All Posts in Unconference

|In: Blogging|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Blogging is something that I started couple of years many years back in 2004 and this blog was hosted on blogspot. Many of my readers, friends, colleagues share the question with me – What was the real motivation for starting a blog? There was no real answer in 2004~2005 since I was following the herd of early-stage bloggers and wanted to be counted in one of them 🙂 But over a period of time blogging transformed from hobby to passion and when you are passionate about something, you do it diligently and results would automatically come out!

Image Source – LinkedIn

It helped change my entire personality, my observation skills, reading habits and countless number of things. The real achievement was is I could motivate others to start blogging and connect with entrepreneurs/techies/students (and support them in whatever way I could via book reviews, app reviews, product feedback etc.) The most important decision of my personal life also has a deep-rooted connection with my blog!!

This article is not about listing my blogging achievements but to reiterate that Blogging can be a life-changer and a game-changer 🙂 Blogging, Competitive Coding, Social Media have changed the market landscape and these would much more important than ever before! If you are an engineering student and interested to get acquaintance about these traits then you should definitely attend Hello Hacker on September 24 (5:00~6:30 PM) in Bengaluru.

Hello Hacker : Listen, Learn, Connect and Execute

Hello Hacker is an event chapter to acquaint engineering students from all across Bengaluru about the following aspects:

  • Competitive level programming
  • Open Source Communities
  • Modularisation
  • Social Media & Blogging

Competitive level is now playing a crucial role in tech-hiring and this platform would answer all the lingering questions about it. There are expert speakers doers from each of these fields who would walk through their pros & cons. In a nutshell

Hello Hacker is an event to help students stay ahead of the curve, make them more employable, and get them connected with domain experts. It is intended to be a stepping stone for young minds to get acquainted with the diverse ways in which web related technologies can affect their lives.

Hello Hacker : Agenda, Speakers

The proposed topics for Hello Hacker are:

  • How Open Source communities change lives.
  • How to contribute to the open source communities.
  • How relevant is blogging in today’s world for personal growth?
  • Importance of Hacker Meets and Hackathons in students’ lives.

The speaker list is below:

Sayan Goswami (Decision Scientist, MuSigma Inc)

  • Topic of discussion – Concept of Modularisation of code.
  • Relevance – Understanding what it takes to write a good code and makes the student more employable.

Anirban Saha (Proprietor, Kolkata Bloggers)

  • Topic of discussion – Blog as a Personal Branding tool.
  • Relevance – Don’t blog to just earn money out of blogging; make it a personal branding tool & be ahead of the cut-throat competition.

Shreyas Narayan Kutty (Regional Coordinator, Mozilla Clubs)

  • Topic of discussion – Requirement of community building among programmers, open source communities and how it could be used to engineer the products of the future.
  • Relevance – To take open source to more people, encourage them to use it in their products for free with modification. It accelerates innovation.

Harishankaran K (Co-founder & CTO, HackerRank)

At HackerRank, he is responsible for the product delivery and scaling the core platform where developers from all over the world come to solve interesting challenges in different domains of Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, Machine Learning, Functional Programming, etc) for fun, glory, learning, and jobs. Recruiters also turn to HackerRank in order to identify the best tech talent while saving massive amounts time in their recruitment process.

  • Topic of discussion – Insights into Competitive Level Programming.
  • Relevance – Competitive level programming & why it is required in the life of a Technocrat.

Hello Hacker : Venue, Registration

The venue for Hello Hacker is below:

JAAGA Startup, 5/1, Penthouse,6th Floor Rich Homes Apartment Richmond Road Bangalore – 560025 (Directions)

For registration, please visit Hello Hacker’s Registration Page

Hello Hacker : Team, Partners

Hello Hacker’s partners can be found here

There is an awesome team behind this initiative, details below:

Mozilla Clubs – Largest groups of Open source evangelists, Mozilla Clubs are a global network of community members that share Mozilla’s mission to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Mozilla provides free training and resources to help clubs succeed and grow digital literacy in community spaces.

Hacker Rank – It is a company that makes a programmer discoverable to corporates ranking them evaluated on their coding skills thus adding value to the companies.

Kolkata Bloggers – It is the largest database of bloggers based in East India. In the last one year they’ve worked with TOI, NASSCOM, US Consulate General Kolkata, Facebook, International Kolkata Book Fair, Kolkata Literature Festival to name a few brands. They’ve conducted workshops in NIT Durgapur, IIT Kharagpur, St. Xaviers College Kolkata and other educational institutions.

