JSFoo 2013 – Day 2

This post is a summary of the talks from Day-2 of JSFoo. Check out Day-1 talks here. The second day of JSFoo started with the most awaited talk of the conference. It was the talk by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) of Mozilla. He gave a keynote address on the topic "HTML5 for the masses - Making the Future the Now" and impressed the crowd who have gathered there early on a Saturday morning.

JSFoo 2013 – Day 1

JSFoo is a JavaScript conference organized by the awesome folks at HasGeek. JSFoo 2013, held on 20^th and 21^st of Sept, is the fifth edition after four successful runs in 2011 and 2012. The focus of this year’s edition was original creations with JavaScript. A series of workshops was also conducted before the conference. My full-time talk proposal (Building components using Polymer) didn’t get selected this time. There were lots of interesting talks and demos on both the days. There was a good number of International speakers this year. The turn around for the conference was quite high. When I walked into the auditorium, I had to spend quite sometime to find a place to sit. The videos of all the talks can be found here – Day-1, Day-2. Attaching the screenshots of mind map I have created during the conference. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Bringing the Open Web and APIs to mobile devices with Firefox OS

Speaker: Robert Nyman(@robertnyman)

Robert Nyman kick-started the conference with a keynote on Firefox OS. This was one of the sessions I was looking forward to. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to the venue on time and had to miss this session completely (thanks to the delayed overnight journey). I am yet to catch up this session on HasGeek TV.

Frontend Dev Ops

Speaker: Aditya Yadav (@NetRoy)

In this session, Aditya talked about the evolution of tools in managing the web applications. He called for the developers to automate various processes involved in managing the web apps – deployment, flushing cache, performance tweaks, writing clean code, etc. He also briefly talked about some of the deployment models being used in the industry.

Generating tests from code – or How to test better and faster

Speaker: Olivier Crameri (@Oliviercramieri)

This was one of my favorites of the day. I have learnt some new about testing. Olivier talked about his research work based on the concept of Symbolic Execution and how to use it to automate the generation of test cases. He also talked a bit about the solvers they are using at BugBuster. Then, he demonstrated Unite, a tool for generating unit tests from the code. The demo looked cool as the tool generated some of the test cases for a regular expression. However, I am not sure about the completeness of the test cases though. I am gonna spend sometime on this to get a better understanding of the concept of Symbolic Execution. Thanks Olivier.

Real-Time peer-to-peer collaboration with JS and HTML5

Speaker: Om Shankar (@om_invincible)

In this session, Om talked about different components involved in making a peer-to-peer connection using WebRTC. He also showed some cool demos. I was looking to see more on data channel. There wasn’t much on data channels though.

JavaScript is a DJ

Speaker: Jaison Justus (@jaisonjutus)

This was the first session after lunch. Jaison engaged the audience really well with his crisp talk on WebAudio API. He showed couple of cool demos using WebAudio API. Good job bro.

Programming Flying robots

Speaker: Sreekanth Vadagiri (@sreeix)

In this crisp talk, Sreekanth showed off his AR Drone being controlled by a node app. He also demonstrated the TurleDrone which he has built. The audience were really impressed with the demos. I have got one myself last month. Yet to find a good place to fly it.

Using Camera motion detection in JS for gesture based interaction

Speaker: Vinci Rufus (@Areai51)

Vinci talked about the techniques involved in recognizing the gestures. He talked about the Blend mode difference method used for detecting the gestures. Then, he demonstrated cool apps built using getUserMedia() API. I was really impressed with the car demo which Vinci and his folks have built.

RedRaphael – JavaScript graphics library on steroids

Speaker: Sushant Sudharshan

In this talk, Sushant from Fusion Charts talked about the evolution of the graphics library RedRaphael. He talked about some the salient features of the library like Composite shapes, grouping, etc. It would have been great had he shown better demos built using the library.

Killing passwords with JavaScript

Speaker: Francois Marier (@fmarier)

This was also one of my favorites of the day. Francois talked about some of the problems with the current password system and what an ideal solution should look like. Then, he introduced Personas with the help of a short play. Personas look like an interesting concept. Need to explore more on this.

