Ahmedabad and its people are amazing, high-spirited, fundoo and really chilled out.

We reached Ahmedabad on the morning of 19th to attend BarCampAhmedabad held at Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship(CIIE) in the new campus of IIM Ahmedabad, the first to be held in Ahmedabad and Gujarat.

It started off with the intro where the offline wiki was built up with two threads of sessions.

The sessions I attended were:

• Prof. Sanjay Bannerjee: The Mind frame of an Entrepreneur , What it takes to succeed as an Entrepreneur? The essentials, the dream,the strategy.
  I missed out on half of the session
• Ankur Shukla: Gave a session on his Entrepreneurial journey from his college days to now.. a 1.8 cr firm Kudos Infomedia
• m-Governance
• Ruchit Surati: Demonstrated an application to control and access a mobile phone over the internet.
• Raxit Sheth: MyKavita.com teaser
• Sashi from NirmaLabs: Motivational Marketing
• Tapan Shah: Facebook Applications

For pics and presentations of BarCampAhmedabad, check out:

• http://www.slideshare.net/tag/barcampahmedabad
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=barcampahmedabad
• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=84164&id=638475579

People I enjoyed meeting in BarCampAhmedabad:

• Ankit Shrimali
• Shalvi Agarwal
• Ashwin Madala
• Sashi
• Ruchit Surati
• Netra Parikh
• Ankur Shukla
• Akash
• Aditi Gupta
• Vinay Modi
• Tapan Shah
• Vijayendra Haryal
• Adel Anwar

More about the remaining part of our trip on the next post… Want to keep that separated from the BarCamp post actually.

Professional life… Hmmm… Just got placed. It is certainly an amazing feeling to get your first job. A pretty smooth aptitude test followed by three grilling interviews was what it took for me to be a part of the 4-year old startup firm, Convonix (Can’t really call it a startup anymore ). Amazing work culture, flexible working hours, shuffling profiles is what I seem to be in for.

Fine. Coming back from the future to the present, it can never be better than this one: I’ll be attending two Barcamps within a gap of 8 days And both in top institutes of the country :!: BarCampAhmedabad in IIM-A on 19th Jan followed by BarCampTechFest at none other than IIT-B on 27th Jan, as a part of their TechFest.

Meanwhile, I have lately been working on Raxit Sheth’s website, MyKavita, which is due to be launched in BarCampTechFest and am a part of the Planning Team of BarCampTechFest.

I also completed 2 more cheques of mGinger in the time being.

21st is when college resumes, and the same old routine is back. Alas! Not even a 10-day holiday.

After being the first in India to receive a mGinger cheque

I just touched the 300 mark day before yesterday and have requested my payment today.

In case, you did not know what mGinger was all about, check out http://www.mginger.com/index.jsp?inviteId=65717

The basic motive was to generate traffic for my blogs on TargetGenX, but when I started stumbling myself, I ran into an addiction. I ended up spending hours stumbling upon new stuff that interests me.

Rock on SU. I loved the technology!!!

Many of you must be already knowing this, but most of the people don’t.

You can read more about it on the blog

It was to be held at IIT, Mumbai, a place of technical exotica.

I got to the place with Saumil on Saturday, 13th to volunteer for the event.

A few things were discussed. The banners were put up around the campus. An IRC Channel was setup. Will have to say the preparations were amazing.

Thanks to this, I got to meet some amazing people, viz. Abhishek Thakkar (have met him before though), Raxit Sheth, Aditya Mishra, Arpit Agarwal, Murli Ramkrishnan, Pooja Palan & Vaibhav Jha.

Finally, it was D-Day and I got there really charged up. I with my Somaiya mates and later joined by Pooja, put up directional arrows to geographically relocate people from the main gate to the precise venue. With roundabout 300 people present, the BarCamp had to be hectically awesome. And that is what it turned out to be. Due to 40 registered sessions on the online wiki, it was decided to be broken up into 4 threads.

The Introductory Session was taken up by Aditya, who made it highly interactive, like a BarCamp is meant to be. Experienced campers explained to the newbies what it was going to be like.

What followed was an innovative time slot allotment method. Campers interested in giving sessions put up their PostIts in their chosen time slots on the white board or Offline Wiki as it was called. Followed by that, everyone briefly explained their sessions.

