Watch India vs. Engalnd Live

An offering from uvstream.tv, watch live action of India vs. England on my blog.

First Open Social Coffee Meet in Pune

On Saturday, 27th September 2008 we had the first ever Open Social Coffee meet at ICC Level 9. There were around 10 of us for the meet and the agenda was to discuss what's next after PHPCamp?

The MOM,

1. We are having a Open Social Developer Garage'08 conference in Pune on 20th September, it is "invite only" conference.
2. CMS Day followed this, somewhere in February.
3. A surprise for all Joomla guys followed that in April.

Met Rohan Dighe, Amit Karpe, Prasoon Kumar, Shardul Mohite, Rakshit, Pravin, Amit Kumar Singh, Vishal Gadkari ,and i am missing out on few names here. The plan of this meet was to discuss some of key points of Open Social Developer Garage'08, how will it be organized and what all things need to be targeted?



How can you be a part of this conference? Help us out with unorganizing/unvolunteering or be a speaker or a contributor to the Open Social Developer Garage. Some of the things that we are having for this conference are

1. CodeLabs, Open Social Geeks develop a prototype.
2. Expect 'Top Notch' speakers from the Open Social community.

PHPCamp is India's Biggest Un-conference

21st September 2008, the weather prediction where, "Heavy rains" expected and so was the crowd at the first in its kind, PHPCamp. With over 700+ Campers, 4 Un-Organizers, and Over 200+ volunteers, PHPCamp was proud to say that "PHPCamp, the biggest un-conference in India". Can anyone debate on that?

The only sad thing that could have happened is one of the unorganizers missing out on PHPCamp, and I was the unlucky one to miss out.

How it all Started?

12th July (Saturday), I was with Amit Singh. We said let's do something in Pune, as we had not announced BarCamp Pune 5 then. Amit says, "BarCamp Pune has always seen a rise in no of speakers on Java related technologies, there is hardly anything with respect to PHP", and that was it. Both of us simultaneously said, " Let's do a PHPCamp, unconference targeting PHP geeks in India"

1 week later

We have PHPCamp created, and we start announcing the date for PHPCamp.

We were looking out for a venue, what better than Persistent, I told Vinod Kulkarni (Associate Vice-President from Persistent) about PHPCamp, and he found this idea interesting ( so did many in our circle). We had our venue decided, it was Persistent Systems

Early days, the camper's count was somewhere around 40. We were expecting around 300 camper's to be at the PHPCamp. But future of PHPCamp was decided the moment it was announced.

Within few days of announcing PHPCamp, we got our first Sponsor, Cogent Technologies, and followed that we gotPune IT Labs, and 01Synergy . Even DirectI was keen on sponsoring PHPCamp, by then it was too late. At DirectI the concept of Un-conference is liked by everyone.


First signs of Success

Thanks to Mr.Devidas Deshpande from Pune Mirror, he wrote a news article ("Camping to Connect"), which was purely targeting PHP and the concept behind PHPCamp. Those were the days when the count was somewhere around 350- 400.

2 Weeks before the D-Day

The Camper's count shoots to 600+. Volunteers Count shoots to 130+, PHPCamp, creating ripples across the country and abroad. Everyone had something to share on the PHPCamp Google Group. Everyone was excited about PHPCamp, thanks to the blogger's community in India, everyone had the "I am attending PHPCamp" tag on their blog.

D-Day

Camper's Count was 1170 (Expecting 50% turn out as this was un-conference and not a conference). We had 8 volunteers from Symbiosis (SICSR), Varun Arora, Tarun, Nishant, Rashmi, Smriti, and 3 others. I was not in Pune, I had some Training to attend. With so many people gathering, Tarun Chandel and Rohit Srivastava started the camp in their own style ("Tashan Mein"), they introduced everyone to the concept of what un-conference is like and nitty-gritty of it. We always wanted everyone to enjoy every bit of PHPCamp. I call Amit Singh at around 3 PM, and first thing he has to say, "Man you are missing out on the fun, we have broken all the records".

What Happened at the Camp?

Sadly, I had missed the show, you can get updates from the following blogs ( there are around 140+ people blogging about PHPCamp).

Amit Singh
Tarun Chandel


Next year it would be even bigger and the noise would be unbearable, let's say "PHPCamp Rocked".

Glimpse of Swype

50 Words a min on Touch Screen, it's amazing! That's Swype for you!
Swype, is quite simple to use, although beneath the user interface there's a lot going on.

"Swype works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out, you press your finger or stylus on the first letter, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. When the word is done, then you lift."

Even on tiny smartphone keyboards, it is intuitive and fast.A built-in 65,000-word dictionary corrects obvious and even creative spelling errors.

I do agree with Kushler (Inventor of T9, Swype) that his technology would improve the iPhone experience. Enjoy this demonstration from Kushler. I want this badly, it's awesome!


Video 1: Swype Demonstation Video