Microsoft sponsored Talk (JS / Web stuff)

Speaker: Rajasekharan Vengalil (@avranju)

In this talk, Raj talked about the some of the cool stuff we can do with JavaScript – Pointer events, Full Screen API, Secure WebGL, etc. Some of the demos (GlacierWorks.org, for example) were really awesome. Then, he talked about some of the tools for debugging the JS code – modern.ie, browserstack. The developer tools on IE seems to have improved a lot. Raj’s session was very informative. Kudos to him for picking up some of the lesser known stuffs for demo.

Bot using Node.Js and the HTML5 Audio API

Speaker: Ameya Karve (@ameyakarve)

In this crisp talk, Ameya talked about how he has used Node.js and HTML5 audio API to build his bot. Unfortunately, he couldn’t show the demo of it on stage.

Offline in the browser – with IndexedDB, AppCache and LocalStorage

Speaker: Manan Bharara (@mananbharara)

Manan talked about the different techniques available for building offline apps in his crisp talk. This was the last session of the day.

Overall the day was really good. Had some interesting conversations with fellow JS developers. Check out the summary of Day-2 here.

-- Varun

JS Foo Bangalore 2012

HTML5 makes the web so powerful that we can do almost everything on the web. Till few years back, Flash was commonly used to build rich applications. Things have changed a lot with HTML5. Browsers are also becoming powerful day-by-day. Many desktop developers have already started moving towards web based application development. JavaScript is growing to be the most important programming language. In fact, the famous Khan Academy has chosen JavaScript as the first programming language to teach. As a developer, how do we keep track of the latest happenings? Though there are many online forums (like HTML5Rocks) to help us, the best way to learn is to hang out with fellow developers and the experts from the field. JS Foo is a tech event, organized by the good guys at HasGeek, which facilitates the interaction between JavaScript developers.

About JS Foo

JS Foo is India’s only conference on JavaScript, with editions in Bangalore, Pune and Chennai. It brings together JavaScript developers from different parts of the country, to share their learnings and help others transition to JavaScript. The highlight of the conference is its transparent system of public submission and voting on sessions. Participants have the control over the sessions to be part of the event. Yes, you can go to http://funnel.hasgeek.com/jsfoo/ to suggest a new session or vote for a session which you like. The schedule for the event will be prepared based on that.

About HasGeek

HasGeek is India’s first and only professional, community-focused technology event organizer. It was founded by Kiran (popularly known as @jackerhack) in 2010. HasGeek creates discussion space for geeks to collaborate. HasGeek has organized many successful events in the past like DocType HTML5, JS Foo, AndroidCamp, DroidCon, Meta Refresh, etc. I have personally attended some of their past events and really enjoyed them. Believe me, these guys are really awesome. :)

JS Foo Bangalore 2012

The fourth edition of JS Foo is happening in Bangalore on 19th -20th of October 2012. The theme for this edition is JavaScript everywhere. People are pushing the limits of what can be done with JavaScript on the server, in embedded devices, and in its original home, the browser. You can share your experience working with JavaScript and you can listen to the best practices in code and working style from the experts.

Date: Oct 19-20, 2012
Venue: NIMHANS Convention Centre, Dairy Circle, Bangalore
Pre-requisite: Basics of web development. You don’t have to be an expert in JavaScript.
Registration: http://jsfoo-2012.doattend.com/
Site: http://jsfoo.in (Site is still showing information about previous edition).

My Experience

I have attended the third edition of JS Foo in Chennai. It was an awesome experience. Learnt a lot of new stuffs. Check out my blog post to know about my experience at JS Foo Chennai 2012. You can also find the videos from previous editions here. I will be attending the event and might even give a talk on JS tools (http://funnel.hasgeek.com/jsfoo/). Hope to see you all at the event.

-- Varun

JSFoo Chennai 2012!