Though I don’t fall in the student bracket, I would also be joining Hello Hacker and hope to share my thoughts on Blogging 🙂 Register for Hello Hacker and learn the Art from people who have “Been there, Done that“!!

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Accenture, in association with Yahoo India, has launched its fifth season of #InnovationJockeys: The Hunt for India’s most Innovative Minds – a contest inviting full-time undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate students in India to use technology to develop innovative ideas.

The goal of this year’s contest is to bring a positive change to society, through the three themes

  1. Detecting fraud and preventing business malpractice
  2. Creating an inclusive digital India
  3. Empowering women

Raghavan Iyer, managing director, Technology Delivery and Innovation Council lead for Accenture in India said

The last four seasons of Innovation Jockeys have generated more than 9,300 ideas from students across India. They have also inspired innovative ideas on emerging technologies and given young minds an opportunity to stand out.  This year, we urge students to think about inclusive innovation and to develop pioneering ideas that tackle challenges that society faces every day.

Unni Aravindakshan, VP – Production Engineering and Head, Yahoo Software Development India Pvt. Ltd said

This year marks the fifth season of Innovation Jockeys and we are expecting a grander participation. It has been very exciting to be associated with a platform that encourages young minds to take on challenges, innovate and envision a better tomorrow. We look forward to identifying even more such individuals this year and providing them with the inspiration to take their ideas forward.

Applicants for the #InnovationJockeys 2016 contest can register solo or in teams of up to four members as they submit:

  • Solutions for detecting fraud and preventing malpractice;
  • Platforms or applications that support the creation of a ‘Digital India’ in which all citizens can participate and enjoy ‘Digital citizenship’ and
  • Solutions that will empower the lives of women by improving their health, safety and employment opportunities.

The deadline for submitting ideas is August 17, 2016. The submissions will go through an initial round of review by the contest’s jury and the final shortlisted participants will be invited to present their ideas to the jury in the grand finale in Bengaluru on October 20, 2016. For complete information on Innovation Jockeys: The Hunt for India’s most Innovative Minds, log on to Innovation Jockeys

|In: startups|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The UAE’s economic record has been impressive and has outperformed all other MENA countries in most global rankings. The UAE is amongst the top 30 countries worldwide in global competitiveness, entrepreneurship, global opportunity and prosperity.

India and the UAE enjoy improving G2G [Government to Government] and B2B relations, resulting in bilateral trade of USD 59.16 billion during 2014-15. India is ranked as UAE’s largest trading partner, whereas the UAE is India’s 4th largest export destination.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the UAE during August 2015, where both the nations agreed to identify bottlenecks to boost trade by 60 per cent in five years. Giving impetus to build stronger trade relations, and to build a comprehensive strategic partnership between the UAE & India, Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s visit to India in February 2016 resulted in four agreements covering cyber security, infrastructure investment, renewable energy and currency swap arrangements.

GITEX Technology Week 2016, now in its 36th edition is organized by Dubai World Trade Centre to promote the UAE as a Global ICT hub. The coming event will be held from 16-20 October 2016 at the Dubai International Convention & Exhibition Centre.

GITEX Technology Week is the world’s 3rd largest technology showcase, and the fastest growing industry focused expo. It is an excellent gateway to the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. This year there will be more than 4,000 ICT companies participating with 145,000+ trade visitors expected.

UAE’s entrepreneurship ecosystem has grown during the last five years. With new markets, new consumers and the rise of Internet technology, the UAE is recognized as a destination for global startups. For the first time, the 36th GITEX Technology Week 2016 brings together, the new tech companies from across the globe at Dubai. ‘Gitex Startups‘ is a worldwide movement that is set to redefine technology for businesses.

To encourage the startup movement, ‘Gitex Startups’ has announced total prizes of US$ 1 million to the best innovative startups along with a 3 year mentorship program.

This expo invites the world’s most exciting startups to participate from various sectors namely Augmented, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, Drones and Robotics, Education, Energy, Fintech, Healthcare, IoT, Media & Marketing, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Transport & Logistics, etc. to showcase their cutting-edge products and services.

To share the experiences and to answer queries, the expo will host Startup Talks and Mentor Clinic sessions. This 5-day long expo will feature an exciting and innovative series of competitions under the following categories such as, Startup Champion, Best Youth Startup, Best Women Startup and Best Category Champion.

