Entrepreneur Geek

Foss.In 2005 kicked in today! The best thing about the day was meeting so many people. So many people whom I have known only on the web. Many people whom I didn’t know, but who knew me! Many people I met in the earlier years of Linux Bangalore. The interaction levels were very high, lots of informal conversations happening, and lot of energy in the atmosphere. Management wise, the day had its share of problems. It started an hour late, t-shirts did not arrive on time (as usual), talks were rescheduled, and there was a bit of chaos around. Despite all that, there were brilliant sessions and inspiring presentations.

The evenings are much more fun though! Most of the speakers and volunteers went to the Windsor Pub (that’s the usual hangout by the way) and had a great time. Lot to learn from people around, good food, lot of booze and good music. I think the place literally rocked with the noise the group created!

Lot more interesting talks happening tomorrow, including the PHP track. Gotta get ready for that!

Took the Kingfisher IT101 flight for Bangalore from Mumbai. The departure was 6.30AM, and the flight took off hovering over the Juhu beach. The Mumbai city looked really beautiful beneath – just getting up for the day. The flight was very good. Kingfisher is living by its motto – “Good Times”! The aircrafts are brand new, the air-hostesses are pretty, food was well balanced and tasty and the service was superb. The best thing though was in-flight entertainment. Having audio and video for a domestic flight was unheard of. Kingfisher had done it, and done it well. Both the audio and video collections were good, and even the headphones! As a matter of fact, you can take the headphones home, along with a few other goodies in a small pouch.

Coming out of the airport, the Bangalore city was alive. Kannada voices, cabbies vying to take you for a ride (pun intended) and the pollution and cold. I went straight onto the exit and picked up an auto rickshaw from there. Auto guys in Bangalore will definitely take you for a ride, so be prepared for that if you are new. The typical trick is to take another route because the driver has to refill gas / oil in the vehicle. But I was shocked to feel the pollution levels in the city. This was much worse than Mumbai! Right in the morning, the air was so polluted. You can feel the smoke going in your lungs! Now it’s not that I have not seen pollution, but this was too much for me to bear! By the end of the day as I write this, my cold has worsened and eyes are burning. Look at what one day’s pollution can do to me

Met Mahesh Pai at the guest house, and we were together for most of the day then. He practices law and is an expert in legal aspects of FOSS. He is also involved in the localization activities I believe.

Went to the Bangalore Palace in the after noon. Met Surjo Das, Palak, Tarique / Swati / Aasim Sani, Kishore Bhargava, Gopi Garge, Atul Chitnis, Karunakar, Devdas Bhagat, Prof. Harshad Gune, Sirtaj Singh Kang, Alan Cox and a few others. People complimented about Glancer and wished we built a “summary print option” for the talk shortlist! The halls and tents were being setup at the grounds and the last day pressure was building up. I wonder why all the events have to have last minute gotchas! I have never organized / witnessed an event where something has not gone wrong at the last moment! May be Murphy’s Law is the culprit!

Roamed around on the M. G. Road and Brigade Road in the evening. Bought a few books from Gangaram’s – this time related to money and entrepreneurship! Faced some hard time getting auto rickshaws and getting back to the guest house! But all is good that ends well! Set up Audacity and Wink on the machine and did some recordings. Getting ready for a screencast I have planned.

The new and improved Glancer beta is available.

The beta version has the following additional features:

• Integration with Foss.In – registered delegates are already imported!
• Talk Schedules available
• Search and shortlist sessions you want to attend
• Print customized conference guide – with information on sessions you
  are attending
• Enhancements to People Finder
• Preferences – fine tune the search results by managing weightage
• Bug Fixes

Head on: http://glancer.foss.in/

Umm, glancer.foss.in?? And not glancer.net?? Yes, Glancer is now integrated with the foss.in systems. All delegates are automatically sync’d with Glancer. So you can login with the same delegate code that you got from foss.in.

We also have all the talks in there. You can read the feature list and start using it!

Notes:
1. This means, speakers will have to register as delegate and get themselves a code to use Glancer.
2. It takes a few minutes to get your delegate info on Glancer after registration.
3. We don’t have any contact information on Glancer now. Your privacy is intact.

Thanks.

I wrote about Pandora music discover yesterday. Today I am talking about photo discovery with Riya.

Riya allows you to search photos and tag them. You can search public photos too and request the owners to allow you to see them. So how is this different from Flickr or even other image searches?

Riya automatically discovers people after you have tagged them once. Or if they are on your contact list. It even recognized text in the images. So you can search images, and it can find people and places based on this discovery engine. It’s a mix of face and text recognition technologies with a great delivery mechanism. Both the backend and frontend of the system are superb.

It is still in Alpha stage, still in invite only mode. But go ahead and checkout the Tour.

Riya is a very hot!

Learnt about a few interesting sites recently. They are quite unique and show excellent opportunities. They will shoot into the limelight very soon!

The first is Pandora. Pandora is a music discovery service that is based on the “Music Genome” project. Music Genome project was started about five years back to analyze the various types of music. Based on this research, they created Pandora.

You simply enter a keyword search and Pandora will pull out music that you may like. As you keep listening and noting which music you like and which you don’t, it automatically pushes music that you may like. The discovery engine is really good, and you actually get to hear music that you would like!

One more interesting thing about Pandora, is that it is written in Laszlo! The application interface is fluid and friendly. They have put up a great example of what can be done with Laszlo.

Go check it out!

Tomorrow: Identifying faces!