JSFoo is a one day conference on building rich web applications in JavaScript. Having tasted success on its previous editions in Bangalore and Pune, HasGeek organized the Chennai edition of JSFoo on 18-Feb-2012. The turn around for the event was quite good. I had reached the event at around 8:30 AM and was catching up with some of the old friends. The day started with an introduction to HasGeek and what followed was a series of interesting talks in two parallel tracks. Overall it was a good learning experience. The videos of the event will be out in the web shortly. Attaching the screenshots of mind map I have created during the event. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Cross Platform Mobile apps using JQuery Mobile and RhoMobile

The first session I attended was on cross platform mobile app development by Balaji Loganathan. He talked about some of the popular web frameworks to build mobile web app. He briefly compared the mobile web app and the native app and explained the need for cross platform mobile app development API. Then, he talked about RhoMobile and how handy it is for building enterprise mobile applications. 

Production ready apps with Flatiron

Flatiron is a framework for building applications using Node.js. Flatiron is sponsored by Nodejitsu and the code is available on github. I have built few apps in Node.js before but have never heard about it. The session was delivered by Pavan Kumar Sunkara (@pksunkara), a student from IIT Madras who is currently doing his internship with Nodejitsu. Flatiron seems to include some interesting components and it is the responsibility of the app developer to pick and choose what he wants. It is still in its early stages – just two months into development but seems to be promising. All the best to the team.

JavaScript and the compatible Web

The session on the compatible web was delivered by Rajesh (@avranju) from Microsoft. Though the session was meant to be a sponsor session (Microsoft was one of the sponsors for the day), Rajesh didn’t focus much about Microsoft products. He talked about the challenges in building web applications because of the availability of wide range of browsers and OS. He talked about Modernizr and other frameworks / techniques to overcome these compatibility challenges. Nice and interesting session. 

Data visualisation in JavaScript

The session was delivered by Anand S (@sanand0), chief data scientist at Gramener. He talked about the need for visualization. He said “Don’t take too much into average. Try to plot all the points and visualize them”. For visualizing data, one need to be creative and tools are just helpers in the process. You can build rich visualizations with simple divs in HTML without any complex libraries / tools. He demonstrated some of the cool visualizations he has build at Gramener. His talk was very crisp and clear. One of my favorite sessions for the day.

Building visualisations that rock using Web Standards

The second session for the day on data visualization was delivered by Harish (@hsivaram), a web developer evangelist at Adobe. This was the first session right after the lunch break but still Harish managed to keep us awake. Great job bro! Harish showed us how passionate he is about the data visualization. The session was more like a Show-n-tell where he built a replica of the cool visualization on Google Zeitgeist 2011 site. He used Easel.js and Tween.js to build the visualization in less than 40 mins.

Tracking Memory Leaks in Client Side JavaScript Application

This is a session by another sponsor of the event - Directi. Vishnu (@pathsny) from Directi delivered this much useful session. He talked about how to identify memory leaks in JavaScript and some of the good practices to avoid them. His session was very informative and I would rate this as the best one for the day. I have learnt a lot from this session. Looking forward to the video of this session and the demo app he has built. 

JavaScript is mischievous. Handle 3rd party content with care!

This interesting session was delivered by Krishna Chaitanya T (@novogeek), a Microsoft MVP for IE. He talked about mashups and the things we need to consider while including third party scripts in our web application. He briefed on the possible attacks because of the usage of third party scripts via script injection or frames. The demo was also quite interesting. This is another session for which I would give the highest ratings.

Ajax is history - Build real time apps in JavaScript

The last session of the day was on building real time web application. It was delivered by Srirangan S. He talked about how the web applications have evolved in the last two decades. Then, he demonstrated how he built his site review19 using Node.js and Socket.io.

-- Varun

DocType HTML5, Hyderabad

DocType HTML5 is a one day conference on HTML5, CSS3 and related technologies. The Hyderabad version of the event happened on 23-Jan-2011 at IIIT, Hyderabad. Since the event was organized in an educational institution, the student turnaround was huge. Almost 75% of the participants were students from IIIT-H or from other colleges. The organizers had to arrange for parallel sessions in the very last minute because of the overcrowd. That means a speaker should give the same session twice and they did very well. Overall it was a good experience – learnt a lot of new things, refreshed the things which I already know. 

