Mahboob's Journal

It was two days in a row of going to LaMakaan. After the Startup Saturday event, I was there again on Sunday (12-May-2013), this time the session being short films screening by Octopus Studios . This was first time I’d attended a screening of short films . It was conducted in a very professional manner. Founder Rahul Reddy explained the format. They conduct this event every two months, take submissions of feature films, which are given to an anonymous jury who select the final list. After the screening, the film makers would address the gathering and then there would be a question and answer session.

It’s always intellectually stimulating and energy boosting to attend startup conferences. The May edition , on the 11th at LaMakaan, was no different and it was about startup war stories - mistakes people had done and the lessons they learnt. The main speakers of the day and who made attending the session really worthwhile were Rahul Chowdhury and Ram Chaitanya Reddy. But first, notes about the featured startup founders and their messages.

It was two days of mingling with the Java world at the May 8 - 9 JavaOne 2013 at HICC, Novotel. Went there along with three other techies from 4S (Ramendra, Sowmindra, Krishna Reddy). We divided the sessions amongst ourselves so that there was no overlap and we get maximum coverage of the sessions. Somehow, the techie sharpness of the Sun days was missing. Yes, there were speakers and speakers, there were sessions and sessions, but it all felt like the event was mechanically planned and dragged along. A lot of sessions were ppt-talk only and the moment one asked a slightly technical hands-on question, you would get a dodge like “that’s a too-much detailed question for this session”.

Attended Startup Saturday, 13-Apr-2013 . Theme was PR and Zero-budget marketing and tried to inform folks on "how can startups effectively leverage free media - either owned assets or earned through networks - to promote their products?" Proceedings started with Ajay Reddy talking about gounesco.in . Very unique concept this; as his site says it's "a unique travel challenge which will take you to all the UNESCO world heritage sites across India over the period of one full year." Focusing on the day's subject, he said that most of the editors, journalists, publishers are available on twitter or their email ids are available on the web; so tweet or email them about your product concept or business model, telling them how you affect somebody's life and asking if this is interesting for them to publish stuff about you. You will definitely get traction. He also mentioned that branding cannot be done by google ads.

Surfing the net a few days ago, I bumped into CS 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms) course lectures of of MIT taught by professors Erik Demaine and Srinivas Devadas. They illustrate the course with Python language and a program named docdist, which essentially 'computes the "distance" between two text files # as the angle between their word frequency vectors (in radians).' That evening I spent a few hours translating the program into Ruby.

Attended yet another book launch event, on 7th March. This one was Rashmi Bansal’s Follow Your Rainbow. Venue was Landmark at Somajiguda. During her talk, Rashmi made a distinction between men and women entrepreneurs. Men give their whole focus to the business. Women typically enter into business in the areas that are more familiar like food, clothes etc. Their entrepreneurship takes off from a hobby or interest and as they run their business they also do other tasks like taking care of their children’s needs. Single-minded money focus vs multi-tasked passion is what one could say.

I didn’t sleep much on Saturday night - I barely got to sleep 2 to 3 hours. Why? Quite unexpected and unplanned were the task I did and this blog entry. The plan on Saturday morning was to go to Ruwi & Rayyan’s school for the parent-teacher meeting to collect their annual grades reports. We wanted to start from home at noon. Since I had some time after the late Saturday breakfast, I was on the net and somehow landed on Vic Gundotra’s plus entry of Valentine’s day. I think the “somehow” trail, though I am not 100% sure, was Latest from Blogger buzz on the +sign before Google profile becoming a link → link to Gregory Fair → just scrolling down → Vic Gundotra’s entry. Anyways, the post was about Vic’s son writing a “geeky cool” Valentine’s card to his girlfriend : “First, I need to know what you’re made of, because you seem to be composed of Copper and Tellurium, which explains why you’re so CuTe.”