Category — Uzanto

Slideshare is hiring in New Delhi!

We’ve got a very good response to the launch of SlideShare and need to hire developers and a sysadmin immediately to keep up with your enthusiasm. This is for our team in New Delhi. The Uzanto team is a small, tightly-knit team of developers and designers in India & US.

We work with cutting edge technologies - Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services. We are looking for developers and a sys admins. We have a small, tightly-knit team of web developers & designers in US and India. Our setup consists of Ruby, Rails, MySQL, lighttpd/mongrel, Pound, FreeBSD, and Debian. We run our Rails apps on a 5-machine cluster (and Amazon S3).

Developer Position: You should be a proven web hacker who can help us get Slideshare to out of the Beta stage and beyond. Freshers OK: having an existing personal web project is a huge plus. Ruby or PHP experience is OK: we can teach you Ruby if you already “get” the web, PHP, CSS, MySql, etc. You MUST be a rock-star where web coding is concerned.

SysAdmin Position: You should have some experience managing open-source clusters. You must be comfortable setting up new servers, tweaking NFS configs, spotting bottlenecks, server surveillance, benchmarking Mongrels, etc. We need you to keep Slideshare working - dealing with any performance crunches, & daily problems that might slow down the site or cause other problems for users.

If the above positions interest you, ping me at amit@uzanto.com.

The SlideShare server cluster (which lives in “sunny” San Francisco) is a friendly gaggle of celeron, pentium, and Xeon machines. The servers are all named after Bollywood actresses (For people not familiar with that term, Bollywood refers to the Indian movie industry with its center at Mumbai). At the bottom of the screen on each SlideShare page, you can see the name of the web server that is responding to your request!

Ash is a Pentium 4 machine with 2 Gigs of RAM, and is used as a web server. She won Miss World in 1994, and is often referred to as the “Queen of Bollywood”.

Celina is a Celeron machine with 2 Gigs of RAM that also is our second web server. She was born in Kabul but raised in Calcutta, and was crowned Miss India in 2001.

Bipasha is another Celeron with 2 Gigs of RAM, responsible for all file conversions and processing. She is considered one of Bollywood’s most controvertial actresses.

Dia is a Xeon with 4 Gigs of RAM and RAID 1. She runs the database, and most recently starred in the Indian adaptation of the film “Fight Club”.

We haven’t found the need for a fifth machine, but there’s only one bollywood actress I know of whose name begins with E, so it will probably be named Esha!

This is the original post on the SlideShare blog

Ever wanted to share your presentations on the web in a simple and elegant manner. Without having to send huge presentations as email attachments. Well if that is you, check out SlideShare.

Slideshare is a new service that we at Uzanto have launched today. Think Powerpoint and then think YouTube. Does it ring a bell somewhere? Well that’s SlideShare for you.

Its got Techcrunched today and this is what Mike Arrington says in his review-

“SlideShare is clean, fast and functional and supports various copyright claims, including creative commons. I’ll be using it to post presentations I give at future conferences for archiving purposes. In addition, if any company requesting a profile on TechCrunch would like to send a presentation deck for public viewing, I’ll show that presentation in the TechCrunch profile using SlideShare.”

Essentially, Slideshare is a free service for sharing presentations and slideshows. You can upload your PowerPoint and OpenOffice presentations, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others’ presentations, and comment on individual slides. It’s a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people. And it’s free.

Check out this sample embedded slideshow (Its the cutest slideshow that has been uploaded till now). Use the buttons in the player’s panel to browse the slides.

Heres what the Homepage looks like

And heres a snapshot of the “Latest” page

Well at present the application is on a “invites only” basis. So in case you are interested, send me a one line email at amit@uzanto.com . Or go to Slideshare and sign up for the invite. We’ll send it straightaway.

I shall write more about it later; for now we have a long night ahead, trying to brave the onslaught of the Techcrunch and the Digg maniacs….

Whats this ? A rock concert ? No…, it’s WWW2006, the world wide web conference, currently underway in Edinburgh, Scotland (22-26 May). And from the looks of it, it sure does look like a rock concert.

For the uninitiated, WWW2006 is the annual bash involving the rockstars of the internet world, who will sit, deliberate and shape the future of the World Wide Web. It involves the world’s leading internet business leaders, technologists, academicians, key standards bodies et al. It is supposed to be four packed days of speakers, workshops, exhibitions, tutorials, panels and social events.

And my Uzanto colleague, Rashmi is attending the event. In fact, she has been invited as the keynote speaker for the session on tagging, which seems to be building up to be one of the most popular sessions there.

Wish I could be there as well…

The Uzanto website has undergone a complete metamorphosis. This was in the offing for a while but kept on getting pushed down our priority list simply because we wanted to steam ahead with the MindCanvas launch. The earlier website was not something that we could be proud of; it was essentially a dump of hurriedly put together textual content.
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