New Ideas in HTML5

Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) from HasGeek started the day with a session on “New Ideas in HTML5”. He gave a brief intro to HTML5 and discussed about Semantic markups, DocType declarations in HTML5. He also discussed about the Postel’s law and how it is adopted by modern day browsers. Shall link to the presentation once I get it. I have used Thinking Space – a mind mapping application for Android to capture the session and here it is.

CSS3 and Presentation

The session on CSS3 and Presentation was delivered by Shwetank Dixit from Opera. He discussed some of the sexy features of CSS3. Some of the properties include – font-face, border-radius, transition, text-shadow, box-shadow, selectors, transforms, etc.

HTML5 in IE9 (Sponsor session)

Harish Ranganathan from Microsoft gave a session on HTML5 features supported in IE9. He also talked about the new tools which are introduced in IE9 to ease the developer’s task. Microsoft was the platinum sponsor for the event.

Multimedia Kit

The next session was delivered by Parashumram from Microsoft. His style of delivery was awesome. The presentation which had fancy animations includes canvas, video, audio tags of HTML5. He also briefed about support for SVG in HTML5. View his presentation here.

Geolocation, Offline and Mobile

Dhaval Trivedi from SourceBits was the next one to give a session on Geolocation, Offline storage and mobile. He clarified that Geolocation is not a HTML5 feature but a related technology. He also discussed how to add support for platforms which don’t have a native support for Geolocation APIs. Then, he briefed about some of the dos and don'ts of offline storage. Performance tips for mobile were also useful.

Accessibility

The last session of the data was delivered by Shewatank again. He focused on the need for making the site accessible for differently-abled persons. He talked about how screen readers work and some of the standards available on accessibility. 

-- Varun

More events in Q1-2011

Earlier I have posted about the tech events happening in Jan 2011. There are more interesting events happening in the first quarter of 2011. Listing down some of the events which might excite you. Shall update this post as I get to know about more events.

• International World Wide Web Conference, India. Mar 28-Apr 01. The WWW Conference series aims to provide the world a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conferences bring together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures – indeed all who are passionate about the Web and what it has to offer. Some of the speakers for the event this year include: Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Sir Tim Berners Lee and many more. More info here.
• ACM India Annual Meeting. Jan 28-29. Computer scientists and engineers from the Industry, Government and Academia are expected to attend the event, to discuss the current science and technology trends, celebrate ACM‘s spirit and India’s accomplishment in computing, and meet fellow CS professionals. More info here.
• DocType HTML5. Jan 23 in Hyderabad. Feb 5 in Ahmedabad. An event organized by the volunteers of HTML5 developer community to discuss the features and power of HTML5. Register here.
• New Contest in TunedIT : Music Information Retrieval. Jan 10-Mar 28.  TunedIT, a leading research platform in the area of data mining, encourages participation in the new competition “Music Information Retrieval” launched at TunedIT Challenges platform. The task is to recognize different properties of provided music samples, based on extracted sound features. More info here.
• International programming contest: Challenge 24. Feb 19. An annual 24 hour programming contest organized by The Electrical Engineering Students’ Hungarian Association. Register here.
• Kurukshetra 2011. Feb 2-5. A techo-management fest organized at Anna University, Chennai. One of the events of the fest is Barcamp, where Android discussions are also made. More info here.

-- Varun

Tech Events, Jan 2011

Attending a tech event – If you are a technology enthusiast, there is no better way to kick start a new year. There are lots of exciting events lined up for this month. The first event, which most of you guys are eagerly waiting for, is CES (Consumer Electronics Show). CES is one of the biggest electronics show held each January to show case the new electronic products from different companies. The next biggest event happening this month is Facebook Hacker Cup. There is also a TEDx event organized by VIT University - TEDxVIT.

