Did Yahoo acquired Indian startup... "Bookpad"??

I saw lot of news coming which says Yahoo acquired Banglore based Indian startup called as 'Bookpad'. But Yahoo press release does not confirm this yet(22nd Sep 11.30 am :) ).

Waiting for official news.. Of course Indian startups are being recognized in world but other part of story could be Indians are not holding it for long to be more successful.

Anyway,
Some highlights about 'Bookpad'

• It is a one year old startup
• Started by yet another IIT engineers
• Based in Banglore
• Company name is Bookpad, product  name is DocsPad
• Bookpad is working with digital contents
• Bookpad had build a end to end document handling technology for the cloud
• They have offices in India as well as USA

Indian Entrepreneurs, Startups & Funding

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) ranked number four in producing Entrepreneurs, beating many Universities in USA. 2 week back I read this news. It was a pleasant and proud feeling.
India has been contributing to world of Information and Technology from many years, but this contribution is for service industry. There are no substantial  'Product' companies in India which made 'Impact' in the field of Information Technology. But these high quality Entrepreneurs coming into the race will definitely change the future for India.

Today I saw another news by National Entrepreneurship Network(NEN) which highlighted 4 Indian startups which raised millions.
The startups are:

• MeraEvents.com
• Redbus.in
• Freshdesk.com
• UrbanLadder.com

Ref:
http://blog.pitchbook.com/the-top-50-universities-producing-vc-backed-entrepreneurs/
http://www.nenonline.tv/3-indian-start-ups-who-raised-millions/

Gmail was down for 2.5 hours!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you believe it guys????
Many would say am i kidding or what.. But this is true.

Gmail went offline for 2.5 hours on Tuesday, around at 2.00pm(Indian time). 'Gmail' one of the most popular email service in the world which has 110 million users.
"The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 0930 GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this ... our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem," said Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager.

This affected most of the gmail users throughout the world, especially users from India & Europe.

Google has apologized for this mess. Many users reflected about this mess on twitter

For more information click, here.

Oscar & Indians

“Slumdog Millionaire” won 8 Oscar Awards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jai ho!!!

The Indian king of music has won 2 Oscars.. One for original score and Another for original song..

The another Indian Resul Pookutty won Oscar for the same movie in ‘best sound mixing’ category.

This is really golden day for Indian Film Industry!!

But.. the controversy is with the word “Slumdog”, many people many views.. Everyone has a different angle to look at things. What i think is: people living in slum area are not dogs.. If the intentions of the writer are not to call them dogs but to show their problem & the treatment they are getting, then we all should be Ok with it.

Laptop in Rs.1000/- ????

Does it look possible?

At least not to me, until i read this news.

Government of India has allocated Rs 5,000 crore for education mission through ICT, so that students of all professional-science programmes could own their own laptops.

Later after few days i heard that these laptops are having only few files in it, which will be used by students for their study purpose. If this is true then its just a calculator with some memory…

I am waiting for real news to come & also waiting for actual price & configuration of laptop..

I remember something like “Desktop in Rs.10,000/-” project Indian government, that was really BAD..

It was a p3 computer with over-clocked processor

BJP uses Open Source Softwares

This is a very good move by Bhartiy Janta Party in India, that they have started using Open Source Softwares in their party office.
source: http://www.linux.com/feature/150549

Even they have decided to implement wi-fi connectivity & IP video telephony for their offices. They are using ubuntu desktops in their Delhi headquarters. I was in Delhi with my friend Amit from 3rd to 9th Jan, that time we heard of this news & planed to visit BJP office, we even got permission to visit the office using some of Amit’s contact, but at the last moment there was some urgent meeting in that office & due to security reasons we could not visit the office.

But i must say Mr. L. K. Adwani’s IT-consultant is a wise man, who has saved a lot of software money for BJP. Also they have got better quality softwares than proprietary ones.

With this BJP has surely one step ahead of all other parties in catching attention of IT community of India. I am a Linux user and i frequently get a link to Mr. L K Advani’s website whenever i am accessing mails related to FOSS or Linux, from my google account (sponsored link).

I think, each and every political party in world should take some tips from Mr. Obama to make effective use of internet for gaining popularity over internet. I am looking forward to see all the political parties in India start using & promoting FOSS.

Here the list of softwares used by BJP :
(ref: http://blog.arpitnext.com/2008/10/bjp-using-foss.html)

Function	Chosen software
Server Virtualization	OpenVZ and Vtonf
Router + Firewall + VPN	Vyatta
Unified Threat Management	Untangle
HTTP Accelerator	Varnish
Proxy Server	Squid
Digital Repository	ePrints
Email	Qmail, Courier Imap and Squirrelmail
Instant Messaging	OpenFire plus Spark
Video and Voice Telephony	Asterisk, Hylafax
Mailing List	Ezmlm
Security Camera Management	ZoneMinder
Identity Management	Fedora Directory Server
Web Content Management	Joomla!
Remote WAN-based Backup	VZDump and rSync
Storage Area Network	OpenFiler
Network Management	Zenoss

Its About Recession Again….

In my previous blogs i have mentioned about some points regarding recession from industry point of view..
But what about Freshers (Students)?
Some of them even don’t know understand seriousness of this whole thing?
For those who understand this, What i think they should do is… try to grab any job opportunity comes in front of them, try to get maximum knowledge & experience they can.. So that when market will gain its good position again they’ll be position to negotiate hard with companies.. Also each fresher/student must do something ‘Extra’ to get in focus.. If they have something ‘Extra’ than their colleagues, they are through else not.
Generally what IT students lack is “Domain Knowledge”. Most of them do not have Domain Knowledge of any industry, this is where non-IT people with good logic get jobs in place of a better skilled IT person. Many IT students think that they would be hired because they have Good Marks in exam & Good Coding skills.. But they should understand that coding is just one stage of SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle)..
I have seen many mechanical & production engineers getting jobs only because they have domain knowledge of their field.
So, be aware IT Student.. instead of enjoying your holidays this year make use of them to get some domain knowledge & ’something’ extra than your colleagues.. Otherwise you’ll not be a part of race..

Job Loss in US…

A report says, approximately 159000 jobs were lost in US in a month time. Which is worst scenario in last five years. We know about Lehman bros.Economic recession is continuing in every vertical these days. Many developing countries will be facing economy crisis due to this.

In India freshers (specially computer students) have a hard time these days. Fresh graduates & post graduates have a hard time in finding the job. Because this recession has caused slowdown in recruitment of freshers drastically..

T-Mobiles launched G1: The Google phone

T-Mobiled launched Google phone G1 in September 2008. It’ll start a new era of mobile technology. i.e. open source mobile phones.

It has many cool features like HTML browser, 3mega pixel camera, compas view etc. I am waiting for this phone to be launched in India. Its price is much less than i-phone

You can go through following links for more info.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/9742-1_53-50003826.html

http://cnettv.cnet.com/9742-1_53-50003826.html