News Challenge

This announcement isn't exactly geared towards the Indian audience. However, for all you guys out there in the US.

The Knight Foundation is $5 million for innovative ideas in the areas of online news media. To quote from their website:

If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.

Head onto http://www.newschallenge.org/ for more details. The clock is ticking and only a little more than a week left...

Technorati Tags: Funding,Knight Foundation,News Challenge

Startup success stories

Sitepoint has a recent post detailing some very inspirational stories about how entrepreneurs went on to startups often turning down very coveted job offers.

Head on to http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/10/24/10-inspirational-how-i-did-it-stories/ to read more about them.

Technorati Tags: Startup,success story

The foss.in controversy

Source Wikipedia

If you are active in the FOSS community in India, you are sure to have heard about foss.in. It is among the premier FOSS conferences in India usually teeming with hackers as well as wide-eyed enthusiasts (I gave a talk at foss.in in 2006, so you know where my loyalties lie ;-). The roots of foss.in have been questioned quite a bit in the past. But, this post will not attempt to discuss the controversy surrounding the ancestry of foss.in (about which you can read more about in the discussion page of foss.in), but rather apprise you about the latest controversy caused by the "Omlette Post"

Atul Chitnis (lead organiser of foss.in) recently posted on the foss.in blog announcing this year avataar of foss.in. The posting makes it clear that the main objective of this year's offering of foss.in is not increasing FOSS awareness in India or catering to the newbie enthusiast but instead choosing to focus on a clique of developers who are looking to move up the software value chain. Although, the community at large seems accepting to the idea of gearing foss.in towards a technically advanced audience, there are certain wording in the announcement that has caused an uproar in the community. To quote a few of them:

Also, FOSS.IN is NOT a newbie event. A “newbie” is defined as someone who has no skills or knowledge or experience that would allow him or her to immediately contribute to FOSS development.

Most new contributors focused only on low hanging fruit, such as translations, and distro-specific packaging. If people got involved with code, it was usually bug fixes and code maintenance.

Our event is meant to highlight Indian contribution to Free and Open Source Software - not just bug fixes, but real code contributions, real innovation, real projects.

The omlette post generated backlash in the community and you can read about some of their points of disagreement here, here, here, here and here. The main points of argument seem to revolve around the blatant undermining of other forms of contribution to the FOSS community such as submitting bug fixes, translations, etc.

However, to offer my personal opinion in the matter. India has largely been at the bottom of the IT value chain pyramid. India is a force to reckon with in the IT industry, but in terms of intellectual capital being generated, India is no where close to that of the US. The way I see it, what foss.in is proposing to do is to encourage Indian FOSS developers to move up the value chain so that they contribute to projects' new features and perhaps start successful new projects. While translations and bug fixing are all essential to the FOSS movement in India, that is not enough. India is one of the largest consumers of FOSS software and gone are the days when you could claim to support FOSS by merely using FOSS software. India has a relatively large number of FOSS contributors. However, if you look at projects where these individuals have made a significant impact, the statistics are dismal. From the top of my head, I can think of Anjuta started by Naba Kumar, Debian is supported by 6 Indian DDs (Debian Developer), GNUSim8085 by Sridhar Ratna, Karunakar of IndLinux fame, LDTP by Nagappan and a few others. Although, I am sure the contributions of all the developers are in fact extremely useful, to be a rockstar, you need to move up the value chain. And you do that not by just contributing bug fixes, but by actually adding creative value to the software.

There are a number of other FOSS conferences in India which focus on spreading FOSS awareness among the public, promotes generation of translations, bug fixes, etc and what foss.in is trying to do is carve a niche out for itself by catering to the segment of developers who are looking to work on creatively more stimulating work.

We will be there at foss.in this year to cover the events and talks in more detail on at least some of the days. If you are going to be there at foss.in too and/or involved with the project days, do let us know if you want us to showcase your views in this forum.

-Prashanth

Technorati Tags: foss.in,FOSS,India

The Digital Heritage project

Bhavish recently blogged about TechVista — a technical symposium organised by Microsoft Research India in Chennai. At the same event, MSRI announced the "Digital Heritage" project. The Digital Heritage (DH) project was a direct consequence of minister Kapil Sibal announcing a collaboration between the Government of India and Microsoft Research.