Events in January 2011

• Consumer Electronics Show 2011. January 6-9, 2011. CES is one of the biggest electronics show held each January to show case the new electronic products from different companies. Many cool products and technologies have been introduced in the CES previous years. Some of the expectations for this year include – 1. Windows 8 from Microsoft 2. Sandy Bridge processors from Intel. Watch the event live here or here or here.
• Facebook Hacker Cup. The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual worldwide programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the title of world champion. The competition commences with a 72-hour Qualification Round on January 7, 2011. Register yourself for the event here.
• TEDxVIT. January 23, 2011. TEDx event organized by VIT University. Dr. Mylswamy Annadurai, the project director of Chandrayaan-1, Chandrayaan-2 is one of the speakers for the event. More info here.
• Titanium Week Webcasts. January 5-7, 2011. If you are a mobile application developer, this will be an useful one for you. Appcelerator Titanium is a mobile web based application framework solutions allowing web developers to create native applications for iPhone and Android. Appcelerator Inc is organizing a free webcast series to get you started on the Titanium framework. There are three different webcasts planned – Titanium for Web developers, What’s new in Titanium Mobile 1.5, Developing native Android apps with Titanium. Register here.

If you are based in Chennai, you can check out events in Chennai during January 2011.

-- Varun

Google Tech Talk: Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality

Google India is organizing yet another Tech talk on 19th Nov 2010. The topic for the same will be “Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality”. Dr. Shailesh Kumar, Senior Software Engineer, Google is delivering the talk. The event is free and open to all in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology and related fields. Register here.

Talk abstract

Enterprises are growing in age, size, and diversity and so is their repository of internal documents e.g. e-mails, internal wikis, special pages for people, projects, and products, etc. Searching this ever growing corpus with high precision, recall, and scale is becoming increasingly important and difficult for Enterprises.

This talk will highlight some of the fundamental differences between web search and enterprise search problems and then a number of opportunities for improving Enterprise search in the light of these differences will be discussed.

Talk     : Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality
Date    : Friday, Nov 19, 2010, 5:30 to 6:45 PM
Venue : Google India Campus, Hyderabad

-- Varun

Google India Engineering Tech Talk series

Google’s Engineering Productivity team is organizing a special event with talks by Google Engineers on October 27th at Google offices in Hyderabad and Bangalore. The theme for the talks will be Engineering at Google. The talks will focus on different phases (Design / Development / Coding / Testing and Release) of Engineering at Google and how the Engineering Productivity team executes on its mission of accelerating Google Engineering. Time: Wednesday, 27th Oct, 4:30 PM. Limited seats. Register here.

Talk 1

Web Testing at Google – Infrastructure for the world’s most demanding web developers – by Ted Mao. This talk will focus on the infrastructure Google has built to support web testing and how this infrastructure evolved as the web testing needs increased in scale and complexity.

Talk 2

Leveraging feedback and analysis to improve development process – by Brad Green. Brad will demonstrate two Google products Google Feedback and RoundUp using which they collect the feedback from hundreds of millions of users and identity the focus area after outages.

Talk 3

Tools for Continuous Integration at Global Scale – by Nathan York. This talk covers the key insights and technical design elements that enable us to scale the word’s largest continuously integrated code base to thousands of engineers worldwide.

Talk 4

Testing at Google – Dr. James Whittaker. James will focus on how the testing is done at Google to ensure the quality of the products.

Venue:

• Google India Pvt Ltd, DivyaShree Omega, Hitech City, Hyderabad.
• Google India Pvt Ltd, RMZ Infinity – Tower E, Old Madras Road, Bangalore.

More details and registration can be found here. Google's Engineering Productivity team is also hosting an invite-only event called GTAC in Hyderabad on Oct 28th and 29th.

-- Varun

TEDxChennai, 2010

Series of short talks by achievers from various fields to inspire you with Ideas worth Spreading. After the tremendous success of the first edition in 2009, TEDxChennai 2010 is going to be a bigger and better one. An event to celebrate The Passion To ‘Do!’  Check out the list of speakers here. Also, a workshop about organizing TEDx events has been arranged on 09-10-10.

