The Webbie

How would you define the experience of a kiddo engineer in his final year meeting people too a many, most of them placed well in the industry? That is what defines my experience at the BarCampMumbai2 last Sunday on 14th October, 2007.

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

Not a lot of information is really available about this one, but it is definitely worth a mention.

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.

The following e-mail is visiting a lot of inboxes these days:

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.

I was fortunate enough to be the first one in India to receive a cheque from the revolutionary advertisement medium mGinger, thanks to orkut, my gmail contact list and my website, which helped me build up that big a network. Really courteous on mGinger’s part, their CEO Chaitanya Nallan called me up personally to congratulate me. It felt good.

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.