The Webbie

I left with my friend Amol on the night of 18th this month to a city which SIMPLY ROCKS…

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.

The lazy blogger in me just woke up. I did have exams but then the mammoth time-table of 40 days having 5 papers ended up in enough sleep & lots of movies… believe me, lots of them. The Mumbai University exam schedules tend to spoil us this way, especially the final year B.E.(Comps) students, because our time-tables are always super-lengthy. I’ll definitely miss these relaxing breaks after getting into professional life.

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.

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

It was bad. Really BAD. One feels the same as I did, when all that happens to one on a particular day goes against him/her.

I first broke a gift I’d bought for someone, followed by an incident that asked me to forget about my MP3 player.

I’d never ever thought that I would be losing my MP3 player in such a manner.

Yaar player kharaab ho jaye to bhi dil pe itni nahi lagti jitni iske baad lagi

I’d taken a local from Dadar, which was fairly crowded, and was standing on the gate, really enjoying the music that my Transcend was churning. Immediately after the train left Santacruz and got into the dark zone, something hit my hand and I could see my player flying away from me with my own eyes but could do nothing about it.

The person standing in front of me suggested me to lodge a police complaint. OK, I thought, I’ll go to Santacruz and do something. I got down at Vile Parle and the same guy who’d suggested me to complaint got down with me. He told me that there were two people whom he saw. I was surprised to hear that and we first went to the police on Vile Parle station, who redirected us to the Bandra railway police station.

This was the harshest part - the police in Bandra.
These guys cared a heck and they asked me stupid crap like why is engineering 4 years long, how come your left hand was outside, etc. They shooed away the gentleman who’d accompanied me leaving his friend waiting. They even went to the extent of saying that I’d not lost my player & we were just pretending and also checked my bag.

Eventually, they didn’t even write an official complaint. They just took my name, address & telephone no. on a piece of paper and told me that they would contact me, if required, or if they got my player(which I doubt whether they’ll even think about tracing).

This was my first such experience, and same for the guy who helped me out. Do you think any one of us is ever going to expect anything better from the police the next time we face something similar?

Since this is what one gets by approaching people who have been supposedly appointed to protect the common man, do you think people should be approaching them for help, because they put you in more trouble by making you feel like a petty criminal, rather than sorting things out for you.

Thanks Tanveer, for all the help that you extended.