 Event Details

TEDx Workshop Date: 09-10-10 Time: 02:00 PM – 05:00 PM Venue: IC & SR auditorium, IIT Madras, Chennai

TEDx Event Date: 10-10-10 Time: 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM Venue: IC & SR auditorium, IIT Madras, Chennai

What are you waiting for? Register yourself and get a chance to network with some wonderful people. For registrations, please visit this page. For more details, visit the official website of TEDxChennai. I will be live blogging from the event. Follow my blog or follow me (@varunkumar) on  Twitter. You can also follow the official hash tag #TEDxChennai

-- Varun

[Webinar] Google Mobile for Businesses

Yesterday, I have attended the web seminar aka webinar organized by Google Apps for Mobile team. Mayur Kamat and Raghu Kota from Google gave the presentation. Most of the discussions revolved around Google Apps, Google Apps for Mobile, Messaging and Collaboration on mobile platforms, devices supporting Google Mobile, etc. Watch out this space to know more about the upcoming webinars. Click here to watch the on-demand recording of the webinar. 

Here is the presentation I have captured from the webcast.

-- Varun

Facebook Developer Garage, Hyderabad

After being successful in several cities across the globe, Facebook Developer Garage finally came to the city where Facebook India office is located - Hyderabad. The idea of the Garage is to offer attendees a great insight into Facebook Open Graph and discuss about new technical ideas. The first edition of Developer Garage was organized at Hotel Golkonda, Hyderabad and was sponsored by Facebook itself, Intel and iridiumInteractive. David Recordon and Jonathan Hsu from Facebook gave an insight into the Facebook platform and talked about some of the open source projects which Facebook is working on.

View Full Album

Highlights

• The event was kick started by Siddharth from iridiumInteractive who was also the host for the event. He talked about the evolution of social media, its need and the role of it in our life.
• David from Facebook was the next speaker. His presentation was all about Open Graph API and Social plug-ins. He started with the Facebook usage stats and the work culture at Facebook. "A lot of Facebook work starts as a hack". Then, he briefed the capabilities of the Graph API. The API has been built with the goal of making it simple and modern. Graph API supports simple authentication of OAuth 2.0. Real-time updates is another exciting thing part of the Graph API. Know more the Graph API here.
• Jonathan’s talk was focused on the technical pieces involved in Facebook. He walked us though the technical overview of the Facebook application. He introduced to us some of the open source projects contributed by Facebook. Some of the notable ones include Thrift, HipHop for PHP, Cassandra, etc. Facebook uses a wide spectrum of technology. PHP for UI. MySQL database. Apache Web Server. MemCached for caching. Varnish as HTTP accelerator. Other open source initiatives from Facebook can be found here.
• Then, it was time for the application developers to share their experiences in developing Facebook applications. Hasan from Merxius shared his experience in building Facebook application for football fans. He talked about the different monetization methods available for Facebook developers – Impression Ads, Pay per click Ads, Social Ads.
• The most exciting part of the event was catching up with Kalpana, the first Facebook India employee. Before joining Facebook, she has with Google for around six years. I have interacted with her earlier on twitter and just got the chance to catch up with her in person. She appreciated some of my scripts and gave me suggestions to improve them. She also expressed her interest in testing few other scripts that I am currently working on. Thanks for the appreciation. That will definitely boost my morale to do more. :)

Lowlights

• It looked like some of the developer sessions were planned on the fly. It would have been great had the agenda been planned in advance. Wish there were hands-on sessions as well.
• No free WiFi and poor mobile wireless signal. This has been a major hindrance for me in live tweeting / blogging.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. Came to know about some of the cool things Facebook is working on. Hoping that the events in the future get better from here on.

-- Varun

[Hyderabad] Facebook Developer Garage and Google Tech Talk!

Hyderabad is becoming a hot place for developments on the technology front. There are lots of tech talks / conferences / startup meetings / tweetups happening in and around Hyderabad. Facebook Developer Garage and Google Tech Talk are some of the exciting things happening this month.

