We need more Barcamps in India
Barcamp Pune was one of the better barcamps I attended this year, it had the right kind of energy, lots of new startups and professionals working in startups, rich conversations, people openly sharing and contributing to other people's ideas.
Personally enjoyed giving a presentation on Monetizing Knowledge and look at what is beyond jobs and business, on how your spare time and knowledge can be shared for profit, rather than just consuming knowledge or wasting available time.
Some startups that I enjoyed meeting, listening to and discussing ideas were
Nanocast.com : Brajeshwar and his team gave a really cool demo of their upcoming product Nanocast, one of the better services I have seen lately on the web. High Innovative and presently one of its kind, it allows people to easily create rich media content from their existing photos, videos allowing you to express even more powerfully and creatively. Certainly worth a checkout at http://www.nanocast.com
Nanocast is a VC funded venture, the entire product development happened here in Pune.
Slideshare.net : Jonathan Boutelle demonstrated Slideshare.net and challenges in scaling slideshare. Jonathan, Amit Ranjan and their team have built a very robust powerpoint presentation sharing application on the web. Thanks to being techcrunched, It is already a huge hit with 40,000 views a day and scaling fast. Jonathan shared some valuable learnings of building slideshare and do's and don't in scaling. The entire development took place out of their Delhi office.
Jonathan also has the credit of kickstarting Barcamp movement in India, he was the part of the team that organized India's first Barcamp in Delhi. I had visited Delhi then, and it was good to meet him again.
Codewalla.com / Gamewalla.com - Rakesh Raju gave a quality presentation about his gaming company startup, After spending many years in USA, he is now working on a startup idea around gaming based out of Pune.
Rahul Thathoo gave a remote presentation from USA, a MS student at Stanford University, Rahul called up on the mobile phone and spoke to the audience on Appearance of Credibility in Online Ads. As we see more and more consumer generated content, there are new formats of disguide ads appearing allover through blogs, reviews and his presentation gave some insights on how to spot the real reviews from the company sponsored ad reviews.
Tarun Chandel gave a good presentation on the social networking and mobility Trends. Well reseaerched, his presentation says it all. You can download it here.
Anil Gupte gave a presentation about his startup which is about a new video recording platform similar to the popular Tivo in USA. Anil is another migrant from USA to Pune after spending 20+ years over there.
Other startups and friends I bumped into included Santosh Dawara and Anjali Gupta of Bookeazy, Anuj Khurana of MangoSpring, Bhavin Turakhia of DirectI, Aditya Mishra of TCS who sponsored the whole event, Kesava Reddy who also organized a 2 day Barcamp in Bangalore.
Good work done by organizes Dibya Prakash, Atul Kulkarni, Karthikeyan, Anand Kishore and others and well supported by the college student team of Symbiosis.
The pool side party was a treat as it allowed us all to wind up, enjoy and network in a relaxed way after a rich and intense day at Barcamp.
It was a pleasure to see the growing startup culture in India, a fab gathering of people across India and quite a few foreigners and NRI's all sharing and gaining knowledge from each other.
We certainly need more such Barcamps in India.
Regards,
Ajay Sanghani
CEO, ITVidya.com
Cell : 098200 20753
Hi Ajay
I think you are right that we need more barcamps in India. Barcamps are a great place to share knowledge and to learn a lot of new things. More than all that it's a huge shift in culture, how the conferences are conducted. I have been a part of few conferences and I feel they lack the learning factor that a barcamp has.
I read Parag' post on Blogging for learning professionals, it was a good presentation from both of you. I think blogging has changed the way people share and learn. I personally use blogs a lot as a learning tool, it's an insight into people's thinking.
I was planning a BlogCamp in Pune, an unconference of various bloggers with an aim to get an insight into how blogging has affected people and what innovations are people doing with blogs.
If the idea interests you do get back to me. I will also discuss the idea with Parag and lets see if we can get it going.