LinOSX TechnoMash

A quick update on Startup Saturday. Startup Saturday Delhi is going to be hosted by the American Center on the 13th of December 2008.

Startups are encouraged to fill out the demo form. Startups, investors, media, and other individuals interested in attending Startup Saturday are requested to fill out the registration form.

Security will be tight so make sure you bring a photo id or you won’t be let into the building.

If you’re going to be tweeting or blogging about Startup Saturday, please use the following tags:
ssd, startupsaturdaydelhi, ss, startupsaturday, ssd200812

Cheers

To help the Indian Startup Ecosystem in some small way, we’re going to be involved in setting up the Delhi chapter of Startup Saturday which is a part of HeadStart. We’d like to use this forum to help startups in the Delhi/NCR region showcase their products to a community of peers, media, and investors.

If you or your company is interested in demoing, please complete the form below.

Here are a few recent posts on Teknatus.

• Saul Klein’s European Venture Scene and surprises about New Delhi
• A To-Do List for Startups
• Hiring and Firing at a Startup
• Perl for Beginners from BarCamp Delhi
• The Financial Crisis and India a presentation I gave at BarCamp Delhi

During the weekend, Arun gave a presentation at BarCamp Delhi on Blog Action Day. This year’s Blog Action Day (today - October 15th, 2008) is about poverty. How can each of us do something to help ease the pain and suffering that so many people around the world endure as part of their daily lives.

Click here to see a list of 88 ideas that each of us can easily implement in our daily lives. It doesn’t take much but it goes a long way to ease a lot of suffering.

Here’s a few of the ideas posted on the BlogActionDay site

88 Ways to Take Action Against Poverty Right Now

1. Eat meatless meals 2x a week. Donate that grocery money to a local food bank. - TarotByArwen
2. Be homeless for a day/night. - Lex
3. Stop putting off adopting a child through an organization like Compassion International (or adopt another one). - Lex
4. Make a loan on Kiva, or buy a couple gift certificates and give them away to friends. - Lex
5. Get a group together to go door-to-door collecting canned foods for your local soup kitchen/shelter. - Lex

This is Arun’s presentation and you can find him on twitter.

BarCamp Delhi is set for October 11th and 12th. IIT Delhi is playing host to this two day event. The location will be the Bharti building on the IIT campus. There are two rooms on the first floor, two rooms on the second floor and one room on the third floor available for campers. There will also be plenty of space available inside and outside for ad-hoc meets and networking.

Remember, everyone attending BarCamp must should participate in some capacity, whether it is presenting, taking pictures or videos, live blogging, or just volunteering for various tasks in organizing a BarCamp. Please take a look at the BCD5 Sessions page and add yourself to the list of presenters.

If you’re one of those people who get inspired at a moment’s notice and aren’t sure what you might be presenting on right now, you can still add your name to the list of Campers for BarCamp Delhi.

Looking forward to meeting you at BarCamp Delhi, the 5th edition on October 11th and 12th.

Update 2008-09-21: Some of the volunteers for BarCamp Delhi had our first face to face meeting today at the Teknatus office. We discussed quite a few items, settled on some open issues, and handed out various tasks. In the immortal words of Col. John “Hannibal” Smith, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

This posting doesn’t have anything to do with tech or other geeky stuff. However, being a foodie, I just had to write about my experience at Wasabi in New Delhi.

Wasabi is a fairly new Japanese restaurant located at the Taj Hotel on Man Singh Rd. in the heart of New Delhi. I first heard about the restaurant a few months ago from my wife. I was fortunate enough to have dinner at Wasabi yesterday. It was a special occasion and Chef Vikram and the rest of the staff at Wasabi made it extra special.

We started out with vegetarian sashimi and vegetarian sushi rolls. Vegetarian sushi rolls are fairly common at most Japanese restaurants around the world but this is the first time we had heard of vegetarian Sashimi. Vegetable sashimi is a platter of raw vegetables such as cucumbers, papaya, radish, asparagus, avocado, seaweed, and a few other items. Chef Vikram came up with the idea by adapting the idea of traditional Japanese sashimi to the Indian palate. Raw vegetables might not sound all that interesting until you have the chance to eat them the way Wasabi serves them. All the vegetables are freshly imported from Japan and they taste incredible. Combine them with some fresh wasabi and soy sauce and you’ve got a combination that will surely bring your taste buds to live. Accompanying the sashimi were vegetarian sushi rolls, also extremely fresh and very tasty.

After our appetizers, we were brought a combination of vegetable teppanyaki, a very special order of rice made with matsutake mushrooms, and one of Chef Vikram’s specialties, a tofu steak. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the names of all the dishes. I was a bit more focused on gorging myself on great food. All the food was exceptionally tasty and really had no need for extra garnishing or condiments of any sort.