Facebook Developer Garage, Hyderabad. The idea of the Garage is to offer attendees a great insight into Facebook Open Graph and discuss about new technical ideas. After being conducted in several cities across the globe, this social event is coming to the city where the Facebook India office is located. This Facebook developer garage will feature speakers from Facebook and other Indian companies. The event is open for all.

Time: Thursday, September 23 · 3:00PM - 6:00PM.
Venue: Hotel Golkonda, Masab Tank, Hyderabad. 

Google Tech Talk, Hyderabad. Google Hyderabad R&D is organizing a tech talk on "Enterprise Cloud Computing". Andy Scott and T.V. Sriram from Google will discuss some of the common issues that must be addressed in order to create robust web services for Enterprises. Andy will talk about "Cloud Computing for the Enterprise" and Sriram will talk about "Policy and access management in the cloud". Register here.

Time: Friday, September 24. 4:30PM.
Venue: Google Hyderabad, DivyaShree Omega, Hitech City, Hyderabad. 

-- Varun

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities.

Past Grace Hopper Celebrations (in the United States) have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration is a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

This is the first time the program is being held in India, especially for Indian women. It will be held at The Taj Residency, Bangalore Dec 7th – 9th 2010. As part of this event, a Poster Session has been organized to provide an opportunity for an informal discussion of one’s research with the conference attendees. Furthermore, it is a forum to convey any raw ideas and results not yet developed into a full paper. The last date for the submission of Poster abstract is 15-Sep-2010. More information can be found here.

-- Varun

What’s new on Apple Store?

Steve Jobs has announced lots of cool things yesterday at the Apple Music Event.

iPod Touch

• FaceTime
• Retina display
• HD video recording
• Game Center

iPod Nano

• Multi-touch
• Fm-radio
• Got smaller

iPod Shuffle

• Voice-Over
• Buttons
• Play-lists
• Got smaller

Apple TV

• Streaming HD movies
• Rent Hollywood movies and TV shows
• Internet with WiFi
• Apple remote

Other updates from the Apple event: iTunes 10, Ping, iOS 4.1

-- Varun

Happy birthday Blogger!

One of the best blogging platforms available till date, Blogger, turned 11 this month. I have been using blogger even before it was acquired by Google. It is a very good blogging platform even for a person with less technical knowledge. To celebrate its birthday, Google has arranged for the first ever Blogger global birthday party (BloggerFiesta).

 Hyderabad Bloggers meet

The Hyderabad bloggers meet (BloggerFiesta) was organized by the city based six-digit blogger Amit Bhawani at Ohris Jiva. The number of entries for the same had been restricted to 50. Around 40 bloggers turned up for the event which started around 7 PM. The event started with a quick round of introduction from the bloggers present there. There were people from different background and it was nice catching up with the fellow bloggers and their interests. After that people started networking with each other while enjoying their food. Chetan Bhawani (Amit’s brother) and his friends organized an open quiz for the participants and goodies were given to the winners. The quiz was interesting and I participated actively answering many questions. Won a gift voucher and a T-shirt too. :) Though I have met Amit on few other occasions before, just happened to talk to him personally today.

Few valuable tips about blogging were given to the participants as a hand-out. Though Amit was actively answering the questions asked to him, it could have been better had he given a talk on blogging instead of just the hand-out. Also, the choice of place could have been better. Overall it was a good experience catching up with few interesting people from Hyderabad.

Thanks to Amit and his team for organizing the bloggers meet.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 15, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Street level imagery from Microsoft. Street Slide. Link.
• Sun eruptions spit plasma at Earth. Link.
• Eco-friendly USB rechargeable batteries. Link.
• Kindle games. Link.
• Helicopter game using HTML5. Link.
• Make your old add-ons work with Firefox 4. Link.
• Skype files for IPO. Link.
• Mathematical breakthroughs. Link.
• JQuery for mobile announced. Link.
• Amazon opens UK Kindle store. Link.