And eventually the gun was triggered and the BarCamp begun.

Enough for now. I will follow this up with a continuation post.

BarCamp, Mumbai, IIT. Enough. I AM ATTENDING!!!!!!!

After the sad demise of our college’s barcamp that was supposed to happen whenever-i-dun-remember, Raxit Sheth has initiated this one (if I am not mistaken) and pulled in some of the BarCamp organisation honchos of West India, viz. Tarun Chandel & Abhishek Thakkar as organisers for BarCampMumbai2.

I just registered half an hour back for this to-be-extravaganza with a Nelson as my registration number and I desperately await this one. Another 12 days, and it shall be the beginning of an amazing experience for me and all other fellow campers.

By the way, have you registered yet? No?? Do it here: BarCampMumbai2

The AMP speaker is an innovation that doubles up as a desk and with built-in amplifiers, so all you need to do for the AMP to start crunching your numbers, is to connect it to your laptop, iPod, music player, radio or any other music device. There’s an audio jack that is used for this purpose, which ensures that you can connect it to any portable music device you have.

To round it up, it is equipped with a MOSFET amplifier and a 3-way speaker cone set.

It has been designed by Pieter Mae, but it is unclear from his website whether it is still a concept design or has it actually been engineered. Whatever may be the case, it doesn’t really seem very healthy for a laptop though, because of the highly charged magnetic fields it shall bear and the heavy vibrations that it might produce.

Right to Emergency Care:
Date Of Judgment: 23/02/2007.
Case No.: Appeal (civil) 919 of 2007.

The Supreme Court has ruled that all injured persons especially in the
case of road traffic accidents, assaults, etc., when brought to a
hospital / medical centre, have to be offered first aid, stabilized and
shifted to a higher centre / government centre if required. It is only
after this that the hospital can demand payment or complete police
formalities. In case you are a bystander and wish to help someone in an
accident, please go ahead and do so. Your responsibility ends as soon
as you leave the person at the hospital.

The hospital bears the responsibility of informing the police, first
aid, etc.

Please do inform your family and friends about these basic rights so
that we all know what to expect and what to do in the hour of need.
Please not only go ahead and forward, use it too!!!!

The message tells us that this is the Supreme Court judgement to Appeal(Civil) 919 of 2007. On searching the Judgement Information System it was clear that the case was in no manner related to the said message.

It was about a no-profit charitable hospital based in Ghanapur, Andhra Pradesh having claimed exemptions on imported medical equipments, based on Para 2 of Notification No. 64/88-Cus, which were granted. But since according to the classification of hospitals by the notification, it fell under Para 3, it also applied for exemption under the same, after the first exemption was granted.

On rejection of the second application, they filed the case in the AP High Court, which again didn’t go in their favour and hence this case was filed in Supreme Court.

For more details, on the case, check out the Judgement Information System.

Always verify any such crucial information related to the lives of people before you believe in it.

From the day I joined mGinger, I was sure that it shall create some flutters around, because I loved the concept they went about applying. And the amount that they have grown in these 5 months, was pretty less than what I’d expected. That is due to the very obvious struggle that everyone faces to pull advertisements on the space they provide and this struggle is profound when you are new. And mGinger is even now a baby, which needs to grow up, so that it is easier to convince the advertisers to see value in the ad space provided by them. According to their latest blog post, they get two types of answers from advertisers:

1. They can spam at a cheaper rate, then why go the mGinger way??
   All thanks to the existent buying and selling of databases containing thousands of numbers and email addresses, which shall change from now onwards with the National Do Not Call List. Check out http://www.ndncregistry.com/ for more information.
   How does it help mGinger and its users?
   More the number of people who register for NDNC, lesser the number of people to spam, hence the medium that remains is mGinger, and hence the advertisers opt for it.
2. The second reason is that some advertisers do find the medium lucrative but unfortunately there aren’t enough people for them to target. This can only be taken care of by the users. The more they advertise their link, the more will mGinger grow.

mGinger will have to rock with the new advertisement medium that it has created. It is now 4 am, and I can’t think of more to write. So, I end it here.

Have you joined mGinger yet? If not, do so by clicking here.