The goal of the project is to provide a virtual experience which is as close as possible to actually visiting the historical monuments of India in person. DH provides an interactive 3D navigation experience by making use of technologies like Photosynth and HDView.

Photosynth is a technology that stitches together a number of photographs from multiple viewpoints to form a 3D representation of the objects in the images. The Photosynth website has a snippet that explains what it does:

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Photosynth is a topic that deserves a post just for itself. Coming back to the topic of DH, the prototype demoed at TechVista demonstrated a guided demo through the Sri Andal temple at Srivilliputhur. The guys involved in the project made multiple fun trips to the temple and took tons of pictures (over 7000) and "synthed" them together. The end effect of all this hard work was a very effective representation of the temple in virtual space. Wading through the "point cloud" as they called it, was an out of the world experience. The background music and the narrative only added to the splendid effect, as the folks of Tamil Nadu could instantly connect to their beloved monument.

This project was steered by Aditya Sankar and Ajay Manchepalli among others. We are coaxing Aditya to write about his experiences (including anecdotes of gorging on the tasty idlies of murugan idly store and the paal khoa of Srivilliputhur) through the project on this blog. Keep an eye out for the insider view!

[Ed note]: To get a better idea of the experience, click on the thumbnails and make sure that you hit the magnifying glass at the right-top of the image, since resizing causes subsampling which omits quite a few of the points in the point cloud

-Prashanth

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Digital Heritage,India,TechVista,Photosynth,HDView

TechVista: Where Researchers become Rockstars!

The DesiTech team was at Chennai the past week for Microsoft Research India’s annual Symposium event TechVista (No relation to Windows Vista!). It was a gigantic affair, with over 1400 people attending, majority of them being students from different colleges in and around Chennai. Most of Microsoft Research India was there, and many professors from the various IITs and IIITs, among other leading Indian colleges.

TechVista is intended as a common platform to bring together the Indian research community, academia and government. Many senior Microsoft executives and internationally recognized invitees turn up annually. This year Prof. John Hopcroft was the keynote speaker. If you ever studied Computer Science, you will recall his book. The students of Chennai really seemed to recognize him, judging by the mob that surrounded him asking for his autograph!

The event opened with the launch and demo of the India Digital Heritage project (We’ll cover this in detail, including a screencast of the demo in a later post soon), which aims to bring a rich online multimedia and interactive experience to Indian heritage, monuments and culture. It was followed by the keynote, and other talks on  Photosynth, Program Obfuscation and Computational Biology. Rick Rashid, the SVP of Microsoft Research worldwide gave a presentation on Microsoft Research contributions to both the company Microsoft and to Computer Science in general. The one contribution that stood out was Surface. That device is awesome!

There was a PhD poster session in parallel with the symposium and some of the demos were really impressive. This is a great event for students to showcase their work to top notch people, and win hefty prize money too.

Microsoft really seems to be focusing on some real problems in India (which the India Digital Heritage project highlights) and is proceeding to help out in the right earnest. The whole event is a great platform for Indian research in general and will undoubtedly increase the quality of research done in India over the next few years by bringing the industry closer to academia.

Bhavish

More pics from TechVista:

Thanks to Ajay Manchepalli for letting us put up these photographs :)

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Research,TechVista,Photosynth,India Digital Heritage,Surface

SmartTechie WebDev Conference

I was at the SmartTechie WebDev Conference today and came back with mixed feelings about how it went off.

The keynote given by Atul Chitnis was engaging and expectedly biased towards Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), as he is one of the pioneers of the open source movement in India and one of the founders of FOSS.IN. Of the other talks, I found a few actually useful and where I learnt new stuff. The other talks could have been made interesting but were killed by the monotonic and bored speakers.

SmartTechie had organized a Job Fair along with this event and quite a few companies were in attendance, including Microsoft, Sun, Adobe among others. No points for guessing that this was the main attraction for most of the 500 strong crowd!

I feel there is a need for a good conference in Web Development but it could have been more fun had the profile of the speakers been better. Also, clubbing this with startup demos and presentations would make it a great platform for startups to pitch their ideas to influential people and attract talent. It might also bring more people to the event.

What do you think?

Bhavish

Some photos from the event:

Technorati Tags: Open Source,Web Development,Conference,Startups