To top off our incredible meal, we had a bit of the Wasabi Green Tea cake. Wow is about all I can say! Unfortunately, we were so completely stuffed, there was no way we could have any Japanese tea after dinner. I’m saving that for next time.

I highly recommend going to Wasab when you’re in Delhi. The decor is very pleasant, the service is exceptional, and the food is the best vegetarian Japanese food I’ve ever had. Thanks Vikram, Deepak, Sumitra and everyone else at Wasabi!

OSSCamp is gearing up for another meet on September 27th and 28th in Delhi. The volunteers have just spent a great deal of time and energy rebuilding the OSSCamp.in site and it looks great. Take a look at the site, sign up, think of a way to participate and join us on the 27th and 28th for some great talks on Open Source technologies and meet some really cool geeks

BarCamp Delhi is scheduled for October 11th and 12th 2008 at IIT Delhi. We’re currently working on reaching out to bloggers to help spread the word. We’re looking to attract thinkers in various fields, in India and outside, to attend the even and share their thoughts with the rest of us.

If you know of any bloggers that we should contact directly, please enter the information in the form below.

Cheers

Much like India missed the industrial revolution, it is clear that India is going to miss the Web 2.0 revolution as well. There are many “Web 2.0″ startups in India and some have been doing well, e.g. Zoho and SlideShare but that’s mainly due to an international user base and not indigenous Indian users.

I’ve been hard pressed to find an Indian Web 2.0 company, doing well and making money by serving the Indian subcontinent. The simple reason for this is that there are just not enough Indian computer and Internet users. Most casual Internet users will check stock prices, buy an airline ticket, look for a job, check their email, hit a social networking site and chat with others. There is a younger Indian demographic that is heavily using social networking sites like Facebook and Orkut but the amount of time they spend on these social networking sites is questionable.

Beyond the tech-savvy in India, very few people have heard of Wikipedia, Digg or the power of social media. The social “web” is taking form in India but not as most of us from the West have experienced. I predict that India will mostly leapfrog Web 2.0 and go directly to Mobile 3.0. Mobile 3.0 being highly personal, highly location specific products and services that allow 3G+ phones and even lower-end phones capable only of SMS to become part of the social fabric of the Web. There shouldn’t be any distinction between the Internet and Mobile platforms. One is just an extension of the other. As innovative user interface designs are produced, India’s 250 million mobile users can be brought into the social web much more quickly and provide them with true value which, unfortunately, they aren’t aware exists on the Internet today.

The largest impediment to bringing these 250 million people into the social web is going to be cost and the carriers holding the golden keys. Expecting the carriers to work with these small startup companies will be difficult at best. Not to mention, Indian carriers have a very bad reputation of bleeding their partners dry. They also have brought the “walled garden” to mobile phones. Companies like Airtel try to push their “Airtel Live” services instead of unfettered GPRS/EDGE. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing right now to allow non-tech-savvy people access to a limited online mobile experience, the way AOL gave subscribers an online version of a walled garden in the late 80’s and 90’s. Users will eventually outgrow the walled garden and seek more.

Estimates put the Indian mobile VAS space at about USD 1 Billion in March of 2008 and predict that it could hit USD 2 Billion by the end of 2008. These aren’t numbers to sneeze at. It’s just the beginning of the mobile application usage. Today, over 40% of VAS revenue comes from SMS. As smartphones like the Nokia N96, Blackberry Bond, Nokia E71, and Apple iPhone penetrate deeper into the Indian market, the desire for richer mobile applications connecting people together will only grow.

I’ve recently gotten back into some development and needed to run MySQL on my Leopard computers. The easy way out was downloading and running MAMP (a great pre-built package of Apache and MySQL). Unfortunately, I hated starting the Apache and MySQL daemons manually.

I created OS X launchctl scripts to start Apache and MySQL but I hated the fact that I was maintaining two installations of Apache (the one that comes with OS X and the MAMP one). I wanted one simple installation of everything that would start automatically. Also, occasionally, weird things would happen with permissions and I’d have to shut everything down and restart again.

It’s been some time since I compiled my own software so I was looking forward to compiling MySQL from scratch. The first thing I found was this great post on Hivelogic about compiling MySQL. I’m not going to regurgitate what’s in the post but I’m going to highlight the configure flags for Leopard. Most times, when compiling applications, getting all the flags right is the only way to ensure your specific OS and architecture are properly supported in the compilation process and it’s the only way to squeeze out the best performance.


CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors \
-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client \
--enable-local-infile --enable-shared


Make sure you change your root (data base administrator password) by running:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password 'new-password'

Don’t forget to secure your server as indicated on HiveLogic.

My plist file for automatically launching MySQL under MAMP is here. Feel free to compare it to the post at HiveLogic or change it to suit your needs. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know.