Social Media

• “Who to follow” is live on Twitter.
• Twitter’s short link service. Link.
• “You both follow” feature is live on Twitter.
• Twitter now even more Torrent friendly. Link.

Google

• Google launches multiple account sign-in. Link.
• Google discontinued Wave. Link.
• Google’s Ultimate demo system. Link.
• Google updates the Contacts in GMail. Link.
• Flipping for Gesture search. Link.
• Product development at Google. Link.
• Google unveils Voice actions for Android. Link.

Gadgets

• JailBreakMe, the first web based Jailbreak for iPhone. Link.
• RIM announces its first touch phone. Blackberry Torch. Link.
• Two new Android based smart phones from Moto. Link.
• HTC Wildifre available in India for 16K. Link.
• Nexus One officially became a developer phone. Link.

India

• Malaysia plans new Visa system (VFS) for India. Link.
• Indian Govt. forms programmers’ army to hack systems of hostile nations. Link.
• Mobile Number portability by Oct 31. Link.

Sports

• Stumpy is chosen as the mascot for the 2011 cricket world cup. Link.

Events

• Speakers announced for TEDxChennai. Link.

-- Varun

Microsoft Community Tech Days 2010

Event Date: 07-Aug-2010

Venue: Microsoft Campus, Gachibowli, Hyderabad

Mind-map of Microsoft Community Tech Days 2010. Click on it to enlarge.

-- Varun

Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google

Google Hyderabad Engineering is organizing a talk on “Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google”. Ashish Kumar, Google’s Engineering Manager, will be delivering the talk. Asish is responsible for steering and managing the 100+ Engineering Tools team that builds tools for most engineers at Google.  He will talk about some of the key infrastructure elements that enable more than 6000 developers distributed over 40 offices to work together on more than 2000 projects. Limited seats. Register here by 07-Aug-2010.

Talk     : Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google.

Date    : Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 6:00 PM onwards.

Venue : Google Campus, DIvyaShree Omega, Hyderabad 

Update: The talk has been re-scheduled to Wednesday, August 11, 2010.

Update-1: Have pinged the organizers to arrange for live streaming (as requested by many of my readers). The organizers have replied back saying this option will be considered for the talks in future. For this time around, the video will be recorded and shared later.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 04, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Firefox 3.6.4 released with crash protection. Link.
• HTML5 showcases of Google, Apple and Microsoft. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.6 released for patching the frequent Flash player crashes. Link.
• Cell phones as eye doctors. Link.

Social Media

• Facebook launches Hover-cards. Link.
• Twitter to publish shopping deals through @EarlyBird account. Link.
• Google Me social networking to take on Facebook. Link.
• Facebook unveils suggested interests list. Link.
• Facebook unleashes Open-Graph search engine. Link.

Google

• Google Spreadsheet adds format painter. Link.
• YouTube’s world cup Easter egg. Link.
• Google apps training and certification tools for teachers. Link.
• Google to use more HTML5 features in GMail. Link.
• Google’s update on China. Link.
• Google adds real-time web analytics to Blogger. Link.

Gadgets

• Infibeam, India has announced its Windows and Android based tablets named “Phi”. Link.
• The newly launced Apple iPhone 4 has reception issues. Link.
• Microsoft Kin discontinued after just 48 days. Link.
• Android Vs iPhone 4 multitasking compared. Link.
• Yahoo gets serious on Android development. Launches Y! Mail and Messenger for Android. Link.
• Android 2.2 Froyo rolled out to all the Nexus One users. Link.
• Amazon Kindle for Android released. Kindle for iPhone to have audio and video support. Link.

India

• Infibeam has launched its own brand of mobile phones in India. Link.
• Facebook, Hyderabad India is hiring 500 people. Link.
• Mukesh Ambani, D.E. Shaw close to Joint Venture. Link.
• Get address proof from Indian Postal department. Link.

Events

• TEDx events in India. Link.
• Dev Camp, Chennai on July 10. Link.
• Seth Godwin in India on July 07. Link.

Misc

• The next version of Eclipse IDE “Helios” is out. Link.

-- Varun