Gitex Startups is the only international event in the world to network and build relationships with global Angel Investors, VCs, eminent industry leaders etc. These Startups will have an opportunity to be featured on a global platform to network with the audience to accelerate their business to the next level in the presence of 100 mentors, 50 incubators and accelerator clinics, 10 industry champions, 450+ tech startups and to meet over 200 investors and VCs to jump start their business.

For information on how to be a part of the Gitex Startups at the GITEX Technology Week 2016, please visit Gitex Startups 2016

About GITEX Technology Week
Launched in 1981, GITEX is the ICT business gateway to the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia Region. Focused on providing exhibitors with high ROI through direct business opportunities with decision makers, GITEX has maintained its position as the industry’s trend setting authority. For more information, visit Gitex

|In: Unconference|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Drug saves life. In contrast to this common note there is one aspect of it hardly discussed-its adverse effect. Mylan recently hosted Mylan Hackathon at its Global Center in Bengaluru on March 19-20, 2016 with a focus on Better Health for a Better World. Mylan Hackathon 2016 presents the world a solution that shall change the way we can address this problem. Team NTT Hackers came up with a solution that presents with an un-surmountable amount of options to solve it.

Mylan Hackathon 2016 lived up to its ethos of providing the world with solutions that shall change the way healthcare is delivered and perceived in the country. The company will take active interest in the winning ideas and would bring about a pilot state to give life to the ideas and bring about a realism to the models.

The solution provided by the winning team- NTT Hackers will  Identify and record patients’ adverse effects & help Mylan to continually offer better treatment. Also, visualizing where diseases are spread  geographically and the scale of impact will help the supply chain to be more efficient and effective at getting medication to the right people, in the right regions, at the right time. In healthcare, timeliness is the key and this solution delivers just that along with providing an extensive map of the disease spread.

[Source – Facebook]

The next two teams to hail the podium at a tie were- Bang On Hackathon and Thea. While the first team had an objective of building up a solution both offline and online to enable patient take the first step towards diagnosis of HIV. Diagnosis – Ask patient a list of questions to evaluate their probability of suffering from HIV, Awareness – To educate person about preventive measures, post diagnosis medical care and patient support group. Lastly, outreach to remote areas providing medical assistance to patients based on the evaluation criteria through the Application was another pillar of the solution provided by Bang on Hackathon.

Thea developed an AI based chat application, which will start off with limited options and then keep updating its knowledge base, based on user queries. This can be used to access info on diseases, treatments, track drug usage and capture potential adverse events/adverse drug reactions.

Expanding the horizon of opportunity, Myklan Hackathon 2016 saw the Team Bitmap being adjudged as the winner in the student category – Working on the idea of geographical monitoring of adverse drug reactions and company wise analysis based on social network data stream they showed the future of solutions on healthcare delivery.

Traceback the runner up in student’s category developed an idea on artificial Intelligence and came up with a project that  can revolutionize data modelling and prediction. The team used artificial intelligence in the geospatio-temporal prediction of the spread of diseases: building a data modelling tool kit that takes a hybrid approach to train the model that uses both data from previous years and non-conventional data sources such as social media, newspapers.

Winner

Student category : Winner – bitMAP, Runner-up – Traceback

Professional category : Winner – NTT Hackers, Runner-ups – BangOn Hackathon and Thea

About Mylan

Mylan is a global pharmaceutical company committed to setting new standards in healthcare. Working together around the world to provide 7 billion people access to high quality medicine, they innovate to satisfy unmet needs; make reliability and service excellence a habit; do what’s right, not what’s easy; and impact the future through passionate global leadership. For more information, please visit Mylan

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Mylan N.V announced that the company will host a health hackathon at its Global Center in Bengaluru on March 19-20, 2016. The event will focus on Better Health for a Better World. Participants in the hackathon will be creating innovative solutions for patients, payers, providers and other healthcare professionals. Mylan conducted a similar event last month at its Global Center near Pittsburgh.

Hackathon teams will build solutions to answer a variety of healthcare challenges, such as overcoming obstacles to HIV treatment in emerging markets, leveraging existing technology to increase Indians’ access to healthcare and accessing public data-sets and application programming interfaces to build insights about diseases.

Rajiv Malik, President at Mylan said

As a company committed to setting new standards in healthcare, we are excited to host hackathons that can help launch a new generation of solutions capable of delivering better health for a better world. In addition, we look forward to welcoming hackathon participants to our new Global Center in Bengaluru, which we opened in 2015 to help support Mylan’s extensive and growing presence in India. The country currently is home to nearly half of our workforce and more than half of our manufacturing facilities.

The hackathon is open to professionals and students attending engineering colleges and healthcare institutes. For more details, please visit the Mylan hackathon registration link

About Mylan

Mylan is a global pharmaceutical company committed to setting new standards in healthcare. Working together around the world to provide 7 billion people access to high quality medicine, they innovate to satisfy unmet needs; make reliability and service excellence a habit; do what’s right, not what’s easy; and impact the future through passionate global leadership. For more information, please visit Mylan

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

What if a mobile phone app could assess the risk of an individual and provide ideas to better manage that risk? Well, that thought helped IIT-B bag the first prize.

Between 30-31 January, Swiss Re held an event entitled My Personal Risk Advisor Hackathon where 16 teams of 70 technologists comprising students, developers and entrepreneurs built applications that enable individuals or small business owners to assess their total risk.

Organised along with IBM, India’s first reinsurance hackathon offered a unique garage-like experience for its participants and provided an opportunity to develop ideas into prototypes. The prototypes were judged based on innovative technology integration, dimensions of risks that were considered while developing the solution, user experience and technical complexity. A panel of esteem judges, which included members from Swiss Re and IBM evaluated the apps.

Alok Kumar, Managing Director, Swiss Re Bangalore said

The reinsurance sector is at the cusp of a radical transition and the convergence of new technologies will help us manage consumer expectations and to better manage risk. Such a platform enables exploration of emerging and disruptive technology to reduce the protection gap, besides further encouraging and nurturing entrepreneurs and start-ups in the sector.

Team IIIT-B represented by Abhijay Vuyyuru, Anubhav Bhardwaj & Lijo Johny were adjudged as the winners for their solution. This WhatsApp-based application can click a picture of the food you eat and distribute it to a specific group. This application analyses the image of the food and highlights the calorie content and recommends healthier alternatives. The winning team was awarded a cash prize of INR 3 lakhs.

  • An app for monitoring food intake of high-risk patients using image recognition and NLP, wins the first prize.
  • 16 teams representing brightest minds from start-ups, developers & students community developed prototypes using IBM Bluemix suite.

Team IIIT-B represented by Amit Gupta, Daksh Varshneya, Tanmayee Narendra, Prerit Jain, Pawan Dhananjay bagged the second prize and were awarded INR 2 Lakhs.

Manu Dwivedi, Chakshu Ahuja, Rahul Radhakrishnan and Saurav Tomar were declared as the second runners-up and were awarded Rs 1 Lakh.

Commenting on winning the hackathon, the first prize winners said

We are thrilled to win. Being the second most populous nation, India is prone to high health risks and diseases. Our idea was to develop a solution that enable individual to assess and foresee their risk based on the individual’s personality and dietary profiling. 

About Swiss Re

The Swiss Re Group is a leading wholesale provider of reinsurance, insurance and other insurance-based forms of risk transfer. Dealing direct and working through brokers, its global client base consists of insurance companies, mid-to-large-sized corporations and public sector clients. From standard products to tailor-made coverage across all lines of business, Swiss Re deploys its capital strength, expertise and innovation power to enable the risk-taking upon which enterprise and progress in society depend. For more information about Swiss Re Group, please visit Swiss Re

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Altimetrik, a business transformation and technology solutions company, part of the $100 million Vattikuti ventures, partners with HackerEarth to host the world’s largest  developer confluence, IndiaHacks 2016. Through this partnership Altimetrik aims to hire close to 50 design engineers as part of their expansion plans for the year 2016.

Altimetrik as a company is heavily invested in and at the epicenter of powering the next wave of business transformation through its new methodology that is based on the fundamentals of Design-Thinking and Design-led Engineering. It is this outlook that led Altimetrik to sponsor HackerEarth’s IndiaHacks 2016 which is predicted to draw over 1,00,000 programmers from across the globe to celebrate the spirit of coding.

As a transformational company that believes in nurturing young talent, Altimetrik through IndiaHacks aims at encouraging programmers and coders to transform themselves into Design Engineers by bringing out their best and rewarding the top 50 hackers. Altimetrik is enthusiastic to take a step further and open its doors with offer letters to the outstanding coders who participate at IndiaHacks.

Commenting on the same, Asha Poluru, Chief -People Experience (HR),  Altimetrik said

Gone are the days where we hire looking at resumes. The future of any company is in finding the right talent and the only way towards identifying this, is through events such as these. We at Altimetrik have made it a practice to hire through Hackathons and Ideathons.

And thus, this synergy with IndiaHacks is only organic to our hiring culture that gauges talent against the best in the industry. IndiaHacks has already seen over 1,00,000 registrations from across the globe, and we’d like to make spot-offers to at least 150 of the top coders from this Hackathon. The team at Altimetrik is looking forward to a fresh batch of ‘Design Engineers’ from this hackathon.

Sachin Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder, HackerEarth said

The Indian developer ecosystem has matured over the past decade. We are witnessing some top class tech innovations coming out of India, and a slow movement from services to product development – and all of this requires world-class developers. IndiaHacks 2016 is an ode to such developers and also a platform to encourage programming.

We are excited to partner with Altimetrik and are extremely happy that they have chosen to engage with the developer community via IndiaHacks. This will help the HackerEarth developer community to grow bigger and stronger.

IndiaHacks 2016 comprises of two levels of programming contests comprise of three programming tracks – Advanced Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning & Big Data. These hackathons will see developers build unique and interesting products based on themes in a duration of 48 hours.

Hacks will be evaluated on criteria like uniqueness of the idea, usability of the hack, code quality, design etc. The second phase of IndiaHacks is an offline developer conference. Top 20 teams/individuals will be shortlisted from each track and will be invited to this conference, where they will again hack for 24 hours and present their ideas to a panel of judges. The top winners of IndiaHacks win the opportunity meet technology companies in San Francisco.

About Altimetrik

Altimetrik is a business transformation and technology solutions partner to global enterprise customers covering three global mega trends of modernization – Digital, Connected Solutions & Consumer Technologies. Additional information can be found at Altimetrik or connect with Altimetrik on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Organized by UNICOM, the IoT Conference 2016 brings together the brightest innovators and business visionaries from India for one day of focused networking, strategy sharing, and technology showcasing at the cutting edge of IoT.

According to Gartner, there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. ABI Research estimates that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the IoT by 2020. The data generated and the business opportunities created will be staggering. Now is the time to position for success.

The conference is a unique opportunity to share IoT insights and strategy with professionals across the full range of industry verticals, including Smart Building/Home Automation, Consumer Electronics and Connected Living, Smart Cities, Environmental Monitoring, Intelligent Transportation, Medical and Health Care Systems etc.

Theme – Internet of Things (IoT) – Link your World
Date – 4th February, 2016
Venue – Le Meridien Bangalore

Detailed Agenda

Main Attraction of the event

  • Learn How IoT is most closely associated to machine-to-machine [M2M] communication
  • Opportunity to network with experienced Business and Technical practitioners and Start Ups in the area of IoT
  • Know – What are the key aspects of IoT that businesses should know about ?
  • Case Studies
  • Key Note presentation
  • Exhibition area, where you can find what Start-Ups are doing in the area of IoT. Experience their products, their Ideas
  • IoT Workshops
  • Startups Showcase

Great opportunity to strategically brand your organization

As a sponsor, you will receive a tremendous amount of visibility and numerous other benefits at the conference. This conference has three sponsor categories, which helps organizations of all cadres to participate at their level. Sponsors will also have the added benefit of tailoring their sponsorship packages, based on their strategic intent.

Who Should Attend

The conference is designed especially for both technology experts & end-user business executives across industries, who are looking to leverage the emerging IoT opportunity. This includes –

  • IoT Developers, Designers & Project Managers
  • Entrepreneurs, Senior Executives & Business Strategists
  • IoT hardware vendors and software developers
  • Commercial & industrial business executives looking to apply IoT technologies
  • VC investment and financial professionals
  • Public policy and municipal government representatives
  • Regulators and government policy makers
  • Academic researchers and university professionals
  • IT and software providers
  • Internet service provider and communication companies
  • Consumer electronics and computing companies
  • Start-up firms and incubators

Registration

Registration for One Day Conference [till 4th February] : Rs 9,999+ 14% Tax. Click Here to register

Know more about the Conference : Click Here

[Image Credit